Explaining This Moment of Pronatalism

Pronatalism is an ideology, cultural orientation, and emerging policy framework promoting higher birthrates by framing reproduction as a social duty or moral good. Oftentimes, pronatalism can emphasize certain gender roles and can be rooted in extreme nationalism and patriarchal ideals. Varina Winder, the former Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor in the Secretary's Office of Global Women's Issues at the U.S. Department of State and co-founder of the ARCH Collaborative, sits down to talk with us about the ways in which pronatalist ideology is present in the U.S. and what a true pro-family vision should look like.

Increasingly, pronatalism is being driven by governments. The Trump administration, for example, have been manipulating language to advance pronatalist ideology, including describing American women as “under babied” and referring to the expansion of the Global Gag Rule as the “Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance” Act. Government restrictions and cultural interventions are the tools used for pronatalism, and the language (often rooted in a low-fertility and birthrate “crisis”) global administrations use support these tools.

LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE

More information on Varina Winder
Baby Bonuses and Motherhood Medals: Why We Shouldn’t Trust the Pronatalist Movement
The Global Gag Rule is Once Again Expanded, Maximizing Harm
Books by Devin Em

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Jennie: Hi, rePROs. How's everybody doing? I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So, y'all, we have a bit of a longer episode today, so I'm gonna keep my intro super short. I guess the biggest thing is I could use some advice, y'all. I have a cat who is suddenly decided that she is a super picky eater. She is like deciding that a bag of cat food— she prefers dry over canned— and she'll eat, like, for the first two days off of that bag and then refuses. She will just hunger strike it out. It's even affecting her eating treats. If the treats have been open for very long, so I've been, you know, trying different foods in smaller quantities, so the bags are smaller. I think I found something that's kind of working for now. When I was at the vet, she really loved the lickable treats, so we're trying those so far, so good. But yeah, if anybody has advice for dealing with a cat who has randomly decided all of a sudden that they are gonna go on hunger strike because they don't want to eat that, I would love to hear what you have found worked for you. Yeah, I don't know. She seems to be doing fine. Otherwise, yeah, like I said, we just went to the vet, so we'll hear from bloodwork if it's anything more serious. But they didn't seem too worried, they seem to think she's just being fussy, so let me know. I could use any and all recommendations. I'm sick of buying and having to get rid of random bags of cat food that she's not eating. So yeah, advice welcome. Okay, with that, let's get to this week's episode.

Y'all, I am so excited for you to hear this week's episode. One, it was a wonderful conversation. I had so much fun, and there's some fun stuff at the end. Varina and I are both big readers, so we talk a little bit about books at the end. So, make sure to read, listen all the way through. But I'm very excited to have Varina Winder on the podcast. Varina has spent a lot of her career working for the State Department at the Office of Global Women's Issues, so she knows so much about so many things dealing with gender equality, the global stage, all of the things. And I am so excited to have her come on today to talk about pronatalism. We also talk a bit about the new Heritage [Foundation] report that is often referred to as Project 2026. We've talked a bit about it in other episodes on here. It's called, like, "Saving America by Saving the Family." So, it's not good. Any who, please welcome Varina Winder with the Arch Collaborative on to talk all about pronatalism.

Jennie: Hi, Varina.

Varina: Thank you so much for being here today. Hi, Jennie. I'm really excited to do this. I've been a longtime listener, so this is exciting.

Jennie: Yay, I'm so excited to have you. And like I have my cat is like sitting on top of my notes I took, and she's just like staring at me.

Varina: She's ready to learn all about pronatalism.

Jennie: Exactly.

Varina: I don't know if she's spayed, but yeah, exactly.

Jennie: She's very against coercive reproductive practices.

Varina: Exactly, exactly.

Jennie: Before we get started, would you like to take a second and introduce yourself?

Varina: Sure. So, my name is Varina Winder. Until last year, so until January of 2025, I was the Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor in the Secretary's Office of Global Women's Issues at the U.S. Department of State. And I sort of consider that my professional home. That was my first big job out of graduate school. I've been in and out of that office for more than a decade. Since January, I've been building together with other wonderful women in my networks— and mostly from the Biden administration, actually— something called the Arch Collaborative, which is a five-year strategic initiative really focused on two things. One is: what are the things that we need to be resisting now in the face of sort of massive coordinated anti-rights movements? And secondly, when and frankly, if we survive this moment, what do we need to build for the first time or rebuild for a future where gender equality is non-negotiable?

Jennie: I'm so excited to talk to you when you just know so much about all of these things and have been Yeah, no pressure.

Varina: No pressure.

Jennie: And have been on the front lines of fighting the anti-rights movement globally, right? Like you've been seeing it spread. So you have lots of thoughts. And we're seeing it come into the US more and more with the pronatalist agenda. And I think maybe we need to like, before we talk about what we're seeing now, we need to kind of take that step back to be like: what is pronatalism and why are we talking about it today?

Varina: Yeah, so and with your indulgence, I'd maybe take us even one step back just to your intro, which I think is really generous, because I would say I've not necessarily been on the front lines, right? We've been listening to people who are on the front lines. We've been listening to the people who are in grassroots movements, the people who kind of have sat across the tables from us and who have reported to us exactly what they've seen in their communities, in their hyper-local communities. One of the most— and I wasn't planning on talking about this— but one of the things that really guides the thinking of Arch and the thinking that I get up with every single day is a meeting that I took when I was still a US diplomat and we were in Kenya, and I was sitting across the table from a woman activist, a queer activist, and we were basically there, like, how can the US government partner with you? And she looked at us straight in the eyes, and I thought this was so bold, right? I mean, the power imbalance there is just incredible, right? They're representing a big, massive government, and she's there representing what was a relatively small organization. And she said, you need to go home and get your own house in order, right? We know exactly who is trying to pass all of these "kill the gays" bills here on the continent. And we know because we don't actually have pronouns in the same way that you do. We know because we don't actually have sex-specific backgrounds in the same way that you do outside of the Capitol. And so that to me is who has been on the front lines. That to me is who has been living the outcome of these anti-rights movements. And that to me is who has been really at the sharp end of how these anti-rights movements, which you know, seek nothing, then the less the sort of overturning of democracy have been out-coordinating sort of pro-rights, pro-democracy forces for the past 30 years have been out-organizing us, have been out-messaging us, and certainly out-funding us. And one of the things that Arch is really taken by, I mean, we're a small team, right? So we can't tackle it all, and there are folks sort of working on all edges of this. But one of the things that we're seeing is sort of the rise of what we call wedge issues, which are issues that are sort of grounded in a kernel of truth. And we'll talk about pronatalism in a second and why that is one of our wedge issues that we focus on. But they're grounded in a kernel of truth, and they're being used and sort of whipped up to divide not just sort of pro-rights folks against anti-rights folks, but pro-rights folks against ourselves— like, how we talk about it, the language we use, how we approach an issue. And pronatalism is a really good example of that.

Jennie: Yeah, I think you know, those "wedge" issues, we've been seeing that with the fight around trans rights of trying to peel off maybe some people in the feminist movement who decide that they're not gonna support that stuff and and try to create that huge divide in our space.

Varina: Right, exactly. Yeah. So, one of the wedge issues that we want to look at is exactly around this, right? Which is the distortion of family and the distortion of family values. So, for those folks who are tuning in and listening, we would love to hear from you. We'd love to work with you on that. It's sort of our least developed prong of work right now because we have been so focused on pronatalism.

Jennie: Okay, so let's turn to pronatalism. What is it? I think some people probably have a general idea— it's been more and more in the discourse lately— but what are we talking about when we talk about that?

Varina: Yeah, so I want to start with pronatalism, the sort of movement around pronatalism is grounded in this, as I said, kernel of truth, which is that at least in sort of high-income, highly developed countries, birth rates and fertility rates are declining, right? So, pronatalism is this ideology, this emerging policy framework, this cultural orientation that promotes higher birth rates specifically by framing reproduction as a “social duty” or as a sort of “moral good.” And particularly, I think, nefarious in this particular strand of pronatalism is how tied it to a certain like who should have children and who should not have children, which is a little bit less explicit. It's very, very nationalistic, very patriarchal. It emphasizes a really sort of certain traditional gender roles, and it's being driven increasingly by governments with all of the power and all of the resources and all of the funding that they wield. And that is really concerning because, of course, when you're deciding for another person whether and how and how many children they should have, you're fundamentally attacking this sort of system of individual and human rights.

Jennie: That's such a personal decision; there are so many factors that underlie it.

Varina: It is probably the most personal decision you can make. I'm just thinking about my own sort of personal journey, right? Which is it's hard to always conflate policy and personal, but becoming a mother, it affects every aspect. It affected every aspect of my life, every single one. Like the only other decision that's analogous is who you marry, right? But marriage, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, you know, marriage is a decision that, if things go really wrong or you know, the love isn't there, so to speak, like you can seek a divorce or a separation. Your children are your children for life, and once you become a parent, that's never something you're gonna step away from. And it affects everything in your life. It is the most personal decision you can possibly make.

Jennie: I feel like the next thing we need to talk about is the language being used when talking about this. I just what is forefront in my mind and probably and was not like originally on our agenda when we first were talking about doing this, but we can't not talk about "underbabied." Like, it was like oh my gosh, how do they find the most cringe-inducing language to explain things? Like, there are a couple things that this administration has done that I've had like a visceral reaction to. Oh, I felt it in my body.

Varina: Yeah, I mean, you can and you have done entire podcasts on "human flourishing" and what that means and what that doesn't mean. And suffice to say, I also have lots and lots of thoughts on that. But they are very much intertwined, and I'm glad that you brought them up in the same sentence. Yeah, so for anybody who's not familiar with this, is Dr. Oz, the TV personality, TV doctor who is now a member of the Trump administration. I think in May, I think it was last month, right next to Trump and RFK Jr. talked about how there's a real crisis in America. And I think that that's really important to point out is that the language around pronatalism is very much rooted in this idea that it is a crisis, that we have to act immediately, that like the sky is falling. And in this case, the sort of twin crises that were talked about on that day are women are "underbabied" and men have low testosterone, right? And so combined, that's a really potent message to be sending Americans. What I think is so, I mean, visceral reaction, absolutely. I just cannot with the “underbabied.” And frankly, I'd be super curious for those comms folks who are listening to this. One of the things that's really hard to do when you're talking about pronatalism is talk about it in language that doesn't sound clinical and that doesn't sound that that actually means what it is, like right. Like "pronatalism" sounds like you're pro-healthy birth or pro-babies or pro any of this. Like Dr. Oz may have inadvertently just given this movement the best name possible, right? Because women being "underbabied" almost immediately leads you to question, like, okay, so it's the women's fault, number one. Yeah. But also, it's not about what you do for the babies when they arrive, right? It's like the number of babies that matters. It's not like the quality.

Jennie: And there's a "magic number" that the government wants.

Varina: Right. There's a magic number that the government wants. And none of those babies' actual lives are part of that calculation, right? And part of what we're seeing, at least in the sort of Heritage Foundation's version that the Trump administration has adopted to a large and frightening degree. It's not about improving the lives of women or of children, right? In fact, almost everything that they're doing is on the contrary.

Jennie: Yeah, it's just so blatant. I mean, I think there's like that's the thing about this administration, right? Like, there is no quiet part anymore, right? They just say the things, and so keeping an eye on, like, the language that has been used and they continue to use is really important.

Varina: Yeah, I mean, I think that so Heritage Foundation in January came out with what I think of as Project 2025, but for the future, right? This is Project 2026, Project 2027, Project 2028. And the title of that piece is called Saving America by Saving the Family, right? And that in and of itself, I think, has to raise some eyebrows. It's 168 pages of policy proposals and policy recommendations. And I think that it would be really lovely to sort of dismiss this as just another report that's gonna sit on a shelf somewhere, but we know from Heritage itself how successful and how deeply aligned and how sort of open the lines of communication are between the sort of levers of government, particularly with the Trump administration, as well, between them and the Heritage Foundation. Kevin Roberts recently went out and talked about how of the 1,900 or so recommendations that they issued in Project 2025, 1,100, more than 1,100 have already been implemented. And that's not a humble brag. That sort of 55% figure is being tracked by multiple sort of watchdog groups. So that’s not a bloviation. It's so much.

Jennie: So much.

Varina: And if you dig into their finances and you don't, there's not a ton of transparency around here. When I mean dig into their finances, I literally just mean Googling their 990s. The latest that we have is from 2024 and they control over 400, almost 500 million dollars in financial assets. That's just what they claim, right? And if you compare that on the sort of more pro-right side, on the more left side, the Center for American Progress is probably the most analogous foundation that you might see, and they control, I think, $84 million. So, we're just seeing these two thought leaders, if you can call both of those thought leaders, batting and playing on very, very different playing fields. So, what the Heritage Report lays out in their sort of Saving America plan, and I and I really want to emphasize I read all 168 pages, I used zero AI note takers, I took notes myself, and then I sent these notes, which were all in a Google Doc, like around to sort of folks in my orbit, and they were like, you need to create a presentation about this. And I stayed up really late and just like PowerPointed, like nobody's business has ever PowerPointed before. And I sort of analyzed it prong by prong. Now, I'm taking it on a virtual road show. But what their sort of policy proposals boil down to are essentially in two different buckets. One is around government restrictions. So, to heck with limited government, these are the new restrictions that we're going to impose. And some of them are incentives too, and maybe we'll talk about that. And then the second prong is around cultural interventions. And that is work for the Heritage Foundation and its aligned actors to do, but they also see a role for government in that. And this is leading to, and you talked about the importance of language, and I and if I can sort of leave anybody with a sort of message, is like this pronatalist vision, what they call "saving America," is built explicitly on the back of we are building a world where women cannot. Women cannot, they cannot leave their husbands if they need to, they cannot go to school, they cannot get a job, they cannot have financial independence, they cannot access health care, they cannot access quality childcare, they cannot, bottom line, choose when, whether, or how many children to have. And so, if there's any message that sort of burbles up from the depths of these 168 pages, is that this is not a forward-looking vision. This is really looking not just to the 1950s, but to a world in which women really had zero autonomy.

Jennie: And I feel like this is the important moment to be like, this is when you're gonna hear people be like, you were saying the sky is falling and this is never gonna happen, women aren't gonna lose voting rights, like this is not this is not gonna happen. But like the moves are being made, the arguments are getting louder from more people in power. This is, like, all of the people who said Roe was never gonna fall, and like they're not coming for birth control, and they are very clearly coming after access to birth control. It may not look like taking a bite of the entire thing all at once. You're talking about women not being able to vote. That looks like starting at the SAVE Act, where it changes like-

Varina: I would argue even before that, but yeah, like, it's like we didn't get to SAVE without covering like a few of the other sort of dismantlings of the Civil Rights Acts, right? Like this is this is what they learned from Roe, and to sort of overturn of Roe was also a Heritage project, right? And it started very much post-1970s. And you've had podcasts episodes about this, right? Like they didn't come after women's access to healthcare until they realized it could be a politically potent tool. But that project was a 40-year project, right? And that’s exactly what's happening here. And just to your point about where and how it's already happening, and you're exactly right. I sound like a conspiracy theorist. I often will sort of like if I'm at I was just at my college reunion, my 20-year college reunion, and when people inevitably ask you what you do, like I try to disarm, I don't know if it's successful by being like, I know I sound very tinfoil hatty when I say this and I start to talk about this movement and how concerned I am about it. But if you look at what's already happening, you know, a lot of what they lay out, what they being Heritage lays out in this "women cannot" plan is already happening, right? So, they promote this idea in in sort of their cultural sections about how, well, if women go to school or college, like colleges should be basically marriage boot camps, and we should be turning pastor or we should be turning faculty members into pastors, and we should be giving discounts for married couples in dorms, and we should be giving motherhood medals a la Hungary, and we should be promoting, we should be using the media to tell more effective stories about the importance of marriage, right? Like in our culture right now, I mean, in the New York Times a couple of months ago, we had a whole and I'm, we're not on being…I'm putting this in air quotes. Like, we had a "debate" (air quoted) in the New York Times around whether women have "ruined the workplace," right? We had this comment from a man who commands a lot of TV access, Dr. Oz, about women being “underbabied.” We have the entire existence of the manosphere. We have the entire existence of trad wives, right? Like, in this sort of very aesthetically pleasing, imagine how much propaganda it took you to reject fill-in-the-blank, right? We also have the government incentives and restrictions in motion, right? So, on the incentive side, we already have the Department of Transportation saying that they're gonna prioritize public transportation projects in areas of the country where marriage rates and fertility rates are higher, right? You have for the first time HHS or the Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the Title X program. So, this is the nation's family planning program. It's been in effect for about 50 years. You have, for the very first time in 50 years, contraception is mentioned only once, and it's in the context of "over-medicalization." And instead, they are promoting, they are incentivizing states to apply for grants that can study quote unquote “body literacy” and low testosterone, right? This is the nation's family planning program, right?

Jennie: That was bipartisan when it was founded.

Varina: Absolutely. I mean, that's the thing, is so many of these things were bipartisan because they were evidence-based and they were things that Americans wanted and needed and asked for, and Congress could sort of decide, like, yes, it would be great if we could have healthier populations. That was an agreed-upon principle. I would say that the last thing that is really, I think, concerning is how much legislation is moving, and this is much more around the restrictions side, but at the federal level level, you have the SAVE Act, which may, may not, may, I'm gonna hope and keep my fingers crossed that it just died, just died on the Senate floor. I'm sure it will be revived in some other form. That would, of course, curtail married women's ability to vote. You have seven different states right now pursuing proposals to curtail no-fault divorce, basically through the promotion of what is called “covenant marriage.” You have 32 states that have laws on the books that would ban same-sex marriage if Obergefell were to be overturned. You have, oh my gosh, in North Carolina, I don't know if you saw this, but this bill that was just introduced that would authorize the use of quote-unquote "deadly force" against women seeking IUDs. You have parents being charged in states like Idaho and Tennessee and Texas with trafficking their daughters for seeking or helping them to seek abortions outside of state lines. You have states that are moving to sort of automatic 50-50 custody awarding, which again sounds great on paper, but what you see is in practice, it does end up trapping women in abusive marriages, right? In a country where one in four women is still experiencing intimate partner and/or sexual violence, most likely in her marriage. These are real things, and it's already sort of tightening that noose around women's ability to do literally any of the things that are these personal decisions, right? Get married to the people that they want to have, the number of children that they have, go to school. I mean, one of the big things that passed last summer through the Medicaid bill, the slashing Medicaid bill, was they capped the amount of loans that individuals, federal loans that individuals could access for very specific degree categories. And what were those degree categories? Oh, I'm so glad you asked, Jennie. They are things like counseling and teaching and nursing and speech language pathology, right? Like who owns who who are in these careers? It's women, right? So so much of this is already happening, so much of this already happening is in play. And I understand how tin foil hatty I sound, but when you see, when you sort of look up and you look all around, there's no way to unsee it. And it is absolutely being coordinated and funded and messaged in ways that are very explicitly anti-women, anti-LGBTQ, and very, very dangerous for anybody who enjoys making decisions for themselves. And that includes men, of course.

Jennie: But it's such a cute tinfoil hat. I mean, at least it's a very styled.

Varina: Oh my god. Oh my goodness. Yes, my prairie dress. I actually, you know, and I love a prairie dress, right? Love it. I love it.

Jennie: Okay, so that's a little bit of what they want. What are they getting wrong? Like what is the whole what are they getting wrong in this moment?

Varina: Yeah. So, I think it's, like, a lot. Yeah. I mean, the delta between what I think the Heritage Foundation thinks women want and what women actually want, you know, they could do a whole separate like Mel Gibson movie. I don't know if you're picking up on my reference there, but yeah. But yeah, so Helen Hunt and Mel Gibson in that movie before it was known that he was potentially not the character he was playing on TV. So, I think that delta is quite big. And it's what's really interesting, and Heritage Foundation folks are many things. They are not stupid, right? They are not stupid. They know that the delta is quite big. And what I think is so interesting, knowing that is that they base their entire framework, right? So, their "Save America" paper is based in this sort of crisis language, as we talked about at the top. The total fertility rate in America is 1.6. That's sort of like if you take a hypothetical woman and sort of averaged out in this hypothetical scenario, the number of babies that she's gonna have over the course of her lifetime, that is 1.6. What is called the replacement rate is 2.1. That's how many children she would need to have to replace herself and her partner over her lifetime. That is a crisis, is that we have to raise the birth rate. And they base the entire paper on like we're gonna just this is this is the focus area, and we're gonna do all of these things, and that's gonna raise the birth rate. And one of the biggest things that they're gonna do is they're gonna "incentivize marriage." And they're gonna incentivize marriage, a very specific form of marriage, "natural" marriage, as they call it "natural families," as they call it, which is marriage between one man, one woman, and they're biological children, right? So, this is an agenda that is pretty explicitly anti-women and anti-LGBTQ, but there's also, you know, what about children? I started my career- I couldn't read that without thinking of my very first job out of college, which was advocating for kids in the foster care and adoption system, right? Like biological children only. And I think that is like, you know, very indicative of this is this is not for anybody who is, frankly, and I'm just gonna say it, not white, heterosexual, and male. And also, you know, not proud of that, you know, leaning into that as their sort of contribution.

Jennie: And I should be clear, I'm nodding. We're not on video, like y'all aren't seeing this, so I'm like nodding doesn't matter.

Varina: Yeah, I mean, there's some there's some pretty implicit, I would, I would say not necessarily explicit, but implicit eugenics are arguments in here. And the place that gave me the biggest pause, especially as the granddaughter of Polish Jews, most of whom were executed at Auschwitz by the other side of my family. I'm the granddaughter of Polish Jews and the granddaughter of Germans. And there is a passage basically about how casual sex and casual abortion and no-fault divorce and childless ladies by choice is like the government can and should act to "clear the weeds before these poison the ground." I mean, I'm mumbling that passage because I don't have it directly in front of me, but that is the passage that absolutely sent chills down my spine, and it comes pretty early on in the text.

Jennie: And again, childless women. I feel like there's men who are childless as well, but it's definitely always about the women.

Varina: Well, Jennie, the problem is, and you started this podcast with the problem, which is that you have cats, right? Like, it's the cats and the childless by choice. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Jennie: So, and both [cats] have shown up as we are talking.

Varina: So yeah, so they've wrapped this crisis language. It's 1.6 in terms of the average number that this hypothetical woman is gonna have. And the solution is marriage, and it's marriage between one man and one woman and their biological children. And they're basing this all on this assumption that marriage is going to produce all of these children that they want. Well, you know, if they had, and I'm sure that they have, right? Like, if they had looked at where programs like this have been instituted, they would realize that none of this works, right? Like in Hungary, which is, I would imagine, something that they spoke about often with the Orbán government, the previous Hungarian government is, you know, Orbán's government spent almost 5%, I think a little over actually 5% of their GDP. That is actually what we spend on Medicare and Medicaid combined. They spent 5% of their GDP on marriage incentive programs and all of the things that you can find in this 160-page document. And they went from a total fertility rate of 1.3, very briefly for two years, up to 1.68 and then 1.6 and back down to 1.3. And why is that? Oh, it's because once you create the incentives for folks to get married, most likely the people who are basically married in all but paper, right? Like they're already cohabitating, they're already sharing a life, they get married, they get the government bonus, and then they don't actually, you know, change their minds about this very, very personal decision because it goes back to your original question, which is, you know, now that I'm on my long soliloquy, like: what do people actually want? Why do people actually choose to have children? The data on that is remarkably consistent. And I mean, I'm talking about data from you know, folks that I think the right would associate with being on the left, even though I would say they're pretty down the road, like folks like Pew and their sort of survey instruments, all the way to like folks like Brigham Young University, which I don't think we would say are necessarily on the left. And the number one thing that Americans say keeps them from having more children or children at all, is they're just not affordable, right? So, in the most recent American Life survey, BYU found that 71% of Americans that they surveyed, and this is a statistically significant sample size cohort, right? This the stat nerd and me went and looked at the crosstabs 71% said like kids are not affordable. And then 42% said, for me personally, for me, my personal experience is I have either chosen not to have children or I have chosen not to have an additional child because I do not have enough money, right? So, the number one thing is about affordability. And that's, you know, completely and totally unsurprising when you look at what the headlines are about how much groceries cost and how much housing costs and how much healthcare costs and how much college and education costs and how much just life costs these days. The second big thing that people report, and I'm it's related to affordability, but it is, I think, a standalone thing is housing, right? So, housing costs have been rising. I think I saw a stat that housing costs have risen 65% since you know 2000 or so. So, over the past 25 years, I guarantee you incomes have not. I didn't look up how much incomes have risen, but it's not 65%, right? So housing, how safe it is, how big it is, how quality it is, we don't have enough of it. And what we do have is far too expensive. And then the third thing that people talk about is the state of life, the state of the world. You see this especially in data from young people. Young people are about three times more likely to say this than older cohorts or older generations. Yeah, I'm worried about the state of politics, I'm worried about climate change, I'm worried about violence, I'm worried about just whether the world is getting better or not. So those three really big buckets are being completely ignored, completely dismissed in this report. And when I do this presentation on the road, I talk about affordability with a picture of the Brady Bunch on my PowerPoint presentation. One, because I'm really proud of myself for having the PowerPoint skills to put a picture of the Brady Bunch on it. But two, because they quite literally, Heritage quite literally says, you know, we hear people's affordability concerns, but they're not real. Because in the 1960s, just like the Brady Bunch showed us, you can have a family with six children and you can share one bathroom. And so, people's expectations are actually what is unrealistic. It's not that affordability is no longer a thing. It's that actually people's expectations are too high, right? Like you should be able to share one bathroom between eight people, two adults and six children.

Jennie: Yeah, no, sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, no, that all sounds like-

Varina: I can report from the front lines if you want my own anecdotal experience. In my house, four two adults and two children share one bathroom. It's not the best.

Jennie: Oh, I can only imagine.

Varina: So, I can only imagine what they would have to say about my yearnings for another bathroom.

Jennie: Yeah, I mean, you're so far short of that eight. Like, you should be fine.

Varina: Yeah. Yeah.

Jennie: Okay. So, what would a true pro-family vision look like?

Varina: Yeah, I'm so glad that you started with that word because I think that what we have and what we can and should be reclaiming is this idea of like we can be "pro-family" and we should be pro-family, and we should be proud of being pro-family, right? Like, family is at the heart of what makes us human, right? It's the people that we choose to love and to, you know, whether that's on paper or not, those are the people who are who are our ride-or-dies. And those are the people that you would ride or die for. And so, that to me is where we have to start is we have to embrace being pro-family. We are actually the party that cares about pro-family, right? Like we're the ones out there advocating for paid leave. We're the ones out there advocating for high-quality child care. We're the ones out there advocating for kids, our children not to get shot up in their schools. We're the ones advocating for them to have clean water to drink. We're the ones advocating for other people to have that too, because we understand that if other people have that, our kids benefit, right? It is almost a self-interested argument to want all of these things as public goods, right? Solve, solve the problem of the commons and just give it to everybody. And your status and your ability to sort of achieve the things that you want in life will increase too. So, I think that the pro-family vision, and I really want to give credit to Stephanie Saki and to Jessica Marcella, who wrote this amazing piece in Time magazine last summer, sort of outlining three prongs of a pro-family vision. So really, I want to give them credit here. But it has to start with affordability. I think that they have tapped in that— they, as in the Heritage Foundation and their elk— have really tapped into something around this idea of traditional gender roles, right? Because it is exhausting to have two parents who are totally leaned in, totally leaned into their careers. They're working hard all the time and they don't have enough time to parent well or to be a partner well or to do their job well or whatever. Like, we should be able to have less than just, you know, 150% foot on the gas at all times and be able to afford your life. So, that's sort of prong one. And whether that's paid leave or better childcare, less expensive childcare, more housing, right? You can debate what the policy proposals are to make life more affordable. But if you have at least one parent working or one adult in the house working, like, there shouldn't be so much pressure for everybody to just be absolutely maximizing their earning, right? You should be able to enjoy sort of that life that you're creating. Second is around opportunity, right? Like, and I mean this not just in the sense of educational opportunity and job opportunity— although I think that that is something that we can and should be tapping to as much as ever, because especially with the rise of AI and this sort of consternation around what are people's careers even gonna look like— we have to be able to have some say, right? We have to be able to create opportunities. We have to be able to still learn, we have to still be able to use our brains, right? But it's also about, like, exactly that, we started this conversation around like the most personal decisions that you can possibly make. Like one of them is who you marry, right? One of them is who you marry. So, do you want to get married? And if you do, to whom do you want to be married? We have to protect that. We absolutely have to protect that, right? Like, and that goes for, whether you want to be in a heterosexual relationship or a homosexual relationship. Like, that is opportunity. The life that you get to create with another person, that unlocks so many other things in your life. Like, I would not be here without my husband, like full stop, full stop. And then the last is around autonomy. We have to protect every piece of autonomy. And when we often talk about autonomy, we're talking about sort of reproductive autonomy and the ability to access contraception or to uh access abortion. And that is very true, and that is something that we need to promote and defend. But it is also about all these other things. I just sort of went on the tech piece, but that is a piece that I think Heritage really misses on, right? They identify technology and in their words, they literally call them "Silicon Valley Tech Bros," right? That's not my, those are not my words. Those are the Heritage Foundation's words. And then later on in their piece, they call them, they say that they have diabolical aims, right? And then they go on to say nothing about what to do about that, other than we should outlaw certain types of infertility treatments. I think autonomy is a really big one. I know that I think about this in the terms of as a parent, like, do I want my child being taught on screens? Do I want them to be sort of manipulated by algorithms? Do I want any of this? So, I think there's so much under the hood of what it would mean and what it would take to be pro-family. But I, for one, am all in on creating a pro-family vision and in making that tent as wide as possible because there are so many opportunities from, as I just said, the algorithms to who you marry to what affordability looks like, making new housing available. The policy options and menu are endless. And it's about being pro-family, not necessarily being pro-forced birth. Take that. I'm not "underbabied." I'm not underbabied, I'm overwhelmed, is what I am.

Jennie: Okay. So I always like to end. We talked about all the things that are wrong, but like, what can the audience do? How can the audience get involved at this moment?

Varina: Gosh. Well, we need everybody, right? Because as I just said, there is something for everybody. But I think that the first step is, of course, awareness. I really, really, really hope that something that I've said here today resonates with somebody who may not have been tracking this movement. And I hope that if you're in a different field, you bring this to sort of outside the gender cone or the gender equality cone, right? This is something that's going to affect every person, whether you identify as a woman or not. So, if you work in the climate space, if you work in the immigration space, if you work in the democracy space, if you are just somebody who is enjoying going to their job making widgets space, right? Like, there is something in this for you. And I hope that you listen and think and and maybe not read the whole heritage report, but sort of examine a little bit more what your what your feed is doing, what it's telling you about the world right now. Second is: we have to, you know, move from awareness to a couple concrete actions. So, I would say the first play is we need to play defense. So much of this agenda is already moving through state legislatures. That is often where we are most connected in our communities. You can call your house rep, you can call your house or your local senator, right? These are not your sitting in Capitol Hill folks, these are your local folks in your community who often work for. Frankly, without very much pay and therefore get a lot of incoming without a lot of ability or bandwidth to respond. And that is something that the hard right takes advantage of. We need to be absolutely paying attention to these bills as they get drafted, for example, in North Carolina and playing defense on those and getting them shut out of committee, stopping them from being passed. But last, I think is offense, right? It's all well and good to play whack-a-mole, and those are really important wins. For example, I'm just gonna keep going on the North Carolina example, right? Like two, I think senators, I think it was senators, peeled off of the bill after they saw sort of a social media upheaval and outcry around like how extreme that bill is. But we have that sort of pro-family vision, we have to take that on the road. We have to actually advocate for those policies. We have to actually put them into action. And so, whether that's sort of advocating for universal preschool in your local city council budget, or whether that is, you know, signing a petition to add more housing in your community, or whether that is going to your school and being like, hey, I don't love that my kid is getting tested on all these tablets for these things. Like, have we done research into you know how technology is- I mean, there's just so much advocating for paid leave, fighting for contraception access. There's just so many pieces. And because of that, there's an avenue to go on offense for everybody. We just have to seize that, and we have to do it under sort of, I think, this umbrella of being pro-family.

Jennie: That is all wonderful. I love having lots of lots of different ways people can get involved and take action. Yes. It's all connected. This is, like, the butterfly is also thinking that this is all heavy and there's lots of bad things happening. But you and I had a really fun conversation in our prep before we actually recorded. So, I thought I would pull a little moment of fun from there that we could talk about. What are you reading and loving right now, or just what are you reading right now or recently?

Varina: Yeah, okay. So, first, before I will share what I'm excited to read, but I also have to share what I just read that I think is really an interesting conversation piece, whether you love it or hate it or you're somewhere in between. If you haven't read Yesteryear yet, that is a piece to start with.

Jennie: It is- I've been, like, resisting, wanting, but also seriously.

Varina: Jennie, go and read it, and then we can have a whole debrief on what the themes are in Yesteryear and who she's writing for. I think the audience question is really interesting there, right? Because I went into that book thinking like, oh, this is gonna be a takedown of trad wives. That it is not. It is essentially a takedown of this world in which we are all performing, but performing essentially for capitalism. I mean, it is an interesting, interesting, fascinating take on: how do you perform; for whom are you performing; who's making money off of that; and who is definitively being hurt? Spoiler, it's your kids. So absolutely recommend Yesteryear. Again, whether you love it or hate it, it will be a great discussion. Today, I just got my book of the month in the mail. So I'm looking over at them. They're all sitting on my bed. I'm very, very excited. These are the four books that I am taking. I'm taking an international trip this week. And so I will be reading these books on the flame. I'm very excited to read So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder or Ginder. I'm not totally sure. I'm gonna go with Ginder because I hate it when people call me Winder. I'm Winder. This guy must be Ginder, right? That's my book club book for the month. Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet, one of my all-time favorite books, has a new book out called Land. I'm really excited about that one. I'm very, very excited if you like romance, which I do. Annabelle Monaghan is sort of like an automatic buy author for me. So is Carly Fortune. I just read her latest as well. She has a new book called Dolly All the Time. And then the last one that is sitting on that stack over here, which I don't know very much about. It just kind of sounded interesting, is called Main Characters by Bobby Palmer. What are you reading?

Jennie: Fine. Okay, so I just finished Of Monsters in Mainframes by Barbara Truelove. I think I had just started it when we were talking first crossing. How was it? So, I thought it was delightful. So, it is billed as like a comedic horror space opera, and it is like the AI system, which again, we also talked about our like not on board with the AI stuff, but this place was really cute. It was a ship, like the AI that was like the autopilot, but you know, had to like do all the things, and then the medical AI, like talking and stuff, and they get to a port, and like everybody on the ship is dead, and the ship is like has no idea what happened or how it happened, and Dracula's involved, and Frankenstein shows up at some point. It sounds crazy when you talk about it, this sounds very banana pants, right? But it was just delightfully kind of fun, and like put back on your chin foil hat, ladies. Let's go. It was really, yeah, comedic space opera. It was pretty delightful. And then the other thing I've been reading and going through is The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lyon, which I have loved. I'm on, I think I'm on book seven, is the one I have next to read. They're like short little delightful interludes. They're I think the longest one's like maybe 250 pages, but like they started especially really short. Like you could just like whip through it, and it's like the late 1800s in London, and it's like this quirky neighborhood in London, and her parents were have died previously, and an uncle is like kind of spent all of her inheritance, and she doesn't like have any rights, she hasn't come into her majority yet, so she hasn't didn't have the ability to control her money, and it's like found family in the most delightful way, and so you're like reading her like daily journal, and so everybody's like quirky, and I don't know, it's just really delightful escape, and I've really enjoyed it, and I'm very much looking forward to there's eight of them out right now, and a ninth one being written, but they're just really fun, and I don't know. I love found family. That's also what the Of Monsters in Mainframes was also found family.

Varina: You are on the pro-family vision, Jennie. You are doing your part. So, just because you mentioned sort of like delight and escapism too, I'd be remiss. There is a member of our extended community who is writing novels right now under a pseudonym Devin M. And she writes these wonderful romances, and they are all you will find yourself in because like she is accurate to the work. I mean, like how many romance novels have you ever read in your life that you know explicitly mention and talk about the work of USAID, right? Like it's it's that kind of just you know, found joy, but also, they're very romance-y, if you know what I mean. And so, I would call those out too.

Jennie: Awesome. Yes, we will put a link because everybody should go buy one. Yes, yes.

Varina: And E. Jean Carroll's Not My Type. Can I mention that too? Am I allowed to just keep naming books? E. Jean Carroll, Not My Type. It is a memoir of not her sexual assault, but her sort of court cases are regarding her sexual assault by Donald J. Trump. And I think it's just so especially important to be reading these novels, especially during the weaponization of our Department of Justice against this woman who dared to stand up to him. And I read actually quite a few memoirs of sexual assault every year. I think it's really important that there's somebody, you know, that there's an audience for that, and that publishers know that they can and they will find an audience when they put out these books of just harrowing pain. And her book is unlike her memoirs, unlike anything I've ever read in my life. I was giggling during it. Oh, great. I like sat in my little chair downstairs. I think I actually missed a meeting because I was so entranced in what she was writing. She's 80-something, and she has lived a life, and she has honed her eye based on her eight decades on this earth. I mean, every sentence is a gem. And just please go, you know, don't get the copy from the library. Go buy it, go support this woman. It is the most- I think it's my favorite book of the year so far.

Jennie: Ooh, okay. Okay.

Varina: I read a lot.

Jennie: I will do one more, and I don't know that this is a like I recommend to everybody, but I love having a nonfiction book going that I usually listen to on audiobook. And I had been wanting to read Challenger by Adam Higginbotham for a long time. You're probably of the similar age where that's like a memory, like a clear young person. Yeah, the Challenger explosion. And so, it's like a deep dive into it. So, it's like long and kind of not super, I mean, it's technical. It's like talking about kind of the dysfunction at NASA and like how all of the stuff was working. And so, my dad was an engineer, and early in his career, he did aerospace engineering, and he had done work on the moon rover. So, like this was kind of leading to thinking about my dad, he had passed away three years ago now. So, it's hard to time. And so thinking about my dad, and I read it this spring without realizing the launch that was coming. And so, it was like really weird to read this book about the Challenger and how everything that led to the explosion and all of the decisions while at the same time, like shortly after hearing, like starting to hear the rumblings about the big launch that's coming up.

Varina: Artemis.

Jennie: Yeah, Artemis.

Varina: I mean, watching Artemis...

Jennie: Weird timing that just like I happened to finally get the book done because I was waiting for it on audiobook. And yeah.

Varina: Well, I should put that out: Taylor Jenkins Reid also came out with a book this year called Atmosphere that I read actually shortly before Artemis, too, and I would highly recommend that as well. It's a wonderful, it's a love story, but it's also a love of science story. But watching Artemis with my now 10-year-old was just unbelievable. And staying up late and, you know, just literally praying for the safety of these four astronauts and now watching them come back and go on tour and talk about what it means. Christina Koch, who went on and she gave this talk, and I saw this sort of viral moment where she talks about what it means to be a member of a crew. Oh, it's just unbelievable. I mean, poets and scientists and national leaders and figures, I mean, what else could we ask for?

Jennie: So, okay.

Varina: They're pro-family.

Jennie: Okay. So, we have to talk about those. We will have like the additional hour. Should we just do a whole book talk? Right. Can we just do a book talk? Yeah. Varina, thank you so much for being here today. It was so much fun talking to you.

Varina: I am so grateful to you, Jennie, not just for interviewing me, but for using your space and really conceiving of this so much earlier than I would imagine the podcast class has. And I just am so grateful for you giving the platform to folks who care so much about rights and about human rights. So, thank you.

Jennie: Oh, thank you. My only goal in all of this was to be a useful tool for the community. So, I hope that is what I have built.

Varina: Well, that is me clapping for you. So, thank you.

Jennie: Okay, y'all. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Varina. I had so much fun talking to her. We got to talk about books, we had to have just like a great conversation. We had a wonderful conversation in advance of this. So, it was just so much fun to have her on. So, I hope you enjoyed it. And with that, I will see everybody next week. If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com, or you can find us on social media. We're at rePROs Fight Back on Facebook and Twitter, or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and want to make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you want to make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprosfightback.com. Thanks all.