She’s 28, Loves God and Her Family, and Might Be the Reason You Can’t Have Kids

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. At least once a month, reporting on fertility, I ask for an academic source and am instead directed to Waters, author of a biblical women’s leadership book that basically says the best thing about the Barbie movie was the patriarchy. The craziest thing is that, in certain ways, she’s a voice of reason. America’s $10 billion fertility industry is suffering a massive PR crisis that makes the embryo mix-ups and baby-selling schemes of yore seem quaint. A few recent headlines: “The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of US-Born Babies Via Surrogate,” “The Family Law Loophole That Lets Sex Offenders Parent Kids,” “California Couple Busted for Running Suspected Baby Mill,” “Surrogate Mother Who Refused to Abort Baby Gives Birth Amid Ongoing Legal Dispute.” Polygenic testing companies promise today’s parents that they can pick the tallest, smartest, least-bald offspring, mainstreaming debates about the “Black-white IQ gap.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—a father via surrogacy—and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong are invested in an embryo-editing startup. If you believe what they told The Wall Street Journal, their first gene-hacked baby has probably already been born. Many right-wing techies are jazzed about these developments, which might bump up birth rates or create “better” spawn. Many liberals don’t know how to talk about the ethical pitfalls. Emma Waters fills in the gaps. As a kind of backroom wheeler-dealer and political strategist, she is the mastermind behind Florida’s recent ban on international surrogacy, the Texas GOP’s souring on IVF, and the squashing of Trump’s “fertilization president” initiatives. This God-loving, JD Vance–stanning Gen Z-er might be standing between you and your ability to have a family, or she might be, somehow, the force that makes it possible. Waters has so much to teach us about optics and politics and why, in so many arenas, Democrats are losing so dramatically. Waters wants to dismantle fertility as we know it. And she wants to do it politely, during nap time, with her husband’s permission. 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.” 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. Waters found her conservative colleagues ignorant about the state of assisted baby-making. One Hill staffer emailed Waters about a test that counts embryos’ chromosomes, asking, “Will this be around in 10 years?” It had been around for decades. At that point, a Chinese scientist had already embryo-­Crispr’d babies, gone to jail for it, and gotten out. Sex selection had become a standard part of American IVF; the first sex-selected people were in their thirties. It was easier to open a surrogacy agency than an ice cream cart or a tanning salon. Then there was China. In 2023, more than two years before mainstream media outlets reported on Sino-US infant import-exports, Waters was on Fox News, accompanied by an article headlined “Chinese ‘Rent-a-Womb’ Industry Using American Surrogates Is a National Security Threat.” She called it “the new face of birth tourism.” Intended parents didn’t even have to leave the country. Our nation’s lax laws meant that you could ship sperm over and get an American citizen shipped back. 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. In her work, Waters fastidiously avoids mentioning gays, singles, or women over 40. When I ask her about this omission, she gets defensive: “It’s not about the desires of adults. It’s about the rights and well-being of children.” 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. Besides China, nothing rankles Waters like embryo screening tools that promise to let parents “have your best baby.” Nobody really expects these so-called polygenic tests to move into the mainstream or ever become very accurate, but they set the tone for a future where parents can edit their children’s genes. On X, Noor Siddiqui, CEO of the startup Orchid and one of Waters’ least favorite founders, wastes no time in shaming breeders who fail to optimize. Getting knocked up the old-­fashioned way is irresponsible: “What if your baby never walks?” Siddiqui has posted. “What if they’re never able to live independently? What if you could have stopped it … but chose not to?” (Stopping it, in this case, means making sure your disabled child isn’t born.) “Just be honest: You’re OK with your kid potentially suffering for life so you can feel morally superior, or because you can’t be inconvenienced.” In a decade, Siddiqui warns, all babies will be born using IVF and her test—Waters’ definition of dystopia. 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. I’d come to DC to meet Waters in person. It was a tough week for the organization. Its president had taken heat, and nearly had to resign, for defending Tucker Carlson’s choice to platform Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist. (Fuentes: “Hitler was awesome. Hitler was right. And the Holocaust didn’t happen.”) I wondered if there were always a dozen cops outside of the building. Sometimes the roar and the sirens were so deafening it was hard to hear Waters, but the disturbance seemed to make her smile. First, Waters warmed up the room by having a “chat” with a mom who gets told by libs that she should’ve aborted her disabled son. Then Waters turned to the main event. “Welcome, gentlemen,” she said. She had assembled four white experts for “Editing Destiny,” a panel on the subject of polygenic tests and gene editing. Two seemed like MAGA partisans. Two were legitimate academics. Waters had the energy of a high school newspaper reporter with a blowout and makeup that perfectly concealed her prominent chin. Everyone agreed that somatic gene editing on “born people” was good. Waters pointed out how it served the MAHA goal to eliminate disease at the source. But germline gene editing, the panel also agreed, was risky and unnecessary. No one said “fetus” or “God”; instead they evoked “the human person” and “flourishing.” Ben Hurlbut, one of the academics, made a moving, secular argument against polygenic selection. This was the “first relational act” you make with your future children, he told me, and it invites a serious rift. Around the room, young female staffers in tight dresses held microphones for Q&A. The panel took a few questions. One attendee noted the harms of Tylenol. After the event, Waters introduced me to Austin Rogers, then general c