In many places, in many cultures, and in many times, femaleness has been treated as inferior to maleness. Even in our own culture, where many people believe that women have made so much progress toward equality, many women have to work hard to see themselves with the dignity and care with which we were created.

When I look at something like artificial contraception, used as almost a rite of passage for girls entering womanhood today, I can’t help but think of the message of femininity that it shouts. It is medication that is not given to sick people in order to heal them of their infirmity, but instead it is a pill given to a perfectly healthy body in order to change her natural functioning body in a way that the culture views as better.

The message that artificial contraception brings is that women’s bodies and their functioning is inherently inferior to the way male bodies behave and so women must rely on pharmaceuticals to improve us. Young women whose bodies are still maturing, are told that the “responsible” thing for them to do, is to eradicate their natural functioning. People argue that women cannot be liberated unless we have access to such drugs and devices.  Essentially, this is saying that our own bodies are our own enemies and that we need science to liberate those of us who were unfortunate enough to have been born female.

A culture that accepts contraception and abortion as women’s liberators is a culture that has accepted that femininity is a defect, a kind of unlucky throw of the dice that lands unfavorably on 50% of the population.

In a final act of deception, this culture that looks so disrespectfully on females then turns and calls their view “feminism,” when nothing could be further from the truth.