Conservatives value single women. GOP policy must show it.

Since Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, conservative leaders have been particularly vocal in celebrating the central role of family life. From Elon Musk’s son, X, sitting with the president in the Oval Office to Vice President JD Vance holding his sleeping daughter while boarding Air Force One, the administration has been normalizing the presence of young children as a natural part of life. This welcome trend will likely accelerate as the second family welcomes their fourth child this summer.

For decades, conservatives and some liberals, like those at the Brookings Institution, have worked to build awareness of how getting married before having children, along with graduating high school and getting a job, provides the foundation for avoiding poverty and achieving long-term success. This is important information for the public—particularly young women and men charting their futures—to have.

Given how marriage benefits both men and women (who are healthier, wealthier and report higher levels of happiness than their single counterparts) and society broadly, public policy should consider how to support healthy family formation.

But Republicans risk deepening the gender gap—particularly among unmarried women—by advancing proposals that explicitly privilege marriage through federal tax and benefit structures.

Hitting single women with tax penalties won’t help conservatives

The Heritage Foundation recently published a report, “Reviving the American Family,” that offered a long list of policy proposals meant to encourage marriage and childbearing. The report details how, for decades, the government did the opposite—penalizing married couples with higher taxes and creating welfare programs with benefit cliffs that discouraged couples, particularly those with lower incomes, from marrying.

This disastrous public policy approach contributed to the decades-long breakdown of healthy family formation, contributing to generational poverty and dysfunction.

Policy changes to root out the bias against marriage are common sense. Yet the Heritage report goes further, calling for the use of government policy and federal tax dollars explicitly to encourage people to get married, particularly to marry young.

Heritage proposes “Newlywed Early Starters Trust accounts,” which would be funded with a $2,500 taxpayer deposit at the birth of a child. The NEST accounts would be accessible to that individual when they marry—provided they marry by age 30. Heritage estimates that the young couple’s NEST accounts would provide about $38,000, enough to help the couple with a down payment or start a family.

What about those who don’t marry or marry after age 30? They would be hit with a tax penalty of 20% for any money taken out before they reach age 59.5.

Heritage also wants to expand the current $17,280 adoption tax credit to parents for each of their own babies—but only if those parents are married.

Conservative policies are pro-woman, married or not

Put aside whether it’s really appropriate to use federal power to incentivize marriage. What message does it send to a pregnant 25-year-old woman who would love to be married, but who was left by the father of her baby, that these programs exclude not just her but also her child, from being eligible for this support?

Of course, there are plenty of means-tested programs that could reach the single parent, but that doesn’t blunt the message that this policy framework leaves out—or worse, is meant to punish—the unmarried.

A fixture of election year commentary is the great “gender gap,” the term used for the divergent support between men, who lean toward Republicans, and women who favor Democrats. Yet Republicans’ problem isn’t so much among women but among unmarried women.

CNN’s post-2024 exit polls found that President Trump won married women, 52% to 47%, but lost single women by a jaw-dropping 23 points: 61% of unmarried women’s votes went to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, and just 38% to Trump.

Republicans should consider how proposals to steer federal dollars to support married parents—and the often relentless messaging celebrating married families with children, particularly when women stay at home—might make this gap worse.

Conservatives do not want to be seen as valuing only married mothers or only women as mothers. Ours is a movement that welcomes single women, widows, lesbians, divorcées, working moms, any woman, so long as she shares the core conservative beliefs that personal responsibility, limited government and free markets are the foundation for a flourishing country.

Conservative policies are fundamentally pro-woman: Women thrive in a safe, secure society with a robust economy offering plentiful opportunities for people to pursue their own visions of happiness, whether that is to be a full-time parent, entrepreneur, CEO or any combination thereof. This policy vision needs to be communicated carefully, in a manner that shows that women—all women—can find a home in our movement.