Weekend Plans With Emma Waters, The Mom On A Mission To Heal Infertility

Weekend Plans is our exclusive lifestyle feature where we highlight the real off-duty routines of the most exciting people in culture. 

This weekend, Emma Waters, senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation and author of the upcoming book “Rethinking Fertility: The Package Deal of Marriage, Sex, and Procreation,” chats with The Daily Wire about the beauty of long walks and French lessons with her kids, why she’ll never be the mom hosting a bake sale, and how she hopes to heal America’s infertility crisis by empowering everyone to have the family — and career — they’ve always dreamed of. 

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I confess to Emma Waters that the first I’d heard about her was from a headline calling her “The reason you can’t have kids.” A weird thing to say about someone who advocates for families. Brushing off the snarky clickbait, she tells me, “The rest of the sentence in the actual article ends with ‘Or Emma Waters may be the reason you can have children.’” Just minutes into our conversation, it’s clear that helping women heal their bodies so they can have children is her entire mission.

After uncovering an interest in public policy surrounding marriage and family studies in college, Emma got curious about what makes men and women tick. “Study after study found that when men and women were married, when they were having children, and when they had access to sustainable meaningful work, that’s where we found men and women who self-reported the highest levels of happiness,” she explains, citing the Bible as backup. 

“This isn’t just a secondary social issue. This is crucial to questions of national strength and prosperity going into the next 250 years of America.”

She describes how women’s health split into two very different paths in the 1980s and ’90s: the natural birth movement, which benefited women and families, and the flip side of that, which involved “a trifecta of abortion, birth control, and reproductive technologies, which essentially sought to destroy, suppress, or circumvent the woman’s and — in the case of abortion — the child’s body altogether.”

“There is something to how these technologies have shaped us culturally and shaped how we thought philosophically about children. Without them, you couldn’t reasonably say, well, we can delay first-child motherhood into our 40s,” Emma notes. “That promise of control has been incredibly deceptive because it has led to many, many women realizing that despite financial means and despite access to egg freezing and IVF, children aren’t a guarantee.” 

Now a married mother of three in her late 20s, Emma’s life is full. But she’s not out there telling everyone to have babies by a certain age, or else. (She’s also not anti-birth control or in vitro fertilization.) Instead, she’s asking, “How do we help, not hinder, marriage and children in the United States? It’s a complicated question for so many people.”

The first step, in her eyes, is informed consent or “ways we can use technology to actually help us achieve our goals of family and then career, and not putting women in a position where they feel like they have to choose either or.”

Recent data show a record 100,000 babies were born in the United States through IVF in a single year. Emma explains how this intervention began in order to highlight where it failed families. “When IVF was developed, it was specifically in response to two conditions,” she says. “The first was blocked fallopian tubes … and the second was in the case of a cancer diagnosis where a woman would lose access to her eggs or certain reproductive parts. It was a way of preserving a woman’s fertility in light of conditions that they otherwise couldn’t treat.”

As infertility began to rise — thanks to environmental toxins and preservatives in our food (Gen Z women are set to experience the highest rates of infertility and subfertility) — reproductive tech and research fell behind modern medicine. Emma says that’s where IVF became a universal Band-Aid for health issues — like “endometriosis, PMOS [polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome], uterine fibroids, and hormonal imbalances” — that could have been addressed years earlier.

“What happened for many women is that the moment they had a painful or irregular cycle, they were offered the birth control pill with very little or no diagnostic work done to understand why,” Emma says. “So a woman in high school may go on the birth control pill to suppress painful symptoms for something that turns out to be stage 1 endometriosis, then find herself with stage 3 or stage 4 endometriosis when she’s actually ready to have kids a decade down the road.” 

“That’s when it becomes a massive problem for your fertility. We’re starting to see the painful reality that there was a lot more going on than we paid attention to.”

Holding her 9-week-old daughter, Emma describes the visceral “gut punch” from recent election results that expanded abortion access. It’s now or never if we’re serious about shifting the culture to support “strong, flourishing families.” 

“A lot of young couples look at the cost of housing, childcare, and groceries and wonder how they could afford a family or more children,” she says. “We have to make family life more affordable and address that head-on.”

“Pro-life culture starts with helping women and men understand and love their own bodies. How can we expect a woman to value the life growing inside her if her own body is a mystery to her, or feels like it’s working against her? Women’s health can’t just be about whether we want more or less abortion. The goal must be promoting root cause care, body literacy, and real answers.” Claiming to be “bullishly optimistic” about the future, Emma is confident we can “build a culture of life that values every stage of human development.” 

Team Effort

Contrary to anything you might have read about Emma’s home life from other outlets, she’s not cosplaying trad family values while secretly employing paid childcare behind the scenes. In reality, she’s a very present mother with the help of her devoted husband, Jack. And she only wishes her mom, who lives 13 hours away, were close enough to fulfill the internet’s “full-time grandma” shadow conspiracy.

“We’re very much in the all-hands-on-deck toddler mode,” Emma says. She’s currently on maternity leave, raising three children under 4 years old and loving every minute of it. “I just have to brag on my husband because he has made this the sweetest season of rest for me.”

I don’t have kids of my own, but this sounds oddly luxurious. “He does all of the bedtime duties with the toddlers, and he does all of the morning duties. He gets them up in the morning, he gets them ready, and he makes breakfast for the whole family,” she adds. Because of this, Emma can go to bed at 8 p.m. and rise at 8 a.m. if she wants, putting her focus on cuddling their baby, establishing breastfeeding, and resting “as much as I possibly can.”

When she wakes up, she grabs a coffee and sits down to breakfast — usually eggs, sausage, and oatmeal (“choline for my brain and the baby’s brain”) — just as Jack leaves for work. “I’ve had many people remark, ‘Emma, you look far more rested with a newborn than we’ve ever seen you,’” she says with a laugh. 

Emma recalls how, as newlyweds, she and her husband envisioned alternating weeks as the one in charge of mealtime. “It lasted about a week and a half, and I realized I really like cooking — and I like my cooking,” she says. Currently on a soup kick with creamy sausage potato soup and white chicken chili, Emma also loves Crock-Pot teriyaki chicken and beef and broccoli to round out the fall lineup. “[Jack] does all of the dishes, so we’re both very happy with the trade-off we’ve worked out here.”

As far as baking goes? “I really like the idea of being a baker, but baking requires a level of technical precision that is not always available to me,” she laughs. “I keep doing it because I enjoy it, but you never know how it’s going to turn out.” 

The Simple-Ish Life

Based in a small town just outside Pittsburgh, Emma and her family love exploring their neighborhood on foot. “It’s a very walkable community,” she says. Along with nearby friends who have young kids, too, she notes, “there are four parks, a farmers market, a library, and so many kid-friendly outlets within a 10-minute walk.” 

She loves getting her kids moving at the playground, reading and listening to stories with them at the library, and nurturing their imaginations. “Both of our daughters are very into ballet right now, so there’s definitely at least one ballet-inspired dance party a day,” she says. “We’re listening to Tchaikovsky and dancing to ‘The Nutcracker,’ and we’re practicing our spins. Our 3-and-a-half-year-old has been doing ballet for a year and a half, so she’ll just occasionally say, ‘Mommy, look at my arabesque!’ It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”

The family is also taking French lessons. “Our girls are mostly listening and playing, but that’s been fun as a way to expand our language proficiency,” she tells me. “In the middle of the French lesson, our toddler wandered off and somehow managed to pour an entire bag of flour on her head. You just see the footprints of flour and know, ‘This is gonna be so bad.’”

Recharging The Batteries

After talking with Emma, I’m convinced that families that prioritize sleep together thrive together. “Afternoon naps are a staple in our household,” she explains. “Just to give everyone space to sleep and recharge and give me the space to collect myself, to have time to read books, to catch up with a friend, to work, and have a mental break.”

“I am a huge believer in good skincare and good, proactive, preventative health practices,” Emma notes. Along with morning and evening skincare routines, she carves out time for a monthly facial and medical-grade red light therapy and adjustments at her local chiropractor. “Those are just small things that feel so life-giving to me, where I feel like I have space to do something that makes me feel good but is also a proactive measure that — years from now — I’ll be grateful that I did.” 

Luckily, the family-friendly community welcomes kiddos in adult spaces. After a few visits to the chiropractor with her newborn, Emma says, “One of the women will watch her while I do red light therapy and she’s like, ‘Bring her every time. We just love her so much!’”

On Emma’s nightstand, you’ll find “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo. “So much of my work is reading medical literature and social science, which I genuinely find fascinating, or reading up on technological developments,” she says. “When I’m reading for fun, I try to choose books that are as different as possible from what I read day to day.”

A Season Of Life

Emma speaks with a radiant sense of calm. And along with her steady faith, I’m curious about the inner dialogue getting her through this challenging chapter of parenting. 

“I’ve really been focused on the theme of living seasonally,” Emma says. “There are so many different seasons of a woman’s life. It can be very easy to feel like the exact moment you’re in is the way that your life is going to be indefinitely, and the way that you feel in any given moment is the way that you’re going to feel indefinitely.”

“Life is going to ebb and flow, and there are going to be seasons that are more demanding than others,” she explains, noting the transformative changes in giving birth and welcoming a newborn into the family. “It’s sobering because when things are going well, it reminds you that there could be harder seasons coming. You don’t want to become so comfortable that you’re not able to suffer well and weather the storm. But it’s also very hopeful because in harder moments where things feel frustrating or difficult or exhausting, it’s a good perspective because this is not how all of life is going to be.”

This seasonal living mentality seems to match the changing leaves of fall. “It’s given me the strength to embrace the difficult moments,” Emma says. “This is just one expression of a season, and it’s not my entire life.”

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