At the 2026 Turning Point USA (TPUSA) Women’s Leadership Summit, TPUSA President Erika Kirk took the stage to tell the audience to “have more babies than you can afford.” Throughout the Summit, speakers shared similar rhetoric, encouraging the mostly young, white, female audience to embrace submission to their current or future husbands, have more children, and reject modern feminism. Kirk’s words received a soaring applause – and exemplified the rhetoric of pro-natalist and anti-abortion movements integral to TPUSA’s mission.

What Kirk and other speakers failed to mention is the ever-present reality of structural barriers to family planning or welfare services. For those born into poverty, about 5 million children are food insecure and experience higher school dropout rates and higher risk of long-term health problems. Kirk’s statement also comes at a time when public welfare programs for children living in poverty are being slashed. More than 770,000 children are no longer receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, after Trump’s recent “Big, Beautiful Bill.”

Groups like Turning Point USA also want to push women away from careers to prioritize family and homemaking – but at the same time, do no work to advance any semblance of government-mandated parental support like maternal health and parental leave policies. Students for Life of America, an organization spotlighted during the Women’s Summit, largely places the blame of infertility issues on the individual, suggesting that those struggling with infertility have an “underlying condition” that needs to be “treat[ed],” rather than acknowledge the fact that 1 in 6 people globally experience infertility and up to 30% of these cases are due to unexplained factors. These groups, also paradoxically, denounce alternative family planning methods like IVF that families struggling with infertility or queer people rely on to start families.

Even more contradictory is the conflicting messages on the right about child-rearing and financial stability. While extremists like Erika Kirk call on women to have as many babies as they can, despite not being able to afford them and not advancing measures that could help young or low-income parents, other conservatives are lobbying for education around the so-called “success sequence.” Conservative lawmakers want the following formula for success to be taught in schools: 1. Graduate from high school, 2. Get a job, and 3. Get married before 4. Having children. The “success sequence” claims to reverse harmful familial cycles and reduce long-term adverse behavior from a result of poverty – and it’s backed by the Heritage Foundation and numerous conservative House members. In fact, a bill requiring this education in public schools just passed in Ohio.

This “sequence” is a masked attempt to police who has children, how, and when. It’s not a coincidence that the pro-natalist movement centers around the voices of white Christian leaders, while the “success sequence” completely ignores systemic barriers to family planning that largely affect queer people, people of color, and those with lower incomes. Much of the “sequence” argument is based on the core belief that parents who do not marry and do not follow a “traditional” life path will inevitably face poverty and thus raise at-risk youth.

What this education fails to address are large-scale drivers of a person’s path to poverty, such as access to healthcare, housing, or systemic racism/sexism in education and the workplace – essentially blaming people for the systemic and societal challenges that make their lives harder and paths to success less achievable. Angles like Kirk’s similarly ignore any nuance or hurdle to family planning. Audiences like those at Turning Point USA are instead subject to an abundance of pro-natalist calls to action – particularly that of which follows what they claim is “God’s plan.”

The pro-natalist agenda at the center of the white conservative movement revolves around selective procreation and eugenics. The movement has long been tied to rhetoric from white, Christian, heterosexual families – and refutes any type of family planning support for “non-traditional” family models, like building a family through IVF. It has never been about prioritizing the family: it’s a way to seek reproductive control by working in conjunction with anti-abortion, anti-birth control messaging.

Ironically, a bill to require “Success Sequence” education was introduced in Louisiana, titled the “Charlie Kirk Success Sequencing Act.” Erika Kirk, whose late husband Charlie Kirk is named in the bill title, seems to be perpetuating the complete opposite message to her white, Christian audiences. During the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit, Kirk addressed its rather homogeneous crowd with calls to have babies as soon as you can, and as many as you can. This contradiction demonstrates the right’s inherent commitment to eugenicist, white nationalist messaging: tell the white audiences to have more babies while simultaneously uplifting education to deter non-nuclear families, or those affected by structural barriers, from doing so. It’s simple: conservative extremists don’t want more babies – they just want more white, Christian, conservative babies.