The Heritage Foundation’s latest document, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” was published in January, and its purported goal is to reverse the country’s declining birthrate.

See, if you can’t physically force women to have more babies, which is what abortion restrictions aim to do, you design government policies that pressure women into having more babies.

You cut off opportunities outside the home, you make the public sphere hostile to women’s independence and you create a system where the only viable path left for a woman is dependence on a man for survival. In other words, you drag the country back to a time when women had fewer choices.

  • manxu@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    I commented.on a different post that what we have lost in the 21st century is the belief or hope that things are improving. That had been the cornerstone of all politics since 1945; things are imperfect but they are getting better.

    Now it’s the opposite. Two décades of things rushing from catastrophe to calamity, and the really big ones only gave us hints, yet.

    It’s not just that it’s hard to want to force a human to be born into this kind of world. It’s also that a child is a financial anchor and burden that may end up preventing your own évasive maneuver.

    Give families the resources they need to raise a child. Give them a cheap place to live, jobs that don’t kill you, healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you, and éducation that makes people better.

    We can do it. We just choose to bomb Iran instead.

    • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      People are less likely to build community with children as well. “Rugged individualism” and all that.

      Nothing screams “american” like 4 kids, a ford expedition, and never talking to a neighbor or anyone with a slightly darker skin tone than you. Not to mention never voting for things that dont affect you directly, and having zero critical thought about how your actions affect others.

  • SaveTheTuaHawk
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    22 hours ago

    you design government policies that pressure women into having more babies.

    Like only 2 weeks or less for maternity leave?

    Or lower tax rates for married couples?

    • Velma@lemmy.todayOP
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      23 hours ago

      Like outlawing abortion and no-fault divorces.

      Once a woman is trapped with a baby and no way to get a divorce and daycare costs more than she can make at a job, she’s stuck.

    • AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      Lol ikr. There are absolutely policies like this that would incentivize people to have more kids but for some reason it’s out of the question. Like how study after study shows abstinence only sex ed is terrible at stopping teen pregnancy yet southern states keep doing it anyway cuz it’s about control not stopping teen pregnancy.

  • Ænima@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    I remember reading a comment on a similar article about why people don’t have more kids anymore. It summed it up pretty well:

    Caged animals don’t want to fuck.

    Make the world prohibitively terrible, where we all feel like trapped animals in a system we can’t escape, and we’ll focus on survival.

  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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    2 days ago

    You cut off opportunities outside the home, you make the public sphere hostile to women’s independence and you create a system where the only viable path left for a woman is dependence on a man for survival.

    Ethics aside (yes, I know that’s a huge asterisk):

    • We’ve set up society to be dependent on dual-income households. Given that the most commonly cited reason people aren’t reproducing (starting later, stopping sooner, w/e) is economics, limiting women’s ability to contribute financially to a household is only going to exacerbate this.

    • As a childfree man, I don’t want a woman to be dependent on me. If my partner is stuck at home due to being unable to work, that isn’t going to make me suddenly decide that I want to become a parent. If I was on the fence (which I’m not), it would definitely push me onto the “no” side of the fence due to financial considerations.

    This is just fucking stupid and won’t work the way they think it will.

    • undeffeined@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      On your second point: I’m pretty sure there will be a push to ban all contraceptives so the only option you have to not have children is to not have sex. Of course some people will abstain or do non-vaginal sex but it will be a numbers game.

  • ramble81@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Literally shit that Al-Queda is doing in Afghanistan and yet people still don’t realize it.

    • Velma@lemmy.todayOP
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      I’d rather die than be forced to be dependent on a man and forced to birth him babies.

      Riot indeed.

      • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus
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        2 days ago

        Same, but that feeling for my daughters. Its looking like if I dont fight they will have to and fuck that, too.

        • Velma@lemmy.todayOP
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          2 days ago

          On the bright side, women had already figured out how to get around no-fault divorce. We can always go back lol

          • ceiphas@feddit.org
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            2 days ago

            But this time the black widows will go to a procreation center instead of a prison, and their uteruses will be sold by the state or rather the contractor to patriot men…

            The hand maids tale, but without a shortage on fertile women will be way more disgusting

            • Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              12 hours ago

              No, of course not. But a big gust of wind blew my favorite hat onto the roof! Be a big, strong man and climb up a ladder to get it for me, would you??

              • fartographer@lemmy.world
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                10 hours ago

                I see no reason not to do this! Do me a favor and hold my phone? I get really bad vertigo. Everyone I know is always talking about it. Here, lemme unlock my phone in case you need to call any of my contacts should anything go awry. And don’t peek at my browser! I’m in the middle of filling out my life insurance information and just need to assign a beneficiary.

                Anyway, here I goooo!!! Wait, lemme put lotion on my hands in case the air is dry up there.

          • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus
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            2 days ago

            Its just too bad making it so these people cannot operate or propagate in physical reality anymore is not a solution, so sad.

      • corsicanguppy
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        2 days ago

        Can you imagine me supporting my entire household on my income? Forget about the stress of being the sole provider; there is no regular family out there who can live on one income!

      • fartographer@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I’d rather die than have my wife be forced to be dependent on me, and that’s a BIG “fuck no” on us having babies. I’ve met us, I know what horrors await our combined genetics.

    • youcantreadthis@quokk.au
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      2 days ago

      Sucks the heritage fpundation has like a building and killing affiliated scum wont help or fix or prevent anything bad. Because of how easy it would be.

        • youcantreadthis@quokk.au
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          2 days ago

          Not philosophically. i was saying murder is bad dont do murder. But i guess thats bannable now. New internet is weird.

          I like community and stuff. I think thats better. I just havent found anything but high-school-ass tribes. It makes me really sad. Still looking. Feels quixotic at this point. Doing my little actions i can do on my own. Feeling like im wandering the ruins of a dead world. Like im never talking to individuals, but feds, people playing tribal politics at me, and myself. Thats what drugs are for i guess.

          Someday ill either find real people who have ever read a book. Maybe even one or two who thinks im cute? or ill fuck up a dose and die. That sounds more likely. People dont exist anymore. Id resolve to die violently, to not go gently into that goodnight, but i kind of hate everyone too much to give them that.

          • Sanctus@anarchist.nexus
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            2 days ago

            The machine stares back, sibling. It burrows into your fleshy corneas and embeds itself. Becoming a translation layer that trashes critical thought and incentivizes reductionism. It is the void made manifest in the once beating hearts of the wouldbe sentient. It presents itself as an unassailable wall of progress, unstoppable and omnipresent. It is not. Burn it down.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    They don’t need to plan for that. The climate crisis will force societal regression and poverty, limiting job opportunities. They’re already anti-anthropogenic climate change so they’re doubling down on the (likely) inevitable.

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Please understand that this is instinct, not political-variant-specific, or culture-specific:

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2445637#abstract

    male-supremacy is the bedrock of totalitarian-authoritarianism, is what the evidence has been showing us, all along.

    The “taliban”, the “christians”, zionists ( yes, the “Israel” which brags sooo much about women’s rights compared with other cultures, is eradicating women’s rights, & some stories about that have got visible ), the Asian equivalents, it’s consistent that murdering women’s validity is the basis for authoritarianism’s “kingdom”.

    Ask yourself if the root-guru of the Christians, benJoseph, meant male-supremacists or women, in his “The Meek Shall Inheret The Earth”, meaning they’ll have their own flowering-time.

    ( “stalk-growing-time” or “animals-and-tribes-time” is the past 6 “generations”/“ages”.

    “flowering-time” is the time we’re offered, if we get through “The Great Filter”, as whites call it, or “The Great Purification”, as American Indians call it: it’s got nothing to do with gender-supremacy: it’s got to do with values & souls.

    The fact that male-supremacy has trod-on women’s souls for millenia means that needs total undoing.

    It in no way requires that male-lives’ souls be trod-on, no matter how much male-culture presumes that it “must” mean that, in its exclusive-binary-only “reasoning”. )

    It’s truly the deepest prejudice there is, among our world.

    Babboons, chimpanzees, & human-male-supremacism are all absolute-prejudices.

    Human-prejuduce, however, is voluntary & that is a difference which needs to be converted to removed.

    _ /\ _

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      I have been telling people sexism is the real root of all oppression citing examples like the KKK leader stating he would vote for a black man (Obama) over a white woman (Hillary) for forever now.

      People don’t get it and instead we have a backlash against feminism!? Truly bizarre.

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    all women should move to a northern border state like Montana and just fucking take it over. take over every government office, and declare sovereign independence from the US.

    just become absolutely hostile towards conservatives, and force them out.

    should plans not work out, just flee to Canada.