These days, successful women choose some variation on one sequence of events: They enter an influential position in the workforce and then use most of their time figuring out how to maximize time with their children. It is all part of the GOP pro-family master plan.
The culmination of this pattern comes as a House resolution for proxy voting inches closer to passage. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) recently led a discharge petition to force a vote on Rep. Brittany Pettersen’s (D-CO) resolution to permit parental voting by proxy, independent of some Republican members’ resistance. Both women have faced in-person voting difficulties after giving birth.
When the administration of President Donald Trump received its mandate, one clear aspect was the culture war. Society was tired of wokeness and showed itself ready for an increasingly pro-family vision. Child care reform, tax credits, housing regulation, and even car seat laws dominated common discourse led by Vice President JD Vance during campaign season. Increasingly, “pro-family” hopefuls like Luna notice the shift and see it as an avenue for women’s opportunities in the workforce. They cannot seem to admit that this is the forced ideal that has caused many of the problems they seek to fix.
Many of these proponents, men and women, are the same ones who equate pro-family policy to IVF access. Neither policy promotes family formation. In fact, both hurt children in the process: proxy voting in the long-term societal norms it inculcates and in vitro fertilization by both short- and long-term effects on life and identity.
Even so, Trump and MAHA adherents argue that there has “never been a more Pro-Mom and Pro-Child administration in history.” Press secretary Karoline Leavitt can bring her baby to meetings, Luna can push a stroller around the Capitol, and Pettersen can vote with her 1-month-old.
This framing paints a new ideal — one that stakes the zenith of motherhood on how seamlessly it fits into the workforce. It is indeed “a real quandary,” as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) described the proxy voting situation. Some women pretty much have to work, as one income often does not suffice, and others recognize their own talent and intelligence and want to use it. The latter is a good, the former not so much. Both situations, however, are worsened by lack of investigation, the policy band-aid favored as an alternative.
LUNA AND JOHNSON SET TO CLASH ON VOTING BY PROXY
Families need support, and in the modern age, support comes once something has proven itself hardworking and valuable. Motherhood, crucial to family operation, needs the chance to prove its equal status with conventional work. Cultural tenderness to the traditional family can flow from that source. The simple fact that we can intuit the union between “pro-mom” and “pro-child” and prop it up as a natural good, from which fathers benefit, sells the point for itself, whether or not one subscribes to the stay-at-home-mom model.
Instead, we are so starved for pro-family content that we confuse the mere sight of a child for proof of actual family-encouraging policies. The connection between “how” something like this is accomplished and “what” is accomplished no longer bears any consideration. It is the original trick of which the Left convinced us, and it is how we arrived at something like parental leave proxy voting in the first place.