Pro-Family

What’s “Pro-Family” Policy? The DNC and RNC Offered Radically Different Answers.

One political party wants women to have babies. The other wants to help families raise them.

Abby Vesoulis

There’s currently a bill sitting in the US Senate’s hopper that—if enacted—would expand eligibility for a child tax credit to include low-income and working-class families and provide a bit extra to parents with children under the age of 6.

More than 40 US senators have signed onto the legislation, which was introduced by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and is intended to help offset the skyrocketing costs of raising a child in a middle-class family: which, according to inflation-adjusted estimates from the US Department of Agriculture, average to more than $300,000 per kid over the course of their first 18 years.

But Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s presidential running mate, is not among the long list of co-sponsors. No Republican senators are—despite a temporary version of the tax credit reducing child poverty by nearly half during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and 75 percent of the public supporting the benefit.

Top Republicans claim to be the standard-bearers of family values; Trump brags about appointing the Supreme Court justices who gleefully overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and Vance seems to have an unrelenting obsession with a potential increase in babies that would logically follow the Dobbs decision. Particularly, he is infatuated with the role of parents mothers to raise those children.

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs,” Vance tweeted in 2022, “you’ve been had.” Vance has also repeatedly said that women like vice president Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are “childless cat ladies” and “sociopaths” for not having biological kids.

As such, the fact that the junior Ohio senator doesn’t back a wildly popular program that provides parents some spare change to cover essentials like baby formula and burp cloths or braces and back-to-school supplies is, perhaps, perplexing.

“If pro-family only means that you oppose abortion, then that’s a single issue. We vote on so many pro-family issues.”

Or is it? At the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago this week, lawmakers, delegates, and other attendees differentiated between the allegedly “pro-family” stances Vance and fellow Republicans support, versus the plans that the Democratic ticket endorses.

“So many health issues are pro-family. Education issues are pro-family. Job-training is pro-family. And I suggest somebody take a look at [Republicans’] voting record on these programs,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who sponsored the House version of the tax credit bill, tells Mother Jones. “If pro-family only means that you oppose abortion, then that’s a single issue. We vote on so many pro-family issues. It’s not just one issue.”

Nicole Wells Stallworth, an advocate for reproductive health and gender equity from Michigan, is deeply familiar with the concept of what it takes to raise a child. She became a mother at the age of 18.

As she was putting herself through college and graduate school, Wells Stallworth struggled to afford childcare. While working odd jobs to put food on the table, the single mom would normally have family members watch her daughter—unless her child was ill, in which case Wells Stallworth would bring her daughter to work and park her under a desk.

“I had to either bring her to work,” she tells me at a breakfast reception for Michigan Democrats on Wednesday, “or I would have to take time off and not be paid.”

“There’s a correlation between happy moms and successful children,” adds Wells Stallworth. “The Harris and the Biden administration’s family policies are policies that are truly supportive of the entire family, whereas the Trump-Vance policies—I’m just not sure how they benefit anyone. Other than [being] an ideological belief that is not shared by everyone.”

Monica Curls doesn’t have children of her own. But as an elected member of a school board in Kansas City, Missouri, she’s dedicated her professional life to kids’ educational journeys. “I get to advocate on behalf of thousands of children every day,” she says to me at the convention Tuesday night.

Curls mentions Republican opposition to legislation making childcare more affordable, the party’s desire to reduce expenditures on programs supplying nutritious food benefits to low-income families, and Trump’s desire to eliminate the US Department of Education. “How does that support the betterment of a child?” she asks, rhetorically. “They claim to be pro-family. No, they’re just pro-fetus and anti-woman.”

“It’s putting women in their place, and not giving them any other opportunities beyond that, because they don’t see us as valuable beyond that,” Curls says. “Our uterus is all we have to offer, according to them.”

Even then, factions of the party seem to have conditions around how those uteruses can be used to carry babies. For as much as Vance talks about his appreciation of motherhood and babies, he opposed a 2024 bill to enact protections of the fertility treatment IVF. (Some GOP state parties have also passed platforms stating they oppose the destruction of extra or abnormal embryos, which commonly result from IVF.)

During a brief prime-time DNC speech on Tuesday, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq-war veteran who lost both legs when her helicopter was struck by a rocket, explained her previous battle with infertility. The Illinois Democrat called the 10-year ordeal “more painful than any wound I earned on the battlefield.”

Duckworth has since had two children, but warned that a second Trump administration could risk other families’ access to reproductive technology. “If they win, Republicans will not stop at banning abortion. They will come for IVF next,” she said.

To DeLauro, IVF access is one important component of pro-family policy. She defines the term as anything that makes families “not only succeed, but thrive. Our job is to use the power of the federal government to provide opportunity and make help to transform people’s lives. That’s what we are about.”

On the Trump-Vance version of the term, DeLauro doesn’t mince words. “You want to cut a fruit and vegetable program, you don’t want to deal with a WIC shortfall, and you don’t want to increase the funding for childcare?” she says, concluding: “Hell, you’re not pro-family.”