The group behind Project 2025 has a chilling new plan for America’s women

This is an adapted excerpt from the March 15 episode of “Velshi.”

If you thought The Heritage Foundation, the group behind the radical governing blueprint known as Project 2025, was finished dismantling American democracy, think again. Now the organization is turning its sights even more keenly on America’s women.

The same movement that drafted a plan to remake and undo much of the federal government has unveiled a chilling new manifesto, one aimed at making it harder for women to work and live independently, and easier to push them back into financial dependence on husbands or fathers.

No, this is not hyperbole, in the same way that Project 2025 wasn’t hyperbole, though plenty of cynics dismissed it as such, especially as President Donald Trump disingenuously disavowed it.

One year into the president’s second term, groups tracking this administration have said roughly half of Project 2025 has already been implemented.

If there’s one lesson to take from Project 2025, it is this: Do not underestimate the determination of this movement, or its hostility toward liberal values and the expansion of democratic rights for groups they see as outsiders, including women.

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.

If Project 2025 laid out how a conservative administration could reshape the machinery of government, this new blueprint lays out the social vision behind it, a plan for what “American family life” should look like. When you strip away the soft language about “family values,” what its proposals would actually accomplish, if carried out, is the rollback of decades of women’s freedom.

According to its authors, the reason women are having fewer children is simple: feminism. The Heritage Foundation blames the feminist movement for encouraging women to rethink “their relationship to men, marriage, children, and family.”

“These two forces — big-government liberalism and second-wave feminism — combined to radically change how men and women thought about their roles in the home,” the document reads.

From the perspective of the new right, the freedoms fought and won by America’s women aren’t progress; they are the problem:

Fertility rates tend to be higher in less-developed countries, but as nations industrialize, several factors conspire to reduce birth rates. These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home, the delayed financial independence of young adults, and the government’s role in old-age Social Security.

But the agenda goes even further. The report calls for reshaping tax policy to reward large married families while cutting support for single mothers, and it proposes eliminating child care incentives that help women work outside the home. It supports legal frameworks that could effectively ban in vitro fertilization by granting embryos legal rights from the moment of fertilization, and it criticizes no-fault divorce, the laws that made it easier for women to leave abusive marriages.

Taken together, the America they envision looks very different from the one we live in today: A society organized around a rigid patriarchal structure, with men as providers, women as dependents and very few ways out.

Consider this line from the report, which attempts to explain the country’s declining birthrate: “Today’s adults may favor autonomy and personal development over raising children more than earlier generations did. Thus, greater opportunity cost rather than greater actual cost may be a better explanation.”

Translation: Women today have opportunities their grandmothers could only dream of. They can pursue education, careers, independence — lives that extend beyond marriage and motherhood.

From the perspective of the new right, that’s a crisis.

As writer Jill Filipovich has warned:

They see women being able to control our own fertility as the root of the problem. And they’re right: Women being able to control our own fertility is one of the most powerful tools women have for independence. Women who cannot control their own fertility are under greater patriarchal control.

Historically speaking, we’ve seen versions of this before. In the 1920s, Benito Mussolini launched a campaign in fascist Italy known as the “Battle for Births.” The goal was to increase the population and strengthen the nation.

Women were pushed out of jobs. Families were rewarded for having more children. Motherhood was glorified, while women’s independence was deliberately restricted.

The new right’s version is wrapped in the language of religious revival and family stability, but the underlying logic is strikingly similar.

If women aren’t producing enough children, the answer is not to make parenthood easier with things like child care, paternal and maternal leave and education subsidies. The answer is to make women’s independence harder. Recommended Latest Freezing federal funds and firing en masse: Trump uses shutdown to enact Project 2025 agenda Ali Velshi, Allison Detzel, Jimson Rodriguez Latest Heritage Foundation board member resigns over video in support of Tucker Carlson Ja’han Jones The people promoting this vision aren’t even hiding their goals. Scott Yenor, a conservative political scientist recently appointed to a senior leadership role at The Heritage Foundation, has described universities as “the citadels of our gynecocracy,” meaning a society run by women and argued that higher education should be de-emphasized to advance what he calls “family matters.” In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he went even further, suggesting that women should be pushed out of large parts of the workforce. “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers,” he said. “Ditto for med school and the law and every trade.” “If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that’s not a failure,” he continued. “It’s kind of a cause for celebration. Why can’t our celebration of male excellence in sports be translated into all facets of life. More successful men will mean more happy citizenry and a stronger nation.” In that same speech, Yenor attacked women who prioritize careers over family and revealed something else about his thinking, something that should frighten everyone: Such medicated, quarrelsome and meddlesome women gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project. They are agents of the new world, but not new life. Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the Western world, from the Greens in Germany to the Democratic Party in America. And if our ideal woman is a childless media scold or a barren bureaucratic apparatchik, there is no question whether we can have a future. We can’t. There is a question of whether we deserve one. Who exactly is the “we” he’s talking about? Certainly not the “meddlesome” women he condemns for finding meaning outside the home. Yenor seems to believe that he — and men like him — are fully entitled to dictate and to hold ownership over women’s futures. This is not some fringe internet rant. This same line of thinking now sits inside the leadership ranks of The Heritage Foundation, the same group helping shape policy for the Trump administration. Yenor’s comments also reveal another political calculation behind this agenda. Educated women and women who make independent decisions about their lives tend to vote Democratic. Yenor seems to think that’s because Democrats throw great parties, but the reality is much simpler. Many Americans, men and women, who don’t believe society should be organized around patriarchy, racial superiority or religious nationalism tend to gravitate toward the party that defends civil rights, pluralism and personal freedom. Play For men of the New Right like Yenor, policies that push women out of universities, out of the workforce and out of public life don’t just force women back into the home — they fundamentally reshape political power. Which is why this agenda is not just about culture. It’s about control over women’s futures. For these right-wing extremists and the movement surrounding Trump, the real problem is women themselves: Women think, women choose, and they may think things and choose things that threaten the power structure of the New Right. So their answer is to put women back in their place, to strip away their autonomy, push them out of public life and narrow the futures available to them. Ultimately, this agenda isn’t really about solving demographic decline. This is about dragging the country back to a time when women had only one choice: to submit to men. Project 2025 has already shown us how quickly the far right can move its ideas into government policy. Right now, the men behind this draconian vision are already in power, which means the stakes for America’s women are very real. Allison Detzel contributed. Ali Velshi Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage. Amel Ahmed Amel Ahmed is a Segment Producer for "Velshi."