This month, the Heritage Foundation rolled out a “save the family” plan built on a Founders-as-fathers storyline—starting with a tidy headcount of 337 children—before describing a policy agenda that defines which families count. The report says “all children have a right” to the affection and protection of “the man and woman who created them,” and that the “ideal environment” is a home with their “married biological parents.” That’s a definition with exclusionary consequences—especially for same-sex marriages rearing kids, adoptive-only families, and families formed through donor conception and IVF.
But the bigger question is: Should the government use tax dollars to steer intimate family decisions—rewarding “approved” families on the front end and punishing everyone else on the back end, usually with consequences that land on children?
History Repeating
We’ve tried this before. In July 1960, Louisiana terminated welfare benefits for 22,501 children—28% of the state’s entire caseload—because their mothers had sexual relationships outside marriage. Caseworkers conducted midnight raids searching for men’s razors, clothing, or any evidence of male presence. The 1974 film Claudine dramatized this reality: a mother hiding her relationship to keep her family’s benefits. The man didn’t need to be the father, have a legal obligation to support the children, or provide financial support. Evidence of a relationship with a man was enough to disqualify a mother and her children.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down these “man-in-the-house” rules in King v. Smith (1968), citing that they denied aid to eligible children based on moral judgments about their mothers’ behavior. At least 20 states—primarily in the South—had used these policies to systematically exclude families, with Black women bearing the brunt of the policy.
States once denied benefits when a man was in the house. Now, Heritage proposes $38,000 for couples who marry by age 30, a $17,670 tax credit for married parents of biological newborns, and $2,000 in childcare credits exclusively for married households—benefits that are available only when marriage certificates and biological parentage are present. Both systems use economic policy to engineer which family structures deserve support—turning what the Founders called an unalienable right to pursue happiness into a government-approved checklist.
Louisiana’s 1960 suitable home law was justified as promoting family responsibility and protecting taxpayers. It was defended as discouraging immoral behavior. But it was women’s homes that were raided at midnight, women’s benefits that were terminated, women who were punished for men’s presence—while the men themselves faced no consequences, no monitoring, no penalties. Heritage’s 2026 proposal doesn’t explicitly target women, but the effect is the same: when families don’t fit the “married biological parents” model, it’s overwhelmingly women—80% of custodial parents—who are left raising children without the proposed benefits. This violates the core principle of reproductive justice: that women have the right not only to have or not have children, but to parent them in the family structure they choose—whether single, married, blended, adoptive, or with a same-sex partner. Both the 1960 rules and Heritage’s 2026 proposal treat women’s family-formation decisions as government policy levers rather than as fundamental freedoms.
The states that once used welfare policy to exclude families—Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—now nearly all have abortion bans. The through-line is state control over women’s reproduction and family formation, sometimes through denial, sometimes through incentive, always through coercion.
Better Solutions
Obergefell established marriage equality. Loving v. Virginia struck down restrictions on interracial marriage. The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection. Yet Heritage’s federal tax policy creates explicit tiers: marriages producing biological children receive maximum benefits; other families get less or nothing. For ALL Americans navigating second marriages, adopted children, fertility challenges, or same-sex partnerships, this framework codifies which families deserve “saving.”
Heritage is right about one thing: existing marriage penalties in SNAP, EITC, and Medicaid hurt families. But the solution isn’t layering new marriage-only benefits on top of a broken system while excluding the families already doing the work of raising children. Congress could eliminate marriage penalties by raising income thresholds for married couples with young children, extending childcare credits to all stable two-parent households raising children—biological, adopted, step, or donor-conceived—and expanding support for co-parenting arrangements that don’t fit a “traditional family” template. Doing so would help more children, avoid constitutional challenges under Obergefell and the 14th Amendment, and honor reproductive justice principles—without deciding which families deserve government approval and which children get left behind.
Rhonda V. Sharpe is the president and founder of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race. Her research focuses on gender and racial inequality, the diversity of STEM, and the demography of higher education.
