The Fall of the Family

Perspectives on The Heritage Foundation’s plans to resurge conservatism and consumerism in order to “save the family” 

Britta Pietila

“This will never make the front page, but if we don’t write…think…talk about this, it will happen under our noses without a second thought,” said Kelly Rogers, a graduate student studying American Legal History at the University of Minnesota.

That comment was in reference to a report released on Jan. 9 by The Heritage Foundation, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family.” It is an attempt to return the United States to a nation that views the family, rather than the individual, as the main unit of society.

Roger Severino, Jay Richards, Emma Waters, Delano Squires, Rachel Sheffield, and Robert Rector, the authors of the special report, are all directly affiliated with The Heritage Foundation. “Saving America by Saving the Family” is over an hour-long read, spanning 168 pages. The report was released by the DeVos Center for Human Flourishing. Upon researching this title, I was not able to determine what this Center stood for or provided. All I found was that it is a subsect of The Heritage Foundation.

Crowning the “family” as “the key to American greatness in the next 250 years,” the report strictly promotes “healthy” heteronormative marriage and “natural” family-living to all U.S. citizens, but it is specifically targeted at those who do not want such a life.

“It is a concerted attack on all gender identities. It is a way of resubjugating women. It’s a way to make people saddled with debt, more obedient to capitalism, and more stupid by demonizing education,” said Rogers.

Rogers’ research is eyecatching: her dissertation is on the history of the criminalization of abortion in Minnesota. Focusing on state constitutions, the governance of women’s bodies, and the criminalization of sexuality, Rogers wants to examine how the state benefits from the subjugation of women.

The Heritage Foundation’s report and Rogers’ concerns are not new, however, this sort of attempt at control through policy is comparable to the 1965 Moynihan Report, which is cited in “Saving America by Saving the Family.”

Written by former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the infamous report analyzed Black poverty in the U.S. Moynihan stated that the hindered performance of Black Americans in society was due to their own “failure” to foster stable family structures. “The object should be to strengthen the [Black] family,” the report stated. “After that, how this group of Americans chooses to run its affairs, take advantage of its opportunities, or fail to do so, is none of the nation's business.”

Rogers compares the Moynihan Report to The Heritage Foundation’s report. “It is an intentional project of reconstructing race [and] class in such a way that it is only going to serve a very particular kind of white person who is at the top of the socioeconomics scale,” said Rogers.

By clarifying The Heritage Foundation’s end goal of sustained and stable reproduction, Roger’s reveals their definition of the “American Dream” is something attained only when you submit to a conservative, capitalistic, heteronormative lifestyle.

“Saving America by Saving the Family” places blame on women, similar to The Moynihan Report placing blame on Black people. It specifically blames those who mobilized during second-wave feminism and sexual liberation in the 60s. Rather than seeing women in the streets fighting for their rights, they should be seen in the home, married with children.

On page 4, the report states that “Over the course of 60 years, casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce became normalized, while marriage and the natural family became stigmatized.”

Woman’s autonomy in the United States has been a hyperfixation of numerous groups—right-wing and religious interest groups like the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), Students For Life America (SFLA), and general groups like Christian Nationalists and MAGA Republicans—for centuries, even before Roe v. Wade was seemingly embedded into American law in 1973 until it was promptly overturned in 2022.

Zornitsa Keremidchieva, a professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, argues the reports like the two aforementioned are not disconnected from epidemiological conclusions; rather, they are rooted in an international slide towards the right and towards conservatism.

“The kinds of discourses that you are seeing come out of the U.S. are not insular, they are a part of a global conservative realignment,” said Keremidchieva.

Professor Keremidchieva is a rhetorician. She analyzes political rhetoric and its movement across borders through tongues and texts. One class she is currently teaching this semester is called “Rhetoric of Feminism,” where she and her students analyze the struggle of women from the 19th century until the present day and beyond, looking into texts that reveal systemic barriers to equality.

Professor Keremidchieva is also from Bulgaria, and a fraction of her research has been dedicated towards post-communist Bulgaria and specifically the role print media played in the re-subjugation of women.

Keremidchieva’s “The Egoist Lifestyle: Gender, Community and the ‘New Generation’ of Post-Communist Bulgaria,” published in 2015, tells the story of the first Bulgarian lifestyle magazine “The Egoist.”

After a coup d'état (an illegal instance where someone is taken out of office forcibly by the military or other government elites) in 1944 to overhaul the Bulgarian monarchy, a communist regime took over in 1946 after World War II. Women and men were viewed and treated as equals—if and only if you ignore the fact that women were innately tied to household duties. The Communist regime, called People's Republic of Bulgaria, ended in 1989 and was replaced by a parliamentary government, returning with it the market economy and consumerism.

“The Egoist” played a critical role in reintroducing consumerism as a promise of a better life in Bulgaria, which was followed by industrialization and capital exploitation. “[The] market economy requires an attachment to consumerism. [The Egoist] ushered that in,” said Keremidchieva. “And the first product that came into play was women themselves.”

Women’s bodies became a commodity of capitalism, along with endless, useless products.

Women are still inexplicably intertwined in the clutches of capitalism, and in the United States today, the intersectional groups of women, non-binary folk, and people of color still struggle for liberation due to controlling reports like The Moynihan Report and “Saving America by Saving the Family.”

Similarly, federal operations like “Operation Metro Surge,” which started in Minneapolis in Dec. 2025, are equally as controlling. Ironically, with people afraid to leave their homes due to the possibility of being taken into custody, deported, or even killed, the defining trait of The Heritage Foundation—the family—is threatened.

“What’s going on right now in the Twin Cities is fundamentally a women’s issue,” said Rogers. “It is a fundamental problem of the family. It shows the kinds of limitations that these family structures have baked into them because what do you do when your primary earner is deported?”

This question begs an answer, but in the meantime, stay aware. As graduate student Kelly Rogers said, “the first step in throwing a wrench in that plan is by becoming acutely aware of where all of us fit into [Project 2025] and what that means.”