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Since the triumphant end of Roe v. Wade two years ago this June, pro-lifers have suffered loss after political loss. Capitalizing on this pro-abortion tsunami, Democrats just announced a $100 million commitment to push abortion in an effort to win back the House of Representatives. On the state level, efforts to liberalize abortion laws continue to pop up on ballots across the country.

What appears to be missing from the public discussion about abortion is a simple question: What is the engine driving the abortion numbers? Abortion, in various forms, has been around for millennia, but the astronomical spike in those seeking it out is quite new. Legalization and technology have certainly added to its numbers, but there must be more that has led millions of women — women from the wealthiest countries ever — to actively end the lives of their own children on an unimaginable scale. Something else is driving it. What is it?

The sexual revolution is generally targeted as abortion’s source. While it played a huge role in abortion gaining a foothold, the esteem abortion has today required a lot more than the offerings of the radical ’60s. During the Roe years, while pro-lifers chipped away at the Supreme Court decision legally, the pro-abortion side fought a different front: the side of culture. Their success hinged upon one thing: the wholesale adoption of the ideology of feminism. They have been wildly successful.

Feminism: A Spawn of Marxism

One feminist ringleader, who connected the sexual revolution with feminism, was Kate Millett (1934-2017), the author of Sexual Politics. Millett made the cover of Time magazine for her highly influential book and seeded the women’s studies programs throughout American universities. She was a protégé of Wilhelm Reich, who wrote the book The Sexual Revolution in 1936. Millett helped execute Reich’s vision of applying Marxist ideas to the broader culture. The sexual revolution became the avenue through which she and many others, including the equally radical Angela Davis, spread the feminist ideology. Millett’s personal view was that men showed their toughness as soldiers, particularly by killing the innocent, such as during the Vietnam War. Women, she believed, could show they were equally tough by killing their own children in the womb.

Millett and her comrades didn’t invent feminism. It had already been growing quietly in dark and confused places, a pawn of socialism and communism. As early as the 1890s, the socialist magazine, Lucifer, was stirring up in women the “gospel of discontent,” the desire for independence from husbands and children. Three decades later, the Soviets forged a new alliance with the feminist women they previously thought were too bourgeois. Bourgeois bitterness and anger, the Soviets found, made women easily manipulatable and robust promoters of the communist cause.

Among the many notable women in the feminist/communist alliance was Betty Friedan. Friedan quickly convinced millions of women that their life at home was a “comfortable concentration camp.” The cure was “productive work outside the home,” which parroted the view of Marxist co-conspirator Engels. Work would make women truly free.

But “productive” work depends upon one thing: childless women, or at least women who have someone else to watch their children. What many failed to realize is that work alone doesn’t make anyone free. The scale of work’s failure to do so can still be read at the entrance to a real concentration camp, Auschwitz: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Work will make you free. It was a lie then, and it is a lie now.

For feminism to succeed, it also had to sell women on a further set of lies aimed at stirring up female discontent, such as men are oppressors, women are victims, women are better off mimicking men’s lives, and feminism is good for women. These directives led women to be easily seduced by the promise of an alluring lifestyle full of glamour, recognition, hefty salaries, and unlimited sexual partners. Clever marketing and a robust economy made the Marxist bait irresistible. Feminism encouraged women to climb the corporate ladder while also instructing them to slide down the greasy pole of the hook-up culture with its attending pregnancies, STDs, emotional wreckage, and shallow relationships.

But work and hook-ups don’t negate female fertility, even among the most careful. Rather than reign in this dodgy behavior, feminism and other beneficiaries of unbridled sexual activities, like Hugh Heffner, pushed for abortion. It solved the problem of what to do with all the children conceived that no one wished to carry or care for.

Hanging on to Feminism Despite its Wreckage

It is always hard to expose a false narrative, particularly those deeply rooted in intellectual and emotional attachment, careers, reputations, and fortunes. For decades, the smoking industry did all it could to hide the devastating effects smoking had on public health. It took years and layers of lawsuits for the truth to come out.

But feminism isn’t smoking. Lawsuits and regulations can dislodge a carcinogenic product, but it is much harder to eliminate a toxic ideology that has resulted in 44 million dead children worldwide in 2023 alone. These abortion numbers blow away those associated with smoking deaths even in its heyday.

Most defenders of feminism pass the movement off as a benevolent grandmother. This winsome and naïve approach casually glosses over the Marxist underbelly. Yes, women have opportunities today they didn’t have 100 years ago, but much of this has been brought about through technology, like the dishwasher and washing machine, or the dramatic socioeconomic benefits gained by the Industrial Revolution and post-war economic booms, which allowed families to send daughters to school and not just sons. To argue that women’s benefits have come only because of feminism is a narrow and ideological reading of history.  

What feminists’ defenders also tend to miss is the enormous canyon of damage left in its wake. These 44 million children have mothers and fathers who were involved in the decision to end their lives. As Jordan B. Peterson says, “You may be finished with your past, but your past isn’t finished with you.” The damage is hard to continually sweep under the carpet, revealing itself in one form or another, typically through the hardening of the female heart.

And this, they tell us, is what has been so great for women. We now have women who are more depressed, more suicidal, more medicated, and lonelier than ever. In the broader culture, marriage and birth rates are collapsing, the war between the sexes is growing more acrimonious, the word homemaker is triggering, and we can’t define womanhood. Yet, culturally, we hang onto feminism, much like the addicted smoker’s yellowing fingers, who can’t give it up, even to the point of smoking through a trach if necessary.

If we are serious about truly helping women and protecting the most vulnerable among us, then we must stop believing the lie that feminism has been good for women. We can start breathing in the clean fresh air of the family, the importance of children, the beauty of marriage. It won’t be perfect, but no matter, it will be an improvement. 

The work of both women and men also needs to be put back in its proper place where it serves more than just individuals grasping at the ideal of independence or self-importance. Work is meant to serve us, to provide the means to raise a healthy family and live a flourishing life in whatever form that may take. Work is not meant for us to serve it.

Feminism is abortion’s fuel. It is time to do everyone a favor and just stop feeding it.

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.”