Let’s get real about the Republican school voucher agenda.

By Carolyn Wonders

The only reason for school vouchers is to indoctrinate young girls into marrying and having babies earlier. Full stop.

This isn’t a conspiracy—it’s public. Anyone can google the Heritage Foundation’s plans for women. It’s all right there, in plain sight.

The goal isn’t to support women’s education or careers. It’s not to invest in quality child care, healthcare, or services. The goal is to control women’s bodies and force births to grow the economy the “old-fashioned” way: through religious indoctrination and oppression.

That plan includes eliminating access to higher education, restricting birth control, gutting female healthcare, arresting women who miscarry (just happened in Georgia), denying medical care until they die (it’s already happening), and lowering the legal age of marriage so girls can be forced into childbirth (legal in multiple states right now).

It also includes creating conditions where women are vulnerable to marital rape, forced unpaid labor, domestic servitude, and violence behind closed doors. While they don’t publicly endorse rape, history shows that sexual violence has long been used to keep women “in their place”—a tool of fear, submission, and control. These systems thrive on silence and shame, and they rely on policies that strip women of autonomy and safety.

Right now, old, white, evangelical Republican men are grasping at straws, doing everything in their power to control women by any means necessary. Why? Because they are weak, fragile men who would rather dominate than grow. Cowards who rely on abuse and control because introspection, care, and respect are beyond them.

But there is another way.

The alternative to controlling women is simple: support us.

Stop being afraid of our massive power and start embracing it. Instead of studying ways to force us into childbirth, ask how you can support the process of birth—how you can make it safer, more humane, and sacred instead of more barbaric.

Instead of punishing us for whatever twisted fantasy you’ve projected onto our bodies and lives, study female spirituality. Study the feminine divine. Learn from it. Respect it.

Because this isn’t about your fear anymore. It’s about our freedom. And we’re not going back.