By Elyse Shaw and Lorena Roque

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, we should reflect on how far women’s rights have come over the years. However, that’s difficult to do when the Trump Administration has spent the past year engineering a wholesale attack on women’s rights. This onslaught has included attacks on the federal workforce, gutting the Department of Education and the proposed loan caps and loan forgiveness changes, clawing back EEOC guidance on harassment and discrimination at work, canceling grants that support women and LGBTQ+ individuals, and attacks on DEIA and trans people. Taken together, this has allowed the conservative movement to use its authoritarian playbook to strip women of their rights, economic security, and health and well-being. These are not one-off issue areas or separate attacks: this is a coordinated campaign to exert power and control over every aspect of women’s lives. 

Instead of promoting policies that support all working women, such as paid family and medical leave, affordable child care, and equal pay, a new report from the Heritage Foundation outlines what type of women they actually want to support: cisgender straight white women who stay home to raise kids while their husbands work. Writers of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation have gone into detail about their pronatalist policy agenda for women in their latest report, Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years. The Trump Administration has taken this playbook as its own and already begun to dismantle policies, setting women back half a century. All of these policy decisions are intentional and lead to the Trump Administration’s goal: restricting women’s autonomy and freedom in the United States. 

Controlling Women’s Lives: The Pronatalist Movement

Since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the conservative movement has been working to strip reproductive rights from women across the U.S. The fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022 through the Dobbs decision signified an opportunity for the conservative movement to further erode access to basic reproductive health care and control women’s lives. Since Dobbs, women have been denied basic reproductive health care, with the delay or denial of care even leading to death. Some Southern states have sought to criminalize and violate women in regards to their reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. For example, a brain-dead woman in Georgia was forced to stay on life support against her family’s wishes, in an attempt to maintain her nine week pregnancy to viability and was forced to give “birth” while coma-induced. In another case, a Texas woman who suffered a miscarriage was charged with “abuse of a corpse” and jailed for five months. Just weeks ago, a sexual assault survivor in Tennessee, who was hours into pre-surgery preparation for sterilization, was denied that procedure at the last minute when hospital staff decided they had a “duty to protect her sacred fertility.” 

These types of cases are part of a larger playbook for the right-wing movement on who should be given government support. In the new playbook, “Saving American Families,” the Heritage Foundation authors acknowledge the high cost of child care, but instead of investing in universal child care or funding Head Start, they instead focus on incentivizing women to leave the workforce and stay home to raise children. They recommend limiting child care credits, programs, and tax benefits to families with one working parent and one stay-at-home parent. The paper details many other policies aimed at increasing the U.S. birthrate by restricting women’s autonomy – such as limiting public benefits to heterosexual married couples and banning no-fault divorce – while punishing single women and mothers. The report recommends creating stricter work reporting requirements for single mothers who access basic needs programs, rolling back access to higher education, eliminating all government-run registered apprenticeship programs, and eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit. All of this would disproportionately impact single mothers, who are more likely to be women of color and paid low wages, further marginalizing them. 

Limiting Access to Higher Education 

Postsecondary education is a key pathway to economic security for women, given that women with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, only slightly more than men with a high school diploma. At the same time, women rely on professional and post-baccalaureate programs for career advancement and economic mobility. In 2024, the Heritage Foundation made it clear that they believe education, especially higher education, is to blame for the nation’s declining birth rates. Their solution: restrict access to education for women. As a result, the Trump Administration is attempting to dismantle the Department of Education by restructuring departments and reassigning higher education grant programs to other federal agencies. In addition, the administration is threatening funding for colleges that maintain their commitment to DEI and proposing to overhaul student loans and loan forgiveness programs. These combined actions will make it much more difficult, if not impossible, for women to attend undergraduate or graduate degree programs. 

Federal Attacks on DEI/Gender Ideology 

On the first day of his second term, Trump launched an attack on DEIA and transgender and gender-nonbinary people, leading to the shuttering of federal offices and agencies, ending of programs and initiatives, and discontinuing of grant activities or entire grant programs that supported women. Across the federal government, even mentioning the term “women” was enough to get a project, program, or grant cancelled – from workforce development grants to grants for research into women’s health. And critical initiatives to advance women continue to feel these impacts. According to recent research, women scientists were disproportionately impacted by the NIH grant cancellations, as they were leading almost 60 percent of de-funded projects. These attacks will have long-lasting impacts on women’s health, well-being, and economic security. 

Economic Impacts

These policy decisions by the Trump Administration are driving women out of the workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 455,000 women left the labor market from January to August 2025. For the rest of 2025, only 184,000 women re-entered the workforce compared to 572,000 men during the same time period. A national survey revealed that 42 percent of women who left the workforce last year did so due to caregiving responsibilities, 37 percent left due to inadequate workplace flexibility, and 18 percent left because of insufficient wages to meet the high cost of child care. Strikingly, Black women have been the hardest hit by the labor market in the past year. By December 2025, Black women’s unemployment rate hit 7.3 percent, double that of white women and the highest it has been since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Trump Administration’s shrinking of the federal government has had the biggest impact on Black women’s unemployment rate. That’s because Black women represent 6 percent of the labor force and 12 percent of the federal labor force. With almost 330,000 federal jobs cut in 2025, Black women represent 33 percent of those job cuts. The Trump Administration will only amplify these numbers by eliminating minimum wage and overtime protections for millions of home health care and domestic workers. 

At the same time, women can’t achieve economic security without access to comprehensive health care. Abortion bans reduce women’s earnings and labor force participation, especially among Black and Latina women. In fact, when including in-state restrictive abortion policies, such as mandatory waiting times and unnecessary restrictions for providers, the U.S. economy has lost over $133 billion annually since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The economic cost of restrictive reproductive health care transcends abortion access because it also includes maternal mortality, the absence of cancer screenings and treatment, and the lack of access to pre/post-natal and doula care. Just to offer two examples: 81 percent of Black maternal deaths in Michigan are preventable and 40 percent of counties in Colorado are considered maternal health care deserts, meaning they lack a hospital, birth center, or obstetric care providers.

With Project 2025 as the playbook of the current Trump Administration, the newest Heritage Foundation’s report is alarming and should not be taken lightly. Additionally, with the rise of ‘tradwives’ and ‘princess treatment’ getting more traction on popular media platforms, the normalization of women’s subjugation hides what these conservative policies actually promote: the dangerous and violent reality of the government controlling women’s lives and bodies.