The Only Way To Make
Abortion Unthinkable Is To Wipe Out The Feminism Fueling It
By: Carrie Gress
January 24, 2025
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.
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."
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