How Respecting Women’s Biology Fosters A Culture of Life

This is the written version of a speech the author gave in September at the Lutherans for Life annual conference.

According to demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, for the first time in human history since the bubonic plague in the medieval 1300s, global population is declining. The world’s fertility rate just hit a 60-year low, and it’s set to keep decreasing. The nations with replacement-rate fertility are largely terrible places where people die young, such as Somalia, the Congo, and Afghanistan.

The United States faces a population bomb of not too many people, but too few. We’re a slight outlier among Western nations in losing our population at a slightly slower rate, but only narrowly. And that’s entirely due to importing foreigners whose families require larger outlays from our welfare state and who mostly worship pagan gods.

Using foreigners to mask our population decline makes the nation’s problems worse, because it more quickly erases the traditional American Christian culture required to return to freedom under self-governance. It also is an anti-life policy because open borders facilitate child trafficking. Children who are trafficked are at much higher risk for early deaths via dangerous travel routes, abuse, and drug addictions. The Biden administration lost track of some 300,000 trafficked children, tens of thousands of whom authorities still can’t find.

Contrary to widespread claims that most people aren’t having enough kids because they don’t have enough money, the nations with the lowest birthrates are much wealthier than the nations with the highest birthrates. While money is certainly useful for raising children, all over the world and in U.S. history, people are and were much poorer while having many more children.

Indeed, and more to our point at a pro-life conference, research shows that abortifacients, not lack of money, are the top driver of the world’s population bomb. Because this is an area of deliberate confusion among abortion apologists such as our mass media and mass education ecosystems, let me be very clear about what I mean by abortifacients. I include in that term not just elective chemical abortions like Plan B, but also the vast majority of what we usually call contraceptives. The truth is, the Pill kills babies, too.

Contraception Is Killing Our Future

I thank God that years ago, when I was considering using a chemical contraceptive, I read articles by Dr. Donna Harrison, who also spoke here this week. In them, she explained science everyone in our country needs to know: Just about every form of chemical contraception may be able to cause abortions by starving a tiny embryo to death. The Pill can do this, and so can IUDs.

So, scientifically speaking, chemical contraception likely causes abortions. This means it is a scientific fact that chemical contraceptives are abortifacients. That means that for Christians, it is a grave moral evil to use these kinds of contraception. It also means our forefathers and foremothers were right in objecting to contraceptive use on other moral grounds, namely the refusal to welcome life within a marriage.

A minority of churches and pastors teach this, but they simply have to. Every Christian needs to know that he or she could become a murderer by using chemical contraception. For anyone grieved in his or her heart by learning or discussing these facts, I want to mention that God will always forgive you if you repent. Jesus Christ died for this sin, too.

The point here is that abortion is a lot bigger than even we prolifers often realize. It’s not just the estimated 63 million elective abortions performed in the United States between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson. There are likely tens of millions more that no one knows happened, simply as a result of the mass use of chemical contraception.

Reject The Anti-Human, Child-Free Way of Life

Contraception — or abortion — is now an unquestioned way of life for Americans, and increasingly people all over the world. This means hundreds of millions of lives and entire societies are built upon ensuring the deaths of tens of millions of tiny unknown children. Our entire ways of life, our cultural scripts and expectations, are built around the cornerstone that most women will use abortifacients, including most Christians.

And this cornerstone emanates from the ungodly demand from feminist ideology that we treat men and women as interchangeable, something I talk about in my recent book, False Flag. The truth is, men and women are not interchangeable. The Bible says, “Male and female He created them.”

As prolife Christians, we must work to establish Christian cultural scripts that welcome life. That starts with recognizing that men and women are different, and that the chief goal of any career or education is to serve a family, not an ego or bank account.

So let me talk about a few ways we need to change our ways of life to support a prolife culture that do not rest on the un-Christian and anti-life expectations that women will take abortifacients or that young people should prioritize starting families last. Every change we want needs to start with us, in our own lives, families, and churches.

Pushing Women Into a Male Life Script

A friend who is a professor at a Catholic university recently shared with me that the parents of female students come in insisting their daughters get the top classes, do sports and other efforts to get scholarships, have a clear path to a career upon graduation, make all the right internships, and select the best extracurriculars.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. I believe a robust education can prepare women well for our primary vocations as wives and mothers. What’s wrong is what my friend told me was missing. He also said the parents of young men generally do not do the same kind of Type A hustle. This is weird, because if our society really wanted to support women, we would support women’s life-giving capacity, which means making space in young women’s lives not for full-time careers, but for full-time motherhood.

Nothing is wrong with women earning scholarships — I graduated college debt-free thanks to scholarships, and I’m very grateful to those who made that possible, because it made marriage after graduation so much easier with half the debt load. My husband and I had a faster path to saving a down payment for a house because of those scholarships.

And we needed a house pretty quick, because our six children were born within nine years, with the first arriving on our first anniversary. I was nursing babies for nearly ten years straight. I hardly remember anything about those years, as you can imagine. That taught me it’s cruel to ask women to be mothers and work full-time. Compassion for women and children means making it possible for women to mother their children.

If anyone gets pushed towards careers, it should be the men, not the women. Women should be encouraged towards motherhood and careers compatible with motherhood, and men towards fatherhood and careers that sustain fatherhood.

Women must be released from anti-woman, anti-family pressure to pursue careers in a manly fashion, which is to say full-time, full-throttle. I work part-time at The Federalist. What’s more, much of my work is flexible, so I can pause it for a bit if I have a sick child, family emergency, or fussy baby.

Separating Children from Mothers Hurts Us All

Women want these kinds of jobs, and they can be compatible with putting their families first, but many employers instead push nonfamily childcare as if children need mothers and fathers in exactly the same way. They don’t. Little children need their mothers physically present for the vast majority of their waking hours.

Although suppressed for political reasons, substantial research shows that children start showing signs of psychological and behavioral problems when their time away from their mother extends past 15 to 20 hours per week. This is why I have never had a babysitter more than six hours per week for my children, and my husband and I coordinate our schedules to care for our children ourselves.

We don’t really need research to tell us what simple observation and common sense can. First-grade and kindergarten teachers always know which children coming into their classrooms have gone to daycare or preschool, because they are more violent and emotionally dysregulated. Research also confirms this to be true.

This means churches should re-evaluate the daycare and preschool programs they offer. They should offer low-hours options, such as a few mornings or afternoons a week, and encourage families to use them instead of full-time care. Kindergarten and preschool should be half-day. Ideally, children would start formal schooling at age six — Finnish children start at age seven, and they are among the best-performing students in the world.

For children who must be in non-parent care much of their days, such as with a single mother who must support her family alone, churches should help place them with a family or at-home grandma rather than providing overstimulating center-based programs with large caregiver-to-child ratios and frequent staff turnover.

Christians should publicly advocate for government to support family-based care and for employers to accommodate children as much as they can while not going broke. Instead of offering to freeze women’s eggs and IVF procedures with high death counts for babies, we should encourage employers to offer part-time and flexible work to mothers whenever they can.

Men Need More Attention and Mentoring

Parents, teachers, pastors, and career counselors should steer young people into adulthood with as little debt as possible. It’s pretty easy now to encourage young people to avoid college debt. But there’s still a gap between people recognizing young people need that freedom and our society making it possible for men to earn a family-supporting wage by their mid-20s.

Parents should be at least as concerned about their sons’ career paths as they are about their daughters’, and they should be talking with their daughters about work differently than they do with their sons, because sons and daughters are different.

I’m not only using one anecdote to support that position, either. For decades now, young men have earned fewer college degrees of all kinds. We now have the largest population in American history of prime, working-age men with no disabilities who are not working. Of men aged 25 to 54, one in six is not working at all, and one in eight isn’t even looking for work. Research, also by Nicholas Eberstadt, shows that most of these men are spending their days playing video games and watching movies.

This is a complete reversal of what is good and natural. Our culture has everything backwards. We have large numbers of men refusing to provide for others and women refusing to provide children to anyone. Those are literally the linchpin roles that men and women, respectively, play in society as the natural outgrowth of our biological capacities. Men can’t bear children. Women can’t protect themselves or keep all the sewers and farms running as well as men can.

Woman-Run Schools Set Boys Up to Fail

Another way our ways of life stamp on human biology is that schools are set up as a woman’s world. But the truth is, the average boy doesn’t turn into a great man when he is raised mostly by women. We know this because boys raised without fathers always talk about that as a massive challenge they must battle, sometimes their entire lives. Boys become the best and strongest men through the mentorship of men.

Our society has decided to prioritize the mentorship of women, and ignore men. One harbinger of this is what used to be called the Boy Scouts, which is now Scouts because it admits both boys and girls. It seems the girls get two scouting organizations to choose from, and the boys get half of one.

Our churches must fill in this gap because it is a spiritual gap driven by a false theology that says men and women are the same. We need to encourage parents to raise their boys as boys, not as defective girls.

This means cheerful and meaningful discipline. Directing boys’ natural aggression into positive behaviors demands firm, loving, prompt discipline. Mothers need to listen to fathers about this and allow their husbands to administer such discipline instead of turning their sons into weaklings by getting in the way of their husbands’ instinctive knowledge of what boys need.

Our schools need to encourage boy-friendly pedagogy, such as memorizing facts, competition, recognizing excellence instead of blue ribbons for everyone, and seeking to employ male teachers who are paid a breadwinner wage. Our church body should not make it impossible for our schools to pay a breadwinner wage to men by burdening schools and churches with highly expensive health insurance and pension plans that take from the young to pay for the old.

Encourage Women to Put Family First

While it is very easy and popular in our society to beat up on lazy men, it is not as easy and popular to beat up on child-averse women who don’t respect men or their own biology. To be truly pro-life, we need to communicate to women that children are good, a blessing, that they are the only thing on earth we might be able to take with us to heaven, and that dedicating our lives to raising them is more meaningful than shuffling paper in an office.

It’s not prolife to communicate to your daughter that her womb needs to be chemically castrated with the Pill until she’s 35 and her ovaries start to decline. That communicates to her that money matters more than children, which is false. Children matter more than money, and where God gives children, he will provide for them.

We need to hear this in our catechism classes, in our schools, and from our pulpits. And when pastors lovingly rebuke women for the sins we tend to fall into, just as they also lovingly rebuke the men for theirs, women need to accept it and not make their pastor’s life miserable for telling us the truth.

As a church, we need to catechize our people better, especially about biological science. Every Christian child should know that chemical contraception can kill a human life and that this is wrong, and we must never participate in it. These are scientific and moral facts.

‘A Good Man Leaves an Inheritance’

And we must build a church culture that respects such facts of biology, and welcomes children rather than treating them like an obstacle and burden. The Bible teaches in Proverbs that “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.”

We need to instruct our people in the stewardship of wealth that results in reversing American culture’s habit of enabling the old to steal from the young. It is the duty of the old to sacrifice for the young, of parents and grandparents to give up their comforts for the benefit of the children. God gives children partly to sanctify parents and grandparents and challenge our natural selfishness.

This doesn’t mean that children should be idols or that we should disregard the needs and weaknesses of old age, of course. The Bible commands families to care and provide for their own, and there are mutual duties of care between young and old — the old to nurture and provide for the young, and the young to return these gifts when the old no longer can provide for themselves. Being prolife obviously includes respecting the dignity of the aged.

But today the social contract is very lopsided against the young and in favor of the elderly, in an ungodly way. Here’s an uncomfortable example: Our society spends massive amounts of money trying to extend the lives of the elderly just a few more months when Christians are commanded not to fear death, and indeed that “to live is Christ, to die is gain.” While as a pro-life person I would never advocate killing the sick or elderly for any reason, it is not murder for people to die naturally when their time has come.

It is Christian to face death bravely and not spend your children’s inheritance trying to gain another few months or years after a full life because you fear death like a pagan. Money is not just an abstract concept; it represents part of someone’s life because people must give their time and labor to earn money. Taking someone else’s money is therefore taking a part of his life. And, as we prolifers know, it’s wrong to take someone’s life without his conviction for a capital crime.

So it is time for our pastors and theologians to develop and distribute Christian counsel about end-of-life situations that includes looking at whether it is consistent with Christian ethics to get a new heart transplant or triple-bypass surgery when one is elderly and without dependents.

I know this is a touchy subject, but it has to be brought up. Besides our nation’s unjust foreign wars and our unjust redistribution from those who work to those who will not, what’s bankrupting our children’s future is our health system that steals from the young and those who choose to be healthy on behalf of those who choose to be unhealthy and whose death is only slightly delayed with highly expensive treatments that quickly fail.

The top two costs driving up health insurance for families to half of the median family income just to be insured, not to receive any health care at all, are preventable illnesses like diabetes and obesity, and end-of-life interventions that cannot stop death. It is wrong to steal from young families to slightly prolong the life of someone whose responsibilities to his children are completed.

The Young Need What the Old Can Give

To those of you who are past childbearing years or are physically unable to grow children, but you worry about our culture’s hatred of life and the families who nurture it, I want you to know there is a lot you can do when your body cannot generate children. While I have just said some touchy things about old age, I’m going to end with some positive things about old age.

One of the things that drives me nuts is snide comments about boomers. These have become culturally acceptable. And sure, like everyone else, my parents’ generation has committed plenty of sins. But for Christians, those sins are covered by Jesus’ blood. That blood makes for peace between peoples, between mothers and the children who make their lives difficult (but also more holy), between men and women, between old and young.

The standard American ways of life for Boomers, Millennials, and Zoomers alike are hostile to our faith. But we can unite in seeing that and working to bring Christ’s mercy and forgiveness to every aspect of our daily lives.

The last one I’d like to leave you with is an encouragement about the great power that grandparents and the elderly have to benefit the lives of the young. Part of why I hate the anti-boomer rhetoric is because boomers are my parents, my aunts and uncles, my adopted grandparents at church. They are faithful, blessed, wonderful people who give to me and just about everyone they encounter. I want anyone who is a parent or grandparent here today to hear just how much power God has given you to bless the young, and not to be put off by the cultural messaging designed to make you feel ashamed of your age and vocations.

Boomers and Xers can make a difference not just by strategically deploying the unprecedented wealth they’ve laid up on behalf of the next generation, as the Bible commands. They can also make a difference in giving their time, hands, and friendship. Instead of fading away onto a golf course, parents and grandparents can lend a hand to lift the load of young parents and the otherwise needy in their families and churches.

Your lives matter, and you have a lot to offer that my generation and those younger need, even if sometimes we crab about it. Ignore the whining just like you would ignore the whining of a toddler, and perform your vocational duties to pass down your faith, your experience, your institutions, and your knowledge to the next generation. We need it, and we are grateful.

Demographic decline is not a sure death sentence to our culture. Data models can get a lot wrong, as we’ve seen with global warming and Covid projections. God is sovereign, and we should never be afraid to act on that reality. We have a future and a hope, and every life is an expression of eternity, because every human is made in God’s image.

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Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include the NEW “300 Classic Books for Ages 9 to Adult,” the bestselling “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

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