There is something that has always rather puzzled me. Why, in the landscape of modern cultural and political battles, does abortion stand as a near-sacred issue, certainly to feminists, and indeed to most women, not all of whom are on the cultural left?
This is strange in and of itself, for it goes against what we have traditionally seen as female inclinations. Women historically have responded to infants in a unique and distinct way, one that can only be called nurturing, tender, loving. It is no accident that the stereotype of them with a baby is of them babbling and cooing. Yet most modern women seem to be very comfortable with the idea that infants can be killed before they are born.
Fertility rates in developed nations have plummeted below replacement, and this correlates closely with the rise of the feminist movement.
This change has come about only as the result of a much greater political and ideological effort, one aimed at destroying sex-based distinctions. Unrestricted abortion, after all, does something nothing else can: it severs the link between sexual activity and reproduction. And nothing has historically constrained women’s actions and choices more than that. (RELATED: The Demonic Possession of Liberal Women)
Consider: you cannot attain real equality between men and women unless females no longer bear the greater burden in reproduction. But if you treat pregnancy as an optional inconvenience, then the sexes become almost interchangeable. Women can have sex with the freedom of men, and never have to worry that she might be incapacitated for nine months and burdened thereafter with years of childcare. The shame that once attended such procedures must be actively fought and denigrated, and women must receive from the medical profession only an open-armed welcome when they choose to end a pregnancy. A woman’s choice is sacrosanct. Women cannot be criticized, nor can they be accused of wrongdoing. (RELATED: A Massachusetts Jury Legalized 4th Trimester Abortions)
This much is manifest. What was not, when the abortion movement first took off, was where it would lead.
Ideas, however, are fecund creatures. You cannot just introduce them and expect them not to be fertile and multiply.
This analogy is particularly apt here, I might add, for now we come to the next generation that abortion begat: the transgender movement.
It extends the logic of abortion all the way. If abortion renders female reproduction simply elective, then why should women — or men — be held back just because they are not the sex they would prefer? Biology can be overridden, either by desire or “gender-affirming care” for minors, using puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries. All of these follow on patient-affirming models that gained traction as expansive access to abortion grew.
It does not matter that the Cass Review (2024) and European re-evaluations exposed weak evidence for youth transitions, noting autism, trauma, and rapid-onset cases to exist disproportionately among teen girls. It does not matter that desistance rates for childhood dysphoria without intervention have always been historically high: 60-90 percent, in fact. (RELATED: Of Lobotomies, Anorexia, and ‘Gender-Affirming Care’)
Instead, medicalization and acceptance — this concept is important, and was patterned on the speed at which abortion was accepted — proceeded quickly, even though sterility was a frequent outcome. Before the rise of transgenderism as a movement, males were the majority. Once it became a movement, transgender girls suddenly far outnumbered males. UK GIDS documented that where there used to be a male majority amongst transsexuals, now there was a large female majority among adolescents. And a European LGBT youth survey found 80 percent of 15–17-year-old trans respondents were females.
It became a largely female movement, just as abortion advocacy was, for it was based on the same female-centric movement abortion was. Exactly the same people who campaigned most vociferously for abortion now supported policies which treated sex as fluid, just as abortion treats pregnancy as a curable medical condition.
This is not merely an issue of individual choice in gender. It is much more than that. It is part of a broader ideological effort to change a fundamental sexual dimorphism into a matter of personal preference, a mere social construct. Abortion rights function as the foundational claim that women’s bodies can be reshaped to match male patterns of autonomy and career without any trade-offs at all.
Now the next step: the same reproductive realities that abortion is believed to neutralize do not end at viability. Once a fetus is viable and has a realistic chance of survival outside the womb with medical support, typically around 24 weeks, standard medical practice strongly disfavors abortion over delivery. If there are life-threatening or serious maternal conditions in the third trimester, prompt delivery is the solution, not abortion.
But that clinical perspective is opposed to the abortion movement’s political aims, for it would still leave a woman with a child she does not want. So the movement has worked indefatigably to ensure the option to end a pregnancy remains available long past viability. And for this reason, the very state in which the next terrible consequence was to appear, Massachusetts, will on Nov. 8, 2026, make abortion up to birth legal.
Now we reach the final piece of this tragedy. On Jan. 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and eight-month-old Callan, then cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She was left paralyzed from the waist down. She has never disputed causing the deaths. Her defense instead argued postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder and therefore a lack of criminal responsibility. Prosecutors argued the killings were intentional. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Is the Lindsay Clancy Case a Windfall for the GOP?)
This was a terrible act, one that destroyed not just her three children’s lives, but the lives of her and her husband. But instead of condemnation, we see exactly the same pattern as we saw with abortion and transgenderism: instant acceptance and instant rationalization of her act. She was not to be found guilty. She is a woman and must not suffer the consequences of her actions, for, just as a woman is not responsible if she gets pregnant, so is a woman who kills her babies not responsible, for then you would make a woman pay for something only women suffer from: postpartum depression.
The Lindsay Clancy case is the postpartum face of the same logic the abortion movement applies before birth. Clancy could hardly have an abortion: the children were already born. But the abortion movement’s core claim is that reproduction is not a woman’s destiny: pregnancy can at will be interrupted so that a female may live as autonomously as a male. Female autonomy is the ultimate value.
Clancy’s act is what happens when that logic meets children who can no longer be aborted. The slogan “my body, my choice” is meant to justify ending a pregnancy. After delivery, the body is still female, but the infant is now manifest. The movement that insists those costs must not constrain women before viability has no coherent reason for why infants suddenly become untouchable after birth, except by appealing to an arbitrary legal line.
No one knows what the future will bring now that we have come to this tragic pass. Fertility rates in developed nations have plummeted below replacement, and this correlates closely with the rise of the feminist movement. Yes, it gave women more freedom, but certainly not more happiness, and it correlates with delayed marriage, rising singlehood, and a cultural message that pregnancy is an interruption rather than a feature of female physiology. Simply put, feminist ideals are destroying our future. And they have now culminated in excusing murder. This will not be the last time that happens.
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Anthony Tye Rodrigues is a retired academic living in Texas, and the author of a trilogy set in Britain in the later Roman Empire. His latest book is called Gemini.