There is a long tradition of the state deciding what motherhood is for, and it is not for the mother, and it is not for the child.
When the international slave trade became illegal in the early nineteenth century, plantation owners in the American South shifted strategy. They began incentivizing enslaved Black women to have more children because more births meant more labor and more labor meant more profit, and the womb had been reclassified as a site of economic production. This is documented history, not a metaphor, and it is a clear illustration of what happens when an institution decides that the act of mothering belongs to it rather than to the person doing it.
That logic did not end with the Confederacy. It evolved into policy, and the policy into language, and the language changed enough that the same structure became harder to identify.
What Project 2025 and its brother blueprints describe, wrapped in words like “family” and “sovereignty” and “restoration,” is forced motherhood administered through bureaucratic architecture. The Heritage Foundation does not write about control. They write about values. But the underlying is the same as it has always been: who decides what a woman’s body is for, and who benefits from that decision.
Earlier this month, Turning Point USA held its annual Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio, and the speakers made their case with weird clarity. Erika Kirk, the organization’s CEO, opened the event by telling 3,000 women that feminism “treats many of the things that make women uniquely women as obstacles to overcome, rather than divine gifts to embrace.” Isabel Brown told the audience that a woman’s greatest legacy is her children, and that bringing new life into the world means “participating in creation right alongside God.” Riley Gaines, the keynote speaker, said that women can have careers but should seek flexible ones to make motherhood manageable. The screen behind the speakers read “faith over feminism” in cursive. And they said all of it with a straight face, in a ballroom, while being paid to be there.
What none of them mentioned, in a conference built on the premise that women’s highest calling is motherhood, is that every woman on that stage built her career first. Kirk now leads an organization that reported $82 million in revenue in 2023. Gaines is a media personality and activist whose income comes from podcasting and speaking engagements. Brown is a Daily Wire commentator with a platform built on her public profile. The advice they were offering, to prioritize motherhood, seek flexible careers, and center your femininity, was being delivered by women whose financial stability and public visibility made that advice available to them in ways it simply is not available to the women sitting in the audience.
This is the oldest move in the patriarchal book. Women with access to institutional power, professional income, and structural support telling women without those things that the real path to fulfillment is to want less, need less, and root their identity in a specifically defined role the state has always been willing to celebrate, because celebrating it costs nothing and controlling it costs everything. It is a con, and it has always been a con, and the only thing that changes is who is selling it.
The distinction I am insisting on is between motherhood and mothering, and it is nuanced. The version of motherhood being sold at that San Antonio ballroom, and the version written into policy by the state, carries a very specific definition; one that only accounts for women who are Christian, heterosexual, partnered, and in alignment with a particular set of values that those institutions have decided should be universal. Everyone outside of that definition does not appear in it. Queer mothers, single mothers, mothers who do not practice Christianity, mothers of color navigating a system that has never treated their children as worth protecting. The motherhood being celebrated in those spaces does not see them, because it was not built for them.
My definition is different, though I don’t believe it’s unusual, and it is the one I am choosing to raise my child inside of. Mothering, as I understand it and practice it, is the responsibility to teach your child what is good and right in the world; not what is good and right for us specifically, not what is good and right according to one religion or one political framework, and not paired with the insistence that anyone who believes differently is wrong. It is the actual labor of keeping a person alive and intact, of passing down values that hold up under pressure, of raising a child who can look at another human being and recognize their humanity regardless of how different that person’s life looks from their own. The institution has always tried to make mothering serve its own reproduction. That is what I am refusing.
If you are reading this and thinking that motherhood is a private matter, a personal choice, something that happens between a parent and a child and belongs there, you are describing what the culture has always needed you to believe, because the moment mothering becomes political it becomes ungovernable.
What is happening right now is that the people driving the national conversation about birth rates and replacement and the moral weight of reproduction are largely people who have never had to mother under the conditions they are busy legislating. They speak often about the importance of children and the sanctity of family and say nothing about childcare infrastructure or wage floors or what it actually costs to keep a child fed and safe. They want the output. They are structurally uninterested in the conditions that make the output survivable, and that gap pulls the covers on their bullshit, because when an institution fetishizes motherhood while actively dismantling what makes it possible, it is telling you clearly that it wants what the body produces but has no real use for the person doing the producing, or the result of that production.
I think about this every time my kid reminds me, in his own words, that he knows he is supposed to fight for what is right and respect other human beings. That is not an accident or a default outcome of childhood. That is a choice I make in how I talk to him, what I model for him, what I refuse to sanitize or explain away when he is old enough to understand it.
My family is mixed race. We pass as white in most rooms, and I am not interested in pretending that doesn’t come with responsibility attached to it. Part of what I am teaching my son is that the privilege he will move through the world with is not a reason to stay quiet, but rather is a reason to be louder, and to use whatever room he happens to be in, to speak up for the people this system was specifically built to silence. That is not a burden I am placing on him. That is a value I am handing to him. I am raising him inside a world I am genuinely angry about, and I am not hiding that from him.
He is also going to grow up to be a man in a world that has very specific ideas about what men are for, and my opposition to those ideas does not exempt him from navigating them. I do not subscribe to the gender roles being sold at that San Antonio ballroom, but I am clear about the fact that the people who do are building the structure he will have to move through. So part of what I am raising is a person who understands what his position in that structure affords him and what it costs others, and who will not use the first to avoid confronting the second. It is my job to teach him how to protect and stand up for those who may need it at any point in his existence, whether that be women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, or anyone else this system has decided does not deserve the same room he will be given. He will know what side he is on. That is the most deliberately political thing I do as a mother, and it has nothing to do with what the state has ever wanted mothering to produce.
Radical mothers have understood this for a very long time. Some of us refuse to ask for the institution’s permission, and that refusal to comply is what they have always been most afraid of.
