The conversation women are having

About two weeks ago (March 18, 2026), the Heritage Foundation hosted five conservative women in a panel discussion. Their subject: the role of women in human society, and how our society pushes women into roles that do not foster the continuance of civilization. Specifically, why does our society not support women who have, then raise, their own children? Predictably, the we’re-just-fine crowd seized upon an idle comment and ran with it. They made that remark, which did propose a nonviable policy solution, sound like the primary focus of the panel. That is incidental. Those five women were over the target, and catching predictable flak, both in the comment space and elsewhere.

Who were these five women?

Judy Lopez, Program Manager of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Human Flourishing, hosted the event. Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.-15th) made some keynote remarks. Then the panel took their seats:

• Jennifer Galardi, Senior Policy Analyst at the DeVos Center,
• Carrie Severino, President of the Judicial Crisis Network,
• Mary Rice Hasson, Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center,
• Carrie Gress, editor of Theology of Home magazine and author of (among other works) Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity,and
• Emma Waters, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Technology and the Human Person and author of Lead Like Jael. (Bible students will remember Jael as Judge Deborah’s comrade in resistance against Canaanite oppression.)

The discussion began with a critical examination of feminism. It teaches that children will only “slow [a woman] down,” so women can best serve themselves by not having any. (CNAV mentioned that before, as regular readers will recall.) It presents a stark choice: either children or work, never both. The panelists and keynote speaker challenged that notion directly. They argued that a woman can have both – if not both at once, then each in its “season of life.”

The panel also observed this stark fact:

Marriage is in serious decline, and couples are delaying or not having children at all. Rep. Miller

Naturally the panel focused on economic, political, and public-policy obstacles to marriage and childrearing – and how to remove them.

Cautions these women addressed

To their credit, they addressed first this article in the “Intelligencer” section of New York magazine: “The Women Leaving the New Right.”

Defectors say the movement has dropped the pretense of protecting women and is now openly “cruel and fickle.”

The article lies behind a paywall – but Jen Galardi described it as

highlight[ing] the extreme side of the right-wing manosphere that is apparently causing women to flee the right.

CNAV can guess whom that article is talking about:

• Andrew Torba, founder of Gab, and
• Nick Fuentes, his overgrown middle-school protege.

Both men have stated that women don’t belong in the outside-the-home workforce, in any role. In rejecting that notion, Galardi pointed out that

[W]hile the right may have a man problem, the political left has a woman problem.

CNAV also points out that neither Torba nor Fuentes represent all men wishing to “Make American Great Again.” Even the “woman problem” is incidental – because evil men put bad ideas into those women’s heads. Those men are the Billionaire Struldbrugs’ Club, which CNAV defined here. Those men want no one to have children, and hope to achieve immortality and have robots serve their every need. (For further information on what a struldbrug is, read Jonathan Swift’s Gullver’s Travels.)

Harmful philosophies

The panel did discuss the philosophical harms feminism has wrought. Feminism, for the most part, teaches promiscuity and avoidance of childbearing. (Rarely one encounters the extreme form of feminism that teaches asexuality – or the L in the Alphabet Soup.)

LIGGETT [Biology teacher]: All right, Lightman. Perhaps you can tell us who first suggested a method of reproduction without sex?

DAVID LIGHTMAN: Um – your wife? [Provoking laughter from the class.]
Dialogue from the motion picture WarGames (1983)

Naturally the panel observed that a woman “turns [a man] off” if she adopts a “man’s career” or becomes a “girl boss.” And, of course, these are the women who complain most often that they “can’t find a man.” They also observed that relationships, not careers, are the parts of a person’s life most people remember.

But the “meat” of their discussion turned on matters of economics, family choices – and policy. Policy here means both government policy and employer policy. Does an employer properly support an employee’s family in matters (especially pregnancy) that affect the family as a family? Does the government tax families more? Should government tax families less? Does the workplace “culture” favor singles over married people?

Nor did the panel ignore entertainment choices. They discussed the large body of fiction, drama and poetry that encourages promiscuity and discourages procreation. In the end they seemed to encourage men and women to turn certain channels off. They also emphasized mentorship of older women toward younger women.

The casual remark critics ran with

So what was the problem? The problem came about 47 minutes into the program, when Ms. Galardi asked,

Should we be paying men with families more than women?

True, some members of the studio audience shouted, “Yes!” But the panel did not advocate a detailed policy of pay-scale adjustment for family men v. single men – or women. The discussion turned instead to tax and other public policies. This included the kind of “baby bonuses” that Viktor Orban of Hungary has advocated.

Yet the critics regarded that remark as the entire thrust of the program. Carrie Lukas’ article at RealClearPolitics had the best attempt at a logical “rebuttal.” How, she asked, would that be fair to widows – or divorcees – who must work to fill the pay gap from a deceased, abandoning, or otherwise absent husband? That’s all very well, but that is not what the panel pursued. And when Ms. Lukas said:

The panel recognized that this is inconsistent with current law, yet seemed happy that such conversations were happening and hope that such policies might be possible in the future.

She flat-out lied. The only discussion of employment law had to do with the abandonment of the early feminist notion that HR policy make no allowances for pregnancy. Modern HR policy does make such allowances, if not in pay, then in leave and work-hours policy. Would Carrie Lukas object to that? She said not. But she still created no small amount of confusion.

And what shall we make of this?

Many married couples prefer to share responsibilities of home and income-earning. While the two-income trap can be real, many families aren’t trapped; they embrace a two-breadwinner model for the extra financial security and other benefits. Neither government policy, nor conservative thought leaders, should seek to discourage that.

In fact that always is a trap. Only empty-nesters, or teachers with children enrolled in the school systems that employ them, can do this without side effect. Absent parents still leave a gaping hole in the heart.

The comment space

As logically fallacious as Carrie Lukas’ article is, the comments the livestream received commit worse logical fallacies. One comment mentioned Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. (The book was bad enough, as was the Natasha Richardson movie, but the Hulu show…!) Another commenter saw fit to repeat Iranian war propaganda, attributing the destruction of a girls’ school to American military action, not the Iranian missile misfire where the blame truly lies.

That Handmaid’s Tale comment deserves special mention. That same comment mentioned, again, the remark about differential pay scales. To repeat: the panel did not develop that question into a finished policy recommendation. Had the commenter listened to the full program, or searched the transcript (easy to do), he would have realized that.

Furthermore, no one – not even Torba or Fuentes – takes Atwood’s dystopia as a serious public-policy blueprint. It features compelling a relative handful of still-fertile women to produce children for ranking men and their privileged wives. By contrast, the Heritage Foundation supports programs to address all causes of human infertility, and alleviate them for everyone. But again, that doesn’t suit the policy goals of the Billionaire Struldbrugs’ Club. They want no fertility for anyone – except maybe for a relative handful of organ-donor slaves.

Summary

In sum, the Heritage Foundation hosted the conversation women should be having – and now are. Critics didn’t appreciate that. So they seized on one off-hand sentence, about halfway into the program, containing a never-repeated suggestion. And they ran with that, even to telling outright lies about the program’s total thrust.

That enough women are having this conversation, is itself a result of the generational change that results from the fateful decision of the American political left to avoid fertility. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” Corollary: if you do not sow, then you cannot reap.

This isn’t about forcing anyone to raise children they don’t want to raise. Nor is it about paying any employer any differently, for the same work, depending on marital or family status. But it is about making family building more affordable than it now is, and addressing any elements of tax or other policy that make it less affordable than it could be. It is also about encouraging marriage and discouraging divorce.

No one but a dedicated anti-natalist – or a Billionaire Struldbrug – could reasonably object to that. Nor will logical fallacies change the actual content, or the value, of the Heritage program.