The Way To Make Abortion Unthinkable Is To Wipe Out Feminism

Like so many other pro-lifers, I always thought that the real enemy we were fighting was Roe vs. Wade and once it was gone, a pro-life America could be restored. A few years out from the Dobbs decision, most pro-lifers have woken up to the fact that overturning Roe wasn’t the silver bullet we had hoped for. Over the last few years, we have watched as state after state has adopted radical abortion policies, with only a few victories in the most recent November elections.

What or who, then, are pro-lifers fighting? Planned Parenthood? The sexual revolution? Like Roe, these abortion edifices are not the real enemy, but products of it. The real enemy has been hiding in plain sight for over two centuries now. It is feminism.

Feminism is a slippery thing, with most people thinking it is generally good, providing women with jobs, education, opportunity, and empowerment. But a closer look at the philosophical roots, the true underbelly, shows a much more sinister reality.

The central goal of feminism, from the beginning, has been to liberate women from the family, fertility, and faith. Women have been led to believe that this goal can be achieved through work, while fostering contempt for men, promoting promiscuity, and engagement in the occult. Not all women in the culture engage in all these things, but a visit to any secular university or a look at the celebrity and influencer class shows that these have become commonplace.

Women have come to embody the faux wisdom of a quote often attributed to Marilyn Monroe: “A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left.” Feminism has taken the notion of “tough as a whore” and made it a model, not a warning.

Abortion, then, is the means through which the feminist ideology lives on, perpetuating the lie that a career and financial independence is a woman’s salvation. At the same time, feminism is abortion’s engine, fueling it with false promises of a level playing field, independence, and eternal youth. And unlike the true Savior who said at the Last Supper, “This is my body, which will be given up for you,” abortion says, “This is your body, given up for me.”

I heard a wise friend say that he is about three or four bad decisions from ruining his life. This isn’t someone in a bad place, but a conscientious father concerned about raising a family. For most people, bad decisions contribute significantly to miserable lives. Because of feminism’s hold on the culture, we haven’t informed women that living a promiscuous lifestyle will likely lead to extensive damage.

Instead, we stand by and watch each Tinder Tuesday roll by and wait ready to pick up the inevitable pieces. But what would happen if we started warning women that what happens on Tinder Tuesday doesn’t stay on Tuesday? Virtually no one in pop culture is telling women that a reckless disregard for their sexuality has deep and lasting consequences. Meanwhile, what women are really looking for — to be loved and cherished — can only truly happen within a monogamous relationship.

Put another way, what if a school sent small children out to recess with knives, large and small, and said, “Go ahead and play with these. You will probably get hurt, but don’t worry, we are here with sutures and Band-Aids to sew you up.” No one in their right mind intentionally sends children out to play in an environment that will knowingly harm them.

And yet, that is how the culture has acted toward feminism — go ahead and engage in reckless sexual behavior; we are here to pick up the pieces when you get pregnant. This isn’t an attack on crisis pregnancy centers — quite the opposite, these organizations have been doing significant heavy lifting for decades that few others are willing to do. As a result, they are not always equipped to do more than triage and meet the most pressing needs of the women they serve who have spent many years, even decades, entangled in feminism’s lies.

In this age of safety-ism, we have found every conceivable way to keep ourselves safe, except in the area that is most important — our sexuality. Neglecting this affects every aspect of life, mental, spiritual, and physical health, our identity. It even influences our future, as many Western and Asian countries face a growing birth dearth and utilize immigration to fill in the gaps. Our culture needs to be protecting girls and women before they get to that space of needing emergency help.

This week, I watched as a friend journeyed through the excruciating trial of losing her 8-year-old son. Beyond the heroic medical efforts, people from all over the world prayed for a miracle for this little boy, with prayers, rosaries, Masses, novenas, and an all-night vigil. What everyone supporting this family knew was that this one life was incredibly valuable. Such lengths, however, are never taken for a woman about to lose her job. For all the lip service we pay to careers, in the grand scheme of things, a career isn’t really that important. Death has a way of clarifying this.

If you asked this good mother if she could do it all over again and avoid this pain by not having her son, she would never trade him for the world. She would add that it was a significant honor to know and care for him. This is what motherhood does, it moves women from the self-centeredness of childhood into the mature love that can give even when it hurts. Feminism can never give women this mature love because it is actively taking it from them; it evaporates women’s capacity to feel empathy for others, while swelling narcissism and self-centeredness to unimaginable levels.

A mature woman is the opposite of the woman described in the Marilyn Monroe quote: she loves, she believes, and she stays. This is the message we must start reseeding in our culture: Motherhood and the gift of loving and serving a child are much more valuable than any career and the ever-elusive idol of independence.

Truly, feminism is the ideology that pro-lifers need to focus our energy against. Until we do, feminism will just keep on fueling abortion’s engine, one precious and innocent baby at a time.

Carrie Gress is a fellow at Ethics and Public Policy Center. A mother of five, she is the author of 10 books, including “The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity.” She is the editor of the online women’s magazine Theology of Home. Her latest book is “The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us.”