Vance Championed 2017 Report on Families From Architects of Project 2025

Years before he became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance endorsed a little-noticed 2017 report by the Heritage Foundation that proposed a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families.

In a series of 29 separate essays, conservative commentators, policy experts, community leaders and Christian clergy members opposed the spread of in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments, describing those treatments as harmful to women. They praised the rapidly expanding number of state laws restricting abortion rights and access, saying that the procedure should become “unthinkable” in America. And they cited hunger as a “great motivation” for Americans to find work.

Mr. Vance, then known as the author of a best-selling memoir, became a champion of the project. He wrote the introduction and praised the volume as “admirable,” and was the keynote speaker at the public release of the report at Heritage’s offices in Washington.

The report was released just months after Donald J. Trump became president, as social conservatives were laying the foundation for an aggressive agenda restricting sexual freedom and reproductive rights. Those policies became a hallmark of the Trump administration and Mr. Vance’s political career.

Taken together, the pieces in the report amount to an effort to instruct Americans on what their families should be, when to grow them and the best way to raise their children. Authors argued in the 2017 report that women should become pregnant at younger ages and that a two-parent, heterosexual household was the “ideal” environment for children.

Although Mr. Vance did not address in detail the specific issues of fertility treatments, abortion rights or marriage, the broad vision expressed in the report comports with some of the views he has expressed about American families.