The Quiet Revolution in Fertility Policy: How One Conservative Mom Is Reshaping the Baby-Making Industry

The Morning Ritual That Shapes Policy

By 5 am every morning, Emma Waters is on the sofa with a blanket, plotting America's baby-making future. For two hours, she stays off her phone, inspired by Deep Work, the self-help bestseller. At 7:30, she does emails. Waters, 28 years old, is a monk of productivity who makes motherhood look like all-­natural Adderall.

At 8 am, it's time for breakfast and the Bible. Waters tries to live her life according to the mantra 'Love God, get married, have babies.' She asks that I not use the real names of her two daughters for their safety, even though they've been printed elsewhere. I'll call them Gertie and Ophelia, which are close enough.

All morning, they play. Ophelia, the baby, runs around in white tights, shirtless, clutching a pink purse; Gertie's doll won't stop crying. Jack, Waters' husband, flits in and out. There isn't much to say about Jack, other than that he's hot, is studying to be a preacher, and has a big desk at home, much bigger than Waters', featuring a bust of Nietzsche. In the same room, Waters has a pull-out secretary where she takes meetings, not far from a portrait of a glowering President Trump.

The only thing Waters doesn't really do is exercise; she hasn't found the time.

Not many people outside of DC have heard of Waters, who mostly works from home in a dreary Pennsylvania suburb named after a long-offshored manufacturer. Yet Waters is a factory for policy papers and op-eds extolling the harms of unregulated reproductive technology, probing the moral issues that liberals don't want to touch with a 10-foot turkey baster.

From Homeschooling to Political Powerhouse

Waters wasn't always political. She and her three younger siblings were homeschooled by their mother in a poor, rural part of southern Georgia, while their father worked 60-hour weeks as a facilities manager and HVAC repairman. (Waters describes her local high school as the kind of place where one-third of students got chlamydia.) Growing up, Waters never felt aligned with either party: Republicans praised free trade and cheap widgets; Democrats pushed equal pay and shoved kids into day care.

Then, in her junior year at a Christian college in Tennessee, Waters heard a podcast interview with JD Vance. 'Everything he says, I relate to,' she remembers thinking. When she graduated a year later, in 2021—as valedictorian—she applied for an internship at American Moment, a training ground of sorts for rising conservatives. They gave her a full-time job.

Around this time, she met Jackson Waters at a mock-government event. Emma recounts their 'whirlwind romance' in her book, Lead Like Jael. After 'a summer of tense conversations,' she broke up with him 'on a whim.' She wanted a career in politics; the thought of being a wife and mother felt like 'a major letdown.' With the help of a pastor, she realized she only had these notions because of girlboss feminism. She begged Jack to take her back and got married at 24. She was an anomaly even among Republicans. Waters had heard older colleagues refer to women who got married at that age as 'child brides.'

Shaping the Future of Fertility Regulation

Waters loved life in DC: walking 24,000 steps a day, getting coffee with everyone and their mom, hosting dinners in her basement. When she got pregnant with Gertie, she and Jack wanted to prove that life didn't end with a baby. But she needed a job with more flexibility that would eventually allow Jack to attend in-person seminary.

In 2022, Waters approached the Heritage Foundation, the most influential conservative think tank. Heritage had recently shed its intellectual bona fides to become a MAGA mouthpiece; the next year, it would release Project 2025, the playbook for Trump 2.0.

Waters pitched Heritage that she would cover emerging fertility tech as an analyst: crafting policy briefs, penning op-eds, whispering into politicians' ears. Waters found traditional pro-life policy banal—everything was about abortion. Debates around IVF started and ended with 'Are embryos people?' She wanted to apply her dual major in political science and biblical studies to cutting-edge science.

At the time, it seemed like 'the least popular policy issue,' she says, but she promised the bosses it would soon be a big deal. They were sold.

The Moral Case Against Modern Fertility Technology

Waters hates it when people harp on what she's anti. Instead, she wants people to focus on what she's pro: pro-'human flourishing'; pro-'the human person,' including embryos; pro-man-woman marriage; pro-life (duh); pro-Natural Procreative Technology, by which infertile heteros of breeding age clean up their diets, reduce their plastics, and ultimately get knocked up according to God's will. Pronatalist? She prefers 'pro-family,' which implies more straight marriages where straight penises and vaginas produce tons of babies. (Critics would add that the goal is really white Christian babies.)

Waters never says she's against IVF per se. She doesn't talk about 'murdering' embryos; she makes it sound more like negligent manslaughter. She mostly argues that IVF doesn't work. It encourages young women to postpone their true calling by falsely reassuring them that there's still time.

To Waters, IVF is the conduit for many horrors. Ranking and selecting embryos tricks parents into thinking they can choose and control what kind of children they have, cheapening God's handmade gift into an off-brand dustmop plucked off an Amazon wish list. It allows you to outsource reproduction to surrogates, objectifying women and commoditizing babies. Decoupling sex, marriage, and procreation distorts the natural order. Infertility explodes. Civilizations collapse.

Challenging the Status Quo on Genetic Selection

Like many at Heritage, Waters was disappointed when Trump included free IVF in his 2024 platform, later declaring himself the 'father of IVF' and 'the fertilization president.' But Waters still found fertile ground (sorry) filled with low-hanging fruit. There were zero federal regulations governing surrogacy—she would shepherd the first one.

'We have model legislation to SHUT DOWN foreign nations who rent the wombs of American women,' she wrote on X. She would rail against the creepy, unpopular polygenic tests that are opposed by every professional society. With the nation's most influential conservative organization backing her, she'd push to mainstream so-called restorative reproductive medicine that co-opted the language of social justice while addressing the root causes of women's broken, barren bodies.

Waters is a Republican, but that doesn't mean all Republicans agree with her. The vast majority of Republicans support IVF as is. The pronatalist movement has two factions, the tech right and the trads. The tech right sees artificial wombs, surrogacy, and genetic optimization as tools to boost birth rates. Trads, like Waters, think these things will make the problem worse.

Building a Movement from the Ground Up

Waters gets things done by being very, very nice. Simone Collins tells me, 'I don't know a single person in the pronatalist movement who doesn't like Emma. She's golden.' Even though the Collinses promote polygenic testing, IVF, and surrogacy, Waters considers them friends and makes a point not to publicly criticize them.

In any given hour, Waters laser-focuses on a single issue. Another conservative tells me, 'She could do an event with someone on Tuesday and be on the opposite side of a protest on Friday.' When she gets into a flame war with someone on X, she invites them to collaborate.

That's how she secured the special guest for today's Zoom working group: the founder of a polygenic testing company. One Tuesday a month, during nap time, Waters hosts private discussions with a group of bioethicists, activists, and policy wonks. Many potential collaborators do not want to be associated with Heritage, so Waters does much of her work in secret.

Global Perspectives on Fertility Regulation

If Waters had her way, there might be some IVF, but it wouldn't involve ranking, destroying, or indefinitely freezing embryos. The only lawful surrogacy would be altruistic for heterosexual married couples with a documented history of infertility.

In an international context, some of Waters' views are perfectly normal. Almost every wealthy country besides the US bans elective sex selection. Every other wealthy country bans commercial surrogacy, which the UN called a form of violence against women and 'the sale of children.' UN committees see anonymous gamete donation as incompatible with children's rights.

Most Western countries require tests to undergo some kind of approval process before going to market, so polygenic tests are out. In Germany, parents need government approval to genetically test embryos. Through a global lens, American Big Fertility is bizarro.

The Growing Influence of Waters' Vision

Waters' star continues to rise. She got a second book deal earlier this year (working title: Rethinking Fertility) and is contributing to a documentary about cryopreservation called Frozen Orphans. She recently presented at a Harvard summit on embryo law and ethics; four of the 20 other speakers have referenced Waters in their work.

Her master plan to undermine the fertility industry seems to be working. In November 2025, Senator Rick Scott proposed the SAFE KIDS Act, banning citizens of 'hostile foreign regimes' from participating in surrogacy. In Florida, a similar law passed at the state level in May. At the start of 2026, Florida attorney general James Uthmeier stepped in to try to get two French dads un-recognized as their son's legal parents, calling surrogacy 'unconstitutional' and 'modern-day slavery.'

Many observers tell me they think Waters' work is 'the driving force' in pushing fertility regulation out of the fringes and into the mainstream. They also tell me the new laws are insincere and bad, fraught with unintended consequences.

The biggest criticism lobbed at Waters is, obviously, that she wants to turn America into The Handmaid's Tale. The second biggest criticism is that she's a hypocrite. Waters' kids aren't in day care, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have help. At Waters' house, I was surprised to meet a relative who consoled sobbing dolls and occupied the children while Waters entertained me and Jack studied the Bible or whatever.

Waters disagrees, of course—she's a fierce defender of Heritage. 'America first,' she tells me. 'MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW!' she tweets. She admits that Nick Fuentes says some 'disgusting' things and describes him as 'a young white man' who was 'disenfranchised by the Republican Party because he dared to question our relationship with Israel.' When I ask her about the GOP's unofficial strategy of 'no enemies to the right,' a big-tent welcome for neo-Nazis and white nationalists, she snaps back, 'Don't you think the left is the same? Normalizing pedophilia. Abortion until birth. Rampant antisemitism ... Why do you think Josh Shapiro wasn't the vice presidential nominee?'

The Bigger Picture: Fertility, Politics, and Social Change

What's fascinating about Waters' approach isn't just her ideological clarity—it's how she's managed to position herself at the intersection of policy, politics, and public opinion. She's not just another voice in a conservative echo chamber; she's a strategic player who understands that the future of fertility regulation is about more than just embryos or IVF protocols. It's about values, identity, and the kind of society we want to build.

Her influence has grown rapidly because she speaks to both sides of the aisle—Republicans who want to preserve family values and Democrats who are increasingly uncomfortable with the direction reproductive technology is heading. She's essentially taken the moral high ground on an issue that's otherwise dominated by technical considerations, economic incentives, and legal loopholes.

The question isn't whether Waters will continue to influence policy; it's how far she'll go and what kind of society she'll help create in the process. With her third child born earlier this year and her book deal secured, Waters is clearly not just a momentary political flashpoint but a permanent fixture in the fertility debate.