The goal of ending abortion is ultimately a male supremacist political project: the far right believes that women should be afforded fewer rights and opportunities than men, and that their primary roles in society – as dictated through cultural norms as well as laws and policies – should be as mothers and caregivers. This also means that gay, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming and trans people should be, if not somehow eliminated from society, severely restricted in the ways they are able to express their gender identity, express their sexuality and build families. The far right views any deviation from these extremely regressive and repressive gender roles as an existential threat to society.

This is an idea often repeated in spaces like the National Conservatism Conference, where warnings about the left’s supposed desire to destroy the nation itself permeate many of the speeches of those who come from a decidedly authoritarian right-wing tradition. “Since a country is a collection of men and women, united in memory and committed to a common regime,” Yenor, a fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, argued in a speech at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference, the most recently held in the U.S., “if women do not have children, if men do not rise to responsibility, and if they do not marry, the country has no future.”

The Heritage Project’s right-wing coalition Project 2025, which was created to prep for a future conservative presidency, also insists that the government has a strong role to play in ensuring such a family structure. In Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Roger Severino, a former appointee of the Donald Trump administration to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who the Human Rights Campaign has described as a “radical anti-LGBTQ activist,” argues that one of HHS’s five core goals should be promoting “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children,” because they are “the foundation of a well-ordered and healthy society.” The primary way the HHS should promote nuclear families is not through supportive public programs, it seems, but by prohibiting access to reproductive care. Severino devotes most of the chapter on HHS to ways the agency can limit access to abortion – indeed, “protecting life” by denying access to abortion is listed as the agency’s number-one goal. Abortion, which Severino insists “is not health care,” is mentioned over 130 times throughout.

In Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Roger Severino, a former appointee of the Trump administration to the Department of Health and Human Services, argues that a core goal of HHS should be promoting “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children,” because they are “the foundation of a well-ordered and healthy society.” (Alamy)

In the cultural realm, the far right has built up cottage industries aimed at demonizing abortion and elevating motherhood as the sole venture through which women can find happiness. Magazines like Evie, which claims to offer “quality content that affirms your femininity [and] encourages virtue,” discourage abortion and birth control in nearly all forms (even for men), while they advise women to relentlessly pursue marriage (with articles like “How to Get a Man to Marry You”) and not only have children, but to do so as early as possible. Evie is complemented by a network of social media accounts and blogs of antifeminist Christian influencers like Lori Alexander who, as “The Transformed Wife,” tells women they were made to be wives, mothers and homemakers, not members of the workforce.

Alexander can be viewed as part of the broader “tradwife” movement, which proclaims that women should assume a submissive position in their household and find fulfillment through homemaking and child-rearing. On social media, the women of the movement promote highly produced images and videos of their domestic lives – clad in milkmaid dresses, braids and tending to backyard chickens and children – which present the home as a place of solitude and contentment where women are shielded from the stresses of modern, capitalist society. The movement’s influencers are almost exclusively white women, and include many who explicitly argue that women have a duty to reproduce in order to protect the white race.

Many women in right-wing media have criticized the tradwife movement, but their quibbles are generally over the degree to which women should submit to the men in their lives, and not the virtue of traditional gender roles. Even while criticizing the aesthetics of “tradwifery,” women like BlazeTV podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey and Turning Point USA’s Alex Clark continue to embrace anti-feminism and reject abortion rights.

Some far-right organizations and influencers argue that feminism is the primary cause of what they view as widespread societal decay, including the existence of LGBTQ+ people. An article recently published by The Washington Stand, an outlet of the Family Research Council, left no room for interpretation: “Feminism has decimated Western civilization,” it argued. “Its atheistic, Luciferian disregard for the order instituted by God...has led to rampant degeneracy – from the contraceptive Sexual Revolution to the ‘normalization’ of homosexuality – and horrors prior generations could have never imagined – such as abortion and the surgical mutilation of children’s genitals.”

The pseudonymous author Peachy Keenan makes a similar argument in her 2023 book Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, which is blurbed by well-known far-right reactionaries like Tucker Carlson and Christopher Rufo. “America is in free fall, and everyone knows it,” she argues, “What has befallen us? The answer is clear. It’s not mass immigration, unbridled wokeness, or disastrous foreign policy (although all of that sped our descent). The answer is: women have lost their way.” Keenan, who frequently writes for Claremont’s American Mind, presents herself a rebellious counterrevolutionary (“Wake up, CIA reader! You might want to write this one down we even…believe in God,” she writes of her band of extremists), but the book also has a paranoid tone. New World Order globalists, she argues, are destroying the nuclear family, femininity and masculinity through control of “most Western governments, Big Tech, Big Media…Big Pharma, Big Gender (that is, the all-powerful LGBTQ+ lobby), D.C., and the entire American educational system.”

This invisible menace can best be fought by women embracing traditionally feminine gender roles, getting married and having as many children as possible. In a chapter devoted to her opposition to abortion, Keenan argues that the “real goal” of what she calls the “abortion industry” – a term long used by anti-abortion activists – “is to abort the nuclear family.”

Galvanized by the Dobbs decision, the right has recently proposed other ways to limit women’s reproductive choices and autonomy, making it clear that their anti-abortion campaign is part of a broader effort to limit women’s rights and democratic participation. Many organizations have become more comfortable expressing their desire to make birth control illegal, often incorrectly arguing that hormonal birth control and intrauterine devices (IUDs) cause abortions. Others have made the argument that society should return “the danger...the consequentiality to sex” by eliminating hormonal birth control as part of an effort to limit and stigmatize women’s sexuality. At the very least, the right is attempting to make birth control access much more difficult. Many Republican-controlled states are increasing funding for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, which are not only opposed to contraception, but are not medical centers and are therefore not authorized to prescribe it. These fake clinics purposely make themselves appear as if they provide legitimate medical care, deceiving people seeking abortions or other reproductive care into entering their doors and then manipulating them with misinformation.

Some groups have proposed reversing no-fault divorce – laws that, since they first passed beginning in 1969, have led to major decreases in domestic abuse, suicide among women, and spousal homicide of women. Four states already restrict divorce during pregnancy, all of which also have extreme anti-abortion laws in place. That means people who become pregnant might have to remain married to an abusive partner. Pregnancy is an especially dangerous time to be trapped in an abusive relationship: homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women in the United States and, as one study recently found, rates of intimate partner homicide during pregnancy have risen in states with restrictive abortion laws.

Other far-right figures have set their sights on further limiting women’s democratic participation by reversing the 19^th Amendment. “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, said in 2020 remarks that resurfaced after Robinson won his party’s primary in March 2024.

While the right is working to prohibit abortion and restrict women’s rights and autonomy in other ways, certain quarters have also argued that public programs to support mothers and children should be cut in order to force women into familial, dependent positions. Yenor, for instance, has argued that the government should cease funding pre-K programs and other “surrogates for family life.” Project 2025, the blueprint a broad right-wing coalition has created for a potential conservative presidential administration, also argues against public funding for day care and proposes cutting Head Start, a federal program that provides support and educational services to low-income families. Some states have also cut funding that provides resources for mothers and children. Idaho, after adopting one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, for example, disbanded a committee charged with investigating causes of maternal death, turned down $36 million in federal grants for child care, and failed to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage. People who give birth in Idaho only receive Medicaid coverage for 60 days after giving birth. It is one of only three states that have failed to expand, or that are planning to expand, postpartum Medicaid coverage to 12 months. The others are Iowa and Arkansas, the latter of which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the country.

Janae Stracke, vice president of outreach and advocacy for The Heritage Foundation joined a news event to announce the Ending Chemical Abortion Act in Capitol Hill of Washington, D.C., in September 2023. Members of the far right, in addition to seeking laws that ban abortion, also want laws that limit access to gender-affirming care, prohibit transgender people from accessing spaces that conform to their gender identity and forbid discussing LGBTQ+ families in classrooms. (Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)