Conservatives have long understood that abortion has fundamentally changed the sexual constitution of America, its system of honor and shame shaping relations between the sexes. But they have mostly underestimated the scope and nature of the abortion revolution.

Abortion is usually seen only as part of the Left’s rights revolution. Pro-abortion activists see the “right to choose” as an expression of individual autonomy, providing “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Advocates slip other “rights” into American life through this window, including access to contraception, obscenity, sodomy, same-sex marriage, and suicide.

“Pro-life” framing focuses on how the baby’s “right to life” limits female autonomy. Autonomy is thought to be a good, but only up to a point where it meets the baby’s personhood. A woman’s right to swing and punch is limited by the baby’s nose. Much ink has been spilled to prove that the baby is indeed a life—all to the good.

Conservatives have also long emphasized how permissive abortion laws produce a culture of death. Life everywhere is cheapened when it can be ended in the womb. The old or ill, facing life’s inevitable end, will either be ushered out through physician-assisted suicide or shunted away. A culture of death is also callous to children generally, tolerating forms of child abuse and neglect.

The emphasis on life more easily gains purchase in today’s environment because it exists within our rights framework. But, as the pro-abortion votes in most state referenda after the Dobbs decision show, the movement has not won the hearts and minds of the American people. Part of what the pro-life movement has missed is how abortion also affects the ethos of family life and shapes female priorities and character away from motherhood. Abortion exists downstream from feminist career ambitions and associated lifestyles. Once women adopt such lifestyles, they become, mostly, either softer on abortion or positively pro-abortion. Defending abortion means defending a way of life that depends, in many cases, on access to abortion.

>>> I’m a Tradwife Influencer—Here Are My Thoughts on “Yesteryear”

For abortion advocates, the right to choose, like civil rights claims generally, is a means to an end. Permissive abortion laws are designed to produce a new kind of woman with less traditional attitudes about life, marriage, duty, career, sex, men, and family. Abortion is ultimately part of the broad, pervasive, persistent feminist assault on motherhood.

What distinguishes women most from men is the ability to give birth to and nurture children. Mores, laws, customs, and social habits had long been designed to protect and encourage precisely this female distinctiveness. They helped women withhold sexual favors and protected them, especially those with children, from abandonment. Contraception and abortion bans existed as part of an order that honored motherhood.

Abortion detaches sex from what is distinctively female, as was intended. Simone de Beauvoir, the godmother of today’s feminism, recognized in her book The Second Sex that a traditional woman feels abortion to be “a sacrifice of her femininity” that “relinquishes her triumph as a female.” Beauvoir had hoped that women who accepted abortion would be defined by what she judged as more transcendent activities, like intellectual work or poetry, rather than birthing and nurturing a child.

Abortion advocacy melds with the general feminist critique of housework as Sisyphean slavery and the dull, slow assassination of bourgeois life. In 1971, Beauvoir penned the “Manifesto of the 343” to demand publicly financed abortion in France. Easily accessible abortion, she writes, “implies a radical change in women’s mental configuration, and a no less radical change in social structures.” Women will choose children only if “it will not make me a slave to that child, its nurse, its maid.” The woman Beauvoir has in mind would be no kind of a proper mother, since being a mother (and a father too) requires not a little conforming of one’s life to the needs and demands of a child. Meeting needs on someone else’s time would henceforth, if Beauvoir had her druthers, be seen as slavery.

Betty Friedan, too, saw abortion access as a way of springing women from the “housewife trap,” or what she called the “comfortable concentration camp” of suburban living. A life with motherhood at its center was a “slow assassination.” Abortion freed women from the idea that their only purpose was to bear children—a position no one has ever held. What she really meant is that having a baby should not be an important purpose in a woman’s life. Any suggestion about merely having a baby or expecting a mother to take care of the baby would thereafter be labeled a misogynistic desire to return women to the kitchen.

Feminists recognize abortion as freeing women from nature, which makes women victims. Feminists who advocate for abortion scorn motherhood as they celebrate career and sexual liberation as viable alternatives. Shulamith Firestone equates having a child to “sh**ting a pumpkin” and motherhood as the “heart of woman’s oppression.” The list of feminists scorning motherhood is long and sordid.

Abortion breaks down the old feminine stereotypes while creating a new feminist stereotype. It now becomes necessary for women to compete against men with equal intensity in the workplace. Only if they can “plan” a pregnancy, or not get pregnant at all, is the competition with men equal.

And women must adopt a competitive character, or at least be more competitive than their benighted ancestors. They know children are an opportunity cost, even with plentiful social services available, and abortion allows them to ease the opportunity cost, in a sense, by “having it all” within the workplace. Women with such priorities will care a lot less that abortion is, as conservatives have long, rightly argued, murder.

Nothing in the nature of things guarantees that the interests of adults or parents and children will easily coincide. A culture demanding that adults conform to the presence and needs of children has to be created and sustained. A feminine character ready to take on duties must be carefully cultivated, as must the character of a man who is ready and able to be the family’s provider and protector.

Allowing abortion ensures that the interests of parents are less easily reconciled. Motherhood under a regime of legalized abortion looks very different from motherhood without abortion. Mothers can eliminate children with abortion. They can more easily resent children as impositions when they are seen as “choices.” Abortion frees women from unchosen bonds and from the familial world of duties. Femininity becomes optional as carrying a baby to term becomes optional. By authorizing women to abort children, maternal duties to children are shelved. Children who live can make fewer unconditional claims on their mother.

Margaret Mead noted in a different context that abortion changes how children are seen, going from being seen as a duty to a joy, an underappreciated change. This revolution in “parenting” views having children as a matter of personal fulfillment, couched therapeutically in terms of a parent’s interest. Getting married and having children earlier makes people happy and healthy, the only standards of judgment admissible under the abortion regime.

Emphasizing the joys of parenthood captures an important, partial truth about having children, of course. Having children is not simply drudgery. But they come with duties—and part of the satisfaction of being a parent lies in knowing that one has executed one’s duty well. The language of duty—duty to one’s children or to one’s spouse that precedes one’s choice to have children—dies a quiet death under our abortion regime.

Parents who emphasize joy rather than duty have difficulty acting as authority figures. They have less interest in the mundane, necessary work of disciplining children. “Joyful” parents are more likely to want to be friends with their children or to govern their children by consent. They are “gentle” parents.

>>> Religion Alone Won’t Save Young Men

In fact, without duties, parents can be more or less lost on an endless sea, unable to understand how to raise their children. Such frightfulness prevents much from occurring, while uncertainty about what to do paralyzes generations.

Before abortion, parents could be expected to make sacrifices on behalf of their children. A disabled baby would be welcomed and loved, with sympathy and even with charity from others. Parents were responsible. Love for such babies was not just a vibe or a mood; it required an act of the will. After legalized abortion, “unwanted children” can be eliminated, and expectations of parental sacrifice diminish. Parents can act more with their convenience and comfort in mind, as the war against children with Down syndrome attests.

Mothering becomes optional, so putting children in daycare or in the care of a live-in boyfriend becomes more acceptable. Abortion and daycare both reconcile parent interests with the needs of children, as parents differently choose to understand them. Interest in having children dips as claims on behalf of children or childhood innocence become less intelligible politically. Arguments that the country should do it “for the children” have less purchase.

Laws no longer pay much heed to the special condition of children. Age verification laws for pornography presuppose that people respect children. At least 21 of 25 states without age verification laws for minors on porn sites have abortion on demand. Meanwhile, 19 states have both restrictive abortion laws and age verification laws. Caring for the character of children and opposition to abortion go together.

Liberal abortion laws also reflect an unwillingness to have children. The more generations with legal abortion, the lower the birth rates. South Korea introduced mass abortions and sterilizations in the 1970s, and its birth rates cratered within two decades. The same thing happened with China and all other countries of East Asia, where abortion rates had been the highest. Now, sexual indifference and contraception make abortion there less necessary.

America exhibits the same pattern. Only two states with liberal abortion laws have total fertility rates above our national average of 1.56 in 2025, Minnesota at 1.68 and New Jersey at 1.62. States with restrictive abortion laws make up nearly all high-fertility states in America.

States with age verification and stricter abortion laws have cultures that more honor motherhood, parenthood, and parental rights.

Defending the rights of the unborn is not enough. A pro-life party worthy of its name would defend motherhood, maternal character, and parenthood, too.