The Feminist Shaming of Fertility

In light of recent controversies over Planned Parenthood, it is helpful to have a book that illuminates the organization’s motivating ideology. In the recently released Women, Sex, and the Church: a Case for Catholic Teaching, Angela Franks lays out how self-described “women’s health groups” view a woman’s fertility fundamentally as a hindrance, a burden, a disease to be eradicated. This much, perhaps, is already well known. What Franks adds to the discussion is the extraordinary way that these groups demonize women who fail to adopt their view of fertility.

In 1920, Margaret Sanger authored a book entitled Women and the New Race the opening line of which states: “The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of women against sex servitude. This ‘sex servitude’ is the biological slavery of women to their reproductive systems.” Fertility came to be viewed as biological slavery rather than a natural human capacity, and this new view ushered in radical cultural change, both good and bad.