Nothing But Abortion: The Shallow Politics of Captured Feminism

When coat hangers replace critical thought and “reproductive freedom” means pharmaceutical dependence, girls are left with slogans instead of sex-based rights.

Liberal advocacy has become a branding exercise—abortion pills, pronoun pins, and progress pride flags—while the foundational rights of women and girls are quietly erased.

I recently attended a follow-up to the “LGBTQ+” webinar I wrote about in The Trap of Trans Activist Victimhood. The organizers billed it as a space for defending “bodily autonomy” but what I heard was a carefully sanitized script. The word woman was nearly absent. What passed for reproductive care advocacy was mostly abortion access messaging—delivered in corporate-safe, gender-neutral language and smoothed over with the usual slogans.

This isn’t new. We’ve seen the Women’s March morph into the “People’s March,” as mainstream feminist organizations increasingly accept men into the movement—not as allies, but as centered voices. If a man says he’s a woman, he’s not just included—he’s elevated. Meanwhile, the actual rights of women and girls—our single-sex shelters, our sports categories, our legal language, and our right to say “no” to male bodies in female accommodations—are cast aside as outdated or bigoted.

And this hollow version of feminism is not only alienating women. It’s also proven to be politically ineffective. Kamala Harris bet her entire 2024 campaign on post-Dobbs abortion outrage—but it fell flat. Not because voters stopped caring about abortion access, but because they saw through the messaging. "Abortion rights" had become a shallow rallying cry, used to paper over the erosion of everything else that matters to women. While Harris rallied in Atlanta and recorded podcasts about abortion pills, mothers were watching their daughters lose scholarships to boys in woman-face. Parents saw schools strip away girls’ privacy, while gender clinics raced to remove teenage girls' breasts faster than their braces. And through all of this? Silence from Democrats. Nothing but abortion.

In March, a public high school in Virginia unveiled a student-led Women’s History Month hallway display that read: “A is for Abortion,” complete with a coat hanger and a positive pregnancy test. This isn’t just poor taste—it’s a reflection of how shallow and commodified mainstream women’s advocacy has become. Glorifying abortion doesn’t move women and girls toward collective liberation. It doesn’t protect us from male violence or affirm our right to speak as a sex. Instead, it props up the medical-industrial complex, teaching girls that their power lies in becoming patients or pharmaceutical dependents. It’s grooming, preparing the next generation of girls to outsource their birth control to institutions that profit from their lack of fertility awareness and other methods that would make abortion a last resort—not the first.

That the “A” in this student-led project was reduced to abortion—while more empowering and expansive options like autonomy in law, access to education, awareness of breast cancer, and the legacies of Abigail Adams, Anna Julia Cooper, or Amelia Bloomer were ignored—reveals just how deeply narrow, adult-approved feminist messaging has shaped what young women are taught to value.

You can’t fight for reproductive justice while refusing to define who the reproductive class even is. And you certainly can’t claim to champion women’s rights while dodging every question about men in women’s prisons or shelters. When your platform boils down to “vote blue to protect abortion pills” and refuses to even say the word woman, you don’t look principled—you look captured.

Pro-choice voters aren’t turning away from women’s rights. They’re turning away from a movement that no longer knows how—or whom—it’s supposed to serve.