MAHA Brings Social Conservatives Back to the Future
Breakthrough technology holds the best path forward for maternal and natal health.
By Emma Waters, a Policy Analyst in the Tech Policy Center at The Heritage Foundation.
Sometimes, the only way forward is back. That’s the advice a wise old man gives Sarah, the young protagonist in the 1986 movie Labyrinth, as she struggles to rescue her brother from the Goblin King. It’s also the wisdom America needs today.
From AI and biotechnology to reproductive medicine and family formation, technology increasingly shapes human life. Amid such circumstances, the MAHA movement pushes back against the false dichotomy that forces people to choose between the status quo and untethered technological acceleration. Now, social conservatives have a unique opportunity to show how their ideas align with the most innovative technology.
This isn’t about going backwards—it’s about going back to what works. Back to real food, real healing, and real respect for life. Back to a future, if you will, where human flourishing comes first.
For many years, social conservatives have been fighting for the best ideas to prevail. The embryonic stem cell debates during the Bush administration provide an example of this. Then, the President’s Council on Bioethics—filled with many giants of the bioethics movement in America—worked tirelessly to educate and engage the American public in a serious conversation about the ethics of embryo destructive research.
While their work stands as a seminal development in bioethics, the best ideas alone (i.e., protecting embryonic life) did not sway public opinion. Social conservatives were losing that fight.
At the end of the day, the best technology won the embryonic stem cell debate. In this case, adult stem cell research (non-destructive by nature) provided a better, more reliable solution to treat severe conditions than did embryo research—so the scientific community chose to prioritize adult stem cell research.
The best ideas—those that affirm and protect the inherent dignity of human life, regardless of their stage of development or when “ensoulment” occurs—are necessary but insufficient.
Conservatives will only win if we commit not just to preserving good ideas, but also to developing the best technologies.
Today, the cultural and scientific battleground centers on embryonic optimization research. Researchers have developed advanced genetic screening that allows parents to select embryos based on their sex, potential health outcomes, IQ, and, in some cases, personality. Using these technologies, well-funded companies like Orchid offer what every parent naturally wants: the chance to have healthy babies.
But their approach presents parents with a false dichotomy and, ultimately, a regressive form of medical technology. As Noor Siddiqui, the founder of Orchid, shared in a recent post on X:
Sperm quality declines with age. Older fathers contribute more harmful mutations than younger fathers. The mutations can lead to neuropsychiatric conditions in children or adulthood. Freeze your sperm or screen your embryos!
Noor has pinpointed a very real problem, but her solution is odd. For all the advancements in gene therapy and restorative medicine, Orchid relies on an outdated model that encourages parents to either freeze their genetic material (an option that has unreliable success rates, especially for women) or screen their embryos.
Of course, parents want the best for their children, but embryo screening doesn’t heal their embryo(s) or treat disease—it encourages parents to destroy “unfit” human embryos outright.
Technologies like those used by Orchid are advanced, but they don’t move society forward. As conservatives, it’s time to recover a techno-positive vision that restores and supplements human health.
Rather than relying on a false choice between gamete freezing or genetic screening, we should accelerate proactive treatments that either optimize a person’s health prior to conception or enable us to better treat conditions, such as deafness, after birth.
For decades, social conservatives have diligently articulated the errors of genetic selection and embryo-destructive research—but we’ve failed to develop innovative alternatives. This is where the MAHA movement lends itself to social conservatism: it invests in personalized precision medicine that aims to identify, diagnose, and treat the root causes of disease and infertility.
It’s no coincidence that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan pledged to give $100 million for reproductive health research. Nor should we be surprised by the involvement of people like Dr. Casey Means, whose research and clinical practice exploring metabolic health promote a holistic view of life-affirming treatments.
President Trump’s executive order “Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission” provides funding and research priorities to recover true human health and flourishing—an effort that begins with a proper understanding of chronic disease and bodily health. Far from circumventing the human body, such investments in life-affirming treatments prioritize cutting-edge developments in reproductive and metabolic health.
Social conservatives have long fought for the integrity of the human person from conception to death—MAHA offers us the chance to marry our orthodoxy with orthopraxy. It’s time to move beyond traditional pro-life bioethics and digital technology protections and promote innovative products that combine AI, biotechnology, and restorative medicine for the purpose of human flourishing.
Social conservatives must start thinking deeply about leveraging AI and advanced restorative medicine to treat conditions that, before the 21st century, many believed they or their children had to either endure or destroy their unborn child to avoid. And we, at the Tech Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation, have begun charting this new approach for the movement
This new approach uses AI-powered diagnostic tools, machine learning, and advanced imaging to identify and diagnose chronic disease and reproductive health conditions with greater accuracy than ever before.
It develops personalized treatment plans that restore natural fertility rather than automatically using methods that suppress, circumvent, or damage the man and woman’s bodies.
And it encourages non-destructive research and ethical debates about futuristic technologies that could provide life-affirming solutions to issues such as premature births, paralysis, loss of eyesight, and genetic disease.
It may be tempting to reduce MAHA to a bunch of “fru-fru” people who think that sunshine, good food, and love can heal cancer or treat all chronic diseases. But the reality is far different: the MAHA movement reflects a return to holistic health practices.
In reality, MAHA’s singular focus on the root causes of chronic disease is more genuine than much of the medical establishment, which is often incentivized to treat symptoms—leaving many potentially transformative health practices and technologies unexplored.
In doing this, the hope is to ensure we have the best knowledge and treatment options available to make informed decisions about our health—and that we’ll have the humility to admit when we’re lost in a medical web of our own making.
Ultimately, people will use what works. The MAHA movement seeks to promote cutting-edge technologies that affirm the goodness of life and promote holistic health. This is a vision that should unite everyone—not just MAHA and social conservatives, but Silicon Valley too.