Women are being taught to hate women, again.

Often under the cloak of religious-based ‘family values’, there is an increasing backlash against women’s rights all over the world. But it is not only in rigid theocracies like Afghanistan and Iran where those rights are languishing. Under the renewed and invigorated far right movement in Christian churches, particularly in the US but increasingly in other developed countries as well, women’s rights are being rolled back hard and fast. While men dominate the roll-back of women’s rights in Muslim theocracies, there are many women leading the charge against women’s rights in developed countries. Never has the hatred of women for other women been as nauseatingly evident as it is in the US, where Far Right Christian women seek, increasingly successfully, to undo the rights achieved by the second wave of feminism in the 1960’s.

The anti-abortion movement in the US is a perfect case in point. Since Roe vs Wade was overturned in 2022, state after state has passed varying levels of restrictions on abortions. In Texas, where abortion for almost any reason is completely outlawed, a midwife, Maria Margarita Rojas, and her assistant have been arrested for illegally performing an abortion. They face up to 20 years each in jail if found guilty, which they very well may be. And there are a lot of women who will support that conviction in Texas, a deeply conservative Christian bastion.

But it isn’t only abortion the Far Right Christian women’s groups are going after. Fertility treatments, even basic contraception are under attack as well. Many of these women are adamant supporters of women going back to ‘traditional’ women’s roles, raising children and having no work lives outside the home, no professions, no careers. As the US vice-president, J.D. Vance has said, women should be at home raising their children while grandmothers should be at home helping them. In other words, women should not be in the workforce unless they have no children. How wonderfully 19th century of him.

But Vance is not alone. As the Far Right Christian movement in the US increasingly embraces an extreme Christian Nationalism, one of the tenets being espoused is the responsibility of white people to reproduce themselves as prolifically as possible to make sure they outnumber the people of colour who threaten to take over ‘their’ country. Already white Americans with European ancestry are in the minority in the US which is causing panic amongst the many deeply racist men and women in the US who believe that God gave Europeans America for their own. (Never mind those pesky, non-white Native Americans who had been there for millennia before them.) So they are demanding a new baby boom, whites only of course. The new ‘tradwife’ back-to-the land movement, with nice white women having as many children as possible, has become very popular.

However, Christian Nationalism is very unlikely to succeed in its repopulation goals, partly because, in today’s economy, very few people of any colour can afford to have one partner staying home, however much they might like to, JD Vance and tradwives aside (all tradwives have a husband in a high-paying job or they themselves have lucrative home businesses). Thus going after contraception will at the very least force white women to have more children whether they can afford to stay home with them, or afford the children themselves. It will, therefore, cause increased poverty. Plus there is, of course, a major logical flaw in this movement to ban contraceptives. Universal abortion bans together with universal denial of access to contraceptives will not only produce a baby boom of white babies. And given that whites are already outnumbered by people of colour in the US (including, by racist standards, Hispanics), a contraceptive ban is not going to ‘right’ the increasing racial imbalance between whites and people of colour. Only subjugation of people of colour, including indentured servitude, slavery, mass imprisonment, various types of genocide and, of course, deportation will achieve that. To that end, mass deportations and imprisonment of both illegal and legal immigrants of colour have begun. It is only a matter of time, probably very little time, before the rest are implemented, although probably under other terminology. Florida revisionary historical texts now refer to slavery as ‘voluntary labour’, a euphemism that would be laughable if its reimplementation in some form weren’t so frighteningly likely and the original reality so very ugly.

Why do women embrace ideologies that are oppressive to women? Partly because Far Right Christian women are taught that God has ordained women to be subject to men so that their faith hinges on embracing that submission. Many genuinely believe in what they are taught so that when their (always male) pastors tell them that having children is their divine purpose in life, how can they disagree? Then women who do not embrace the same ideology become the enemy.

When it comes to abortion, many Far Right Christians as well as conservative Catholics are taught that a child has a soul from the moment of conception, based on a small handful of verses in the Bible, and therefore the abortion of even a one hour old fertilised egg, such as induced by the contraceptive ‘morning after’ pill, is murder. The fact that most doctors, including Christian doctors, disagree with this is of absolutely no interest to those who believe it. As the Far Right Christian movement grows and gains power, particularly political power, so abortion doctors, midwives who perform or even aid a woman to abort, companies that provide abortion pills, through to women who take those pills or get an abortion another way or even, more frighteningly in some ways, have a miscarriage are seen, quite simply, as murderers. They have taken the life of a person with a soul.

Last week a young anti-abortion woman facing off against an older pro-abortion woman who wanted the pro-abortion movement to take a more aggressive stance against their opposites said “you may hate me but we love you.” Unfortunately, the reverse is true. Whether they can admit it or not, most female anti-abortionists have been taught to hate women who do not believe what they believe and virulently hate women who ‘murder’ innocent, vulnerable unborn children. At the very best they pity them because, in Far Right Christian circles, pro-abortionists and women who get abortions for any reason at all are destined for hell. In all these ‘causes’, under the smoke-and-mirrors guise of love, women hate women increasingly.

“The poison of patriarchy is back—and it is back with a vengeance.” These are not the words of a woman defending women’s rights but a man, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. It is wonderful that some men are standing up for women’s rights, but it makes it all the more tragic that an increasing number of women are trying to destroy them. If they don’t want those rights, if they choose to subject themselves to men, that is their right. But they do not have the right to force that choice onto hundreds of thousands of other women. No one should have that much power to destroy the rights of others. No one.

(23 March, 2025)