Waging War on Womanhood: Reject the Counterfeit Woman

Our daughters deserve role models who are not in perpetual war with their own nature, and mothers who will not have their own babies killed.

There is indeed a war on women currently being waged in America, bloody as all hell. More accurately, it's a war on womanhood. But the warmongers are not conservative men, or priests or religious sisters, or the Catholic Church, or the Republicans. The aggressors are all those who have reduced the complexly beautiful, uniquely gifted, and dignified female human person to nothing but a vagina.

Washington, D.C. (Catholic Online) - As a consumer, I don't appreciate being sold a cheap knock-off of some item I wanted. As a book lover, I don't want the abridged or Cliffsnotes version. As a chocolate connoisseur, don't you dare try to feed me carob or that other nasty stuff called "white chocolate" because it is, in fact, not chocolate at all.

I want the genuine article. I want authenticity. I want the real deal, not the counterfeit. Doesn't everyone?

There's a particular counterfeit being aggressively marketed and sold as the genuine article, and it's far more serious than even chocolate. It's a counterfeit woman. She stands at the heart of all this brouhaha called "the war on women."

The criteria these days for being an acceptable modern woman, a woman of influence and power and progress, can be summed up in a pretty short list that revolves around the unholy trinity of sex, contraception, and abortion. All on-demand, without restriction, and the last two free of charge.

If you dare to object to that criteria or criticize those demands in any way and you are female, then you have broken ranks with the "sisterhood" and are no better than the men the sisterhood hates.

Since my place outside the sisterhood is quite secure, thank you, I'll continue.

The Girl Scouts USA gave a shout-out to some "incredible women" for 2013, including Texas Senator Wendy Davis, and Gloria Steinem. Both are fierce abortion advocates. (Davis is now running for Governor of Texas, and guess who really, I mean really, wants to see her elected? Planned Parenthood, Emily's List, and NARAL, all of whom have donated generously to her campaign.)

Comedian Sarah Silverman and her friends hosted a fundraiser for the Texas Abortion Fund and they called it "A Night of A Thousand Vaginas."  Classy.

Nina Burleigh of the New York Observer remembered 2013 with her own month-by-month list of sexist offenses committed against women, wherein she declared that "childbirth itself is a gruesome and violent event" no worse than late-term abortion. Among Burleigh's other quotables is this gem: "I'd be happy to give Bill Clinton oral sex just to thank him for keeping abortion legal."

In her recent "opinion" piece over at US News and World Report entitled "The Catholic Supreme Court's War on Women", Jamie Stiehm vomited up the most loathing, whiny, and dim-witted tantrum ever pawned off as journalism. (Her bigoted screed was expertly dismantled by The Anchoress, as well as Deacon Greg Kandra and others.)

These are just a few recent examples of the dissonant pitch being echoed out there.

There is indeed a war on women currently being waged in America, bloody as all hell. More accurately, it's a war on womanhood. But the warmongers are not conservative men, or priests or religious sisters, or the Catholic Church, or the Republicans. The aggressors are women like Davis, Steinem, Burleigh, Stiehm, Silverman, Cecile Richards, and all those who have reduced the complexly beautiful, uniquely gifted, and dignified female human person to nothing but a vagina.

They are the sisterhood that talks non-stop about their "lady parts" and their sexual habits while simultaneously telling the government to stay out of their bedrooms and pay for their birth control at the same time.

These foot soldiers in the war on womanhood try to paint fertility and pregnancy as a disease, and childbirth as a gruesome, violent event. They insist that a woman's power comes from being able to execute her own baby. Victory in this war means the child has been successfully "terminated."

They get fuel and cover for their war from politicians who take their orders from Planned Parenthood, and, shamefully, from a medical profession that calls it "health care" to poison female bodies with nasty chemicals and devices that have dangerous side-effects nobody in their right mind should consider healthy for women.

Alas, no longer "victims of biology destined to be shackled to a fruitful womb" (so saith the sisterhood), women have now "progressed" to being nothing more than a cruel bully willing to kill someone who can't fight back at all; someone who happens to share her DNA; someone who rightfully deserves protection, especially from women.

It strikes a particularly evil chord for women to turn on their own God-given nature. Scream all you want in protest, but it is God's thoughtful design for the human person and the human race that women are the bearers of new life; women are the ones He partners with in a profoundly creative way. (Did I say that every woman on the planet must become pregnant and give birth in order to be a real woman? No. I didn't.)

We may wish sometimes that men could share the reproductive load more "equally", but they can't and they never will. Women are the ones who have both the joy and the burden of childbearing. It's a woman's profound gift and sometimes her heavy cross. In fact, it's usually both at the same time.

The fact that many women will never know this joy and cross for a variety of reasons changes nothing. It remains an integral and beautiful part of a woman's nature. It is a remarkable thing, an astounding thing, to be entrusted with an entirely new creation and a new immortal soul. Only a woman can contain two souls at once. What could be more empowering?

Speaking of power, it needs to be said: crude does not equal powerful, and delicacy does not equal weakness. Vulgarity isn't impressive. Being profane and immodest doesn't make you tough and formidable. It just makes you sleazy and pathetic. Women should never be sleazy and pathetic.

That's why this war on womanhood, and the war on the womb, is so freakish and unnatural and scary. It's like forcing a symphony to play out of tune and without rhythm. It's like lobbying for the sun to go cold and dark. It's like preferring a stagnant and smelly pool to a clear, rushing river. The objective of this war seems to be that women cease to be authentic and lovely women who appreciate their own unique design; it means turning life-bearers into barbaric armed guards at barren doors.

What we'll be left with is a crass, self-loathing, hostile version, much like what's currently on parade as the modern woman. She is "equal" to the men she hates and emasculates and blames for her lot in life. She objectifies and degrades herself in her manner of dress, speech, conduct, and thinking, but don't you dare suggest that her behavior is anything less than admirable.

She hates her own body and she will gladly risk her health by swallowing or injecting hormones she would never tolerate being given to the cows in the field. The vegetables, eggs, and milk had better be organic, but her own body must be a toxic dump in order for her to be "free" and have "preventive health care."

Most of all, she has made the child in the womb -- her child, her womb -- her enemy, who will be shown no mercy or even consideration. This unwelcome pest and threat to her plans is targeted and dealt with by whatever means necessary. Whether chemical or surgical, it doesn't matter. As long as the enemy is destroyed.

The natural and intense instinct to protect a child from danger (mother bear, anyone?) is perversely turned on its head, and now the child is considered the predator.

That is not how a woman was meant to live. That is not how a woman was meant to be. That is a sad, sad counterfeit.

Young girls beginning to navigate adulthood deserve much better than to be programmed to believe they can only fulfill their dreams and enjoy freedom and equality if they can manage to poison their healthy bodies and beat their functioning reproductive organs into submission with carcinogenic hormones.

They ought to be told the truth: that they are fearfully and wonderfully made for a purpose higher than themselves, as is every human person. Part of that mystery, for women, is the ability to protect and nurture a new human being within their womb. That is something to be treasured and respected, not despised and mocked.

Our daughters deserve role models who are not in perpetual war with their own nature, and mothers who will not have their own babies killed. We all deserve a society of women who appreciate and treasure womanhood, rather than viewing femininity as an unfair punishment or a disability to be overcome.

A wise man once reminded us that women set the standard by which society either rises or falls. Ours is falling fast. Women who love their feminine nature can change that.

"When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women." (Archbishop Fulton Sheen)

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Jennifer Hartline is a grateful Catholic, a proud Army wife and mother of four children. She is a contributing writer for Catholic Online. Visit her online at Wake Up, Deborah!

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