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.

Source link