Media Matters has obtained a galley copy of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America. The book recently garnered headlines due to Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s foreword, in which he lauds the stature and influence of Heritage and suggests that his agenda can act as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay ahead.”
In the copy reviewed by Media Matters, Roberts, who is the architect of Heritage-led initiative Project 2025, rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, and abortion. He says that having children should not be considered an “optional individual choice” but “a social expectation or a transcendent gift.” He describes “contraceptive technologies” as “revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family.” He labels reproductive choice methods as a “snake strangling the American family.” From page 63:
“If you change a culture on a profound level, you can break the most basic functioning elements of civilization,” Roberts continues. “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction.”
Roberts also attacks in vitro fertilization. From page 64:
Roberts blames contraception for a rise in abortion rates. Also from page 64:
Roberts rails against childlessness as well, which has increasingly become a political problem for Republicans amid outrage over Vance’s history of misogynist comments about “childless cat ladies.” From page 47:
That’s a problem because a childless society becomes decadent and nostalgic. Aging, barren societies literally become consumptive, taking on higher levels of debt and depleting savings as they pay foreign workers to keep things going. They become less and less capable of innovation (a young person’s game) and more and more stuck and decrepit every year. Their traditions, culture, and way of life die out, with nothing to hand on and no one to hand it on to. A culture of childlessness is, in the final analysis, a culture of despair.
Getting married and having kids, on the other hand, gives you skin in the game for the future of your country. It forces you to grow up, give up childish things, and live in the real world. It grounds you, gives you a sense of purpose in life, and helps generate community, gratitude, and joy. A culture of children is a culture of hope.
On page 69, Roberts rails against the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.”
Many of these comments echo anti-choice positions taken by Project 2025 and its partner organizations. The Project 2025 policy book, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, recommends a potential Trump-Vance administration to attack reproductive rights from several angles, including by removing the term “abortion” from all federal laws and regulations, reversing abortion pill approval, punishing providers by withdrawing federal health funding, and restricting clinics that provide contraception and STD testing. Members of the initiative’s advisory board go significantly further, advocating for extreme abortion bans and criticizing IVF.
Trump’s campaign has recently sought to distance itself from Heritage and Project 2025 as the initiative becomes a toxic election issue and polling indicates its extremism is unpopular with voters.
But the former president is closely aligned with Heritage and its initiative: Trump previously gushed over Roberts as “so incredible” during a 2022 speech at The Heritage Foundation, Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, said that Heritage has a “great” relationship with the former president, and he is “very bought in with this,” 31 of the 38 core authors and editors of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership worked in the Trump administration, and Roberts confirmed to The New York Times in April 2023 that “Heritage and its project partners have already briefed Mr. Trump” on Project 2025.
As for Vance, his connections to Roberts, The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, and its partner organizations also run deep — the GOP vice presidential nominee praised Heritage’s president earlier this year as “somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts.” Vance’s foreword to Dawn’s Early Light also celebrates Roberts and calls Heritage “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” and proceeds from the book’s sales will partly benefit the right-wing think tank.
