Parenting & Family Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

Buttiglione’s line doesn’t just define “the family”; it stages a power arrangement and calls it nature. The phrasing is telling: the family “exists in order to” do two things, both tethered to women’s bodies and men’s authority. Women “have children” (a biological function framed as destiny), then “have the protection of a male” (security framed as dependency). The verb choice matters: women have; men take care. Agency is unevenly distributed by grammar before it ever becomes policy.

The subtext is a paternal bargain. In exchange for reproduction and domestic stability, women receive protection, as if citizenship and autonomy are benefits that can be outsourced to a husband. It’s an old political move: rebrand hierarchy as benevolence. “Protection” is especially loaded in contemporary politics because it smuggles control in under the language of care. If someone is protecting you, they also get to decide what counts as danger, what counts as proper behavior, and what freedoms are “too risky.”

Contextually, Buttiglione is a Catholic-inflected European conservative speaking into late-20th/early-21st century battles over gender equality, divorce, abortion, and LGBTQ rights, when “family values” became a shorthand for resisting social change without sounding openly reactionary. The sentence is meant to reassure anxious voters that modernity hasn’t erased a clear script: men provide, women reproduce. Its effectiveness lies in its simplicity: it reduces a complicated institution to a tidy purpose, then dares critics to sound like they’re against families rather than against the unequal terms.