Feminism: America’s Best Frienemy

It’s time we abandon the tyranny of lies and start restoring our country by sharing a true, beautiful, and compelling vision of womanhood.
Feminism: America’s Best Frienemy
Pro-abortion activists chant while marching from City Hall to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 16, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Carrie Gress
9/14/2023
Updated:
9/18/2023
0:00
Commentary

For decades, Roe v. Wade stood as the legal Goliath against which pro-lifers battled. Few of us believed that we would see the end of its grip on America.

And then it was overturned.

We rejoiced and still rejoice at the end of Roe’s legal stranglehold on our great country. But its removal has uncovered something not everyone anticipated. The cultural underbelly of our nation has been revealed, and it isn’t pretty.

Compared with 2020, abortion is up by about 10 percent nationwide, despite limits put upon it by 20 states since the end of Roe.

In other states, such as my home state of Oregon, abortion clinics are quickly being built in small border towns to draw clients from neighboring abortion-restricted states, such as Idaho. Meanwhile, the march through states to enshrine abortion into state constitutions continues in places such as Michigan and California, moving on to New Hampshire. Ohio is the current target of outside money and inside propaganda to change its constitution in favor of the procedure. Big abortion’s influence is also felt in our elections, with some analysts explaining away the expected 2022 midterm Red Wave by women angered about the end of Roe.

Lifting the legal rock of Roe away from the abortion debate has revealed something much uglier that was festering underneath for five decades: abortion’s cultural rot.

While pro-lifers have been fighting for legal freedom, the pro-abortion camp and those listening to their pied piper of feminism have been teaching women how to think like good Marxists. As I explain in my book, “The End of Woman,” Feminism has passed itself off as a pro-woman effort, but from the beginning, it hasn’t been asking how we help women as women, but how we help women become like men. Feminism has led to significant changes in our core values: encouraging work over home, self over husband and children, and atheism (or the occult) over faith.

Abortion is feminism’s baby. It’s what allows the myth of the independent woman to proliferate. Western women have been told, first by Betty Friedan, that the home is a “comfortable concentration camp” and that freedom can only be achieved when they’re doing productive work outside the home. Friedan’s Marxist message has come to dominate the marketplace of ideas. The belief is that abortion can essentially make us like men and therefore equal. We see how deeply feminism’s lies have drilled into our society, that abortion is no longer something to regret but to celebrate.

The results, although not widely publicized, are clear: Women are less happy, with a rise in depression, substance abuse, and suicide; 60 million children have been aborted in the United States alone; poor women and their children have become married to the state in a type of bureaugamy, with marriage to a man being unattainable; and the nuclear family is under continual threat. Men and women have found surrogates for vital and now missing familial relationships in pets and porn.

Marxism, as an ideology, and feminism, as its female arm, have led women to a place of narcissism, entitlement, and resentment toward men. Men, on the other hand, have been silenced by feminism. Like kryptonite, most men simply don’t know how to approach it, or the women they love, with anything that seems like it'll be worth the effort. The only men who seem to be inoculated against it are young men who have never gained from it, have seen its widespread damage, have felt its unjust vilification, and—because relationships with women have become awkward and unnecessary—don’t feel the pressure to comply.

The pro-abortion message, locked in through media, academia, TV, and Hollywood, has reigned in the hearts and minds of our culture for several generations now. If we ever hope to truly get rid of abortion and its scourge, we need to start focusing on exposing the lies that so many women live with as the truth. The pro-life message and lifestyle are incredibly compelling when people can see them instead of the caricatures presented by the left. It’s time we abandon the tyranny of lies and start restoring our country by sharing a true, beautiful, and compelling vision of womanhood.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Carrie Gress is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University of America. She is also the editor of TheologyOfHome.com and the author of numerous books, including “The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture From Toxic Femininity.” Her forthcoming book is "The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us" (Regnery, 2023).
Author’s Selected Articles
Related Topics