Young women making their own fight

We know that much of MAGA hates women. They want to curtail our freedoms, starting with forced reproduction. They yearn for an imagined lost patriarchy where men were the only bosses and women were content with subservience. Many of them rage against the world that actually is, where young women expect to make their own choices, perhaps alongside a partner, but certainly not under a man's thumb.

Along with Jessica Valenti, Kylie Cheung writes Abortion, Every Day, a tireless chronicle of how right wingers are creating a minefield of barriers, state by state, for adults trying to make their own choices about when and whether to have children. Repression of reproductive freedom didn't start with the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs and it certainly doesn't end there. 

Recently Cheung took a break from reporting the daily details of these horrors to examine what is really happening among young women who are the targets of this coercion. She writes:

The Pink Pill Pipeline Isn’t Working: Conservatives’ tradwife push is losing to feminism. For now. 

... Anti-abortion leaders know their policies are unpopular with young people—certainly with young women who woke up [to the Supreme Court's decision] on June 24, 2022, with fewer rights over their bodies than their mothers and grandmothers.

But despite sweeping declarations of victory from outlets like Fox News, the truth is that this pink pill pipeline isn’t working: Gen Z women are the first feminist majority generation. According to a 2025 Ipsos survey, 53% of Gen Z women identify as feminists—compared with 46% of millennial women, 37% of Gen X women, and 39% of baby boomer women.

We know conservatives have a long-term goal: they’re looking decades into the future, building toward a reality in which women have no options but to marry and have children. They’re priming girls and young women, today, to accept this reality. And while we don’t know what the state of our rights and feminist resistance will look like in a few decades, we do know that right now, this propaganda doesn’t appear to be working on young women. In fact, conservatives’ attacks have activated the next generation—who are now on the frontlines for abortion and reproductive freedom.

The explosion of activism on their own behalf doesn't mean the young women don't suffer constraints that offer women-haters opportunities to try to mess with bodies and minds. 

... Of course, everyone has different experiences with different birth control methods, and our health system has failed many young women as they search for the right method for them. The U.S. economy has certainly failed many young women. Anti-birth control social media content flattens all of these complexities. These posts are solely meant to convince young women that birth control is bad and must be restricted, and marrying and having kids as early as possible is good, and even essential.

Conservatives aren’t interested in improving conditions within the health system or directing us toward real solutions—they’re interested in convincing us to blame feminism.

But it’s feminism that’s helping women see through the lies. [Reproductive rights organizer Stephanie] Spector says that after campaigning for over-the-counter birth control options for years, myths about birth control simply don’t work on her. But she still sees the disinformation everywhere.

Pink pill pipeline content often follows the same recipes and lines of attack: alternative health TikToks questioning the safety and efficacy of hormonal birth control, ‘tradwife’ videos starring young mothers of a whole litter of small children, or, increasingly, celebrity and tabloid stories with predictably misogynistic undertones.

... The right knows exactly what they’re doing: creating cultural support for their repressive, unpopular political agenda. They’re also replicating the success they’ve had with the “manosphere,” which attracts young men first with ‘apolitical’ content about weightlifting and dating. The pink pill pipeline similarly lures young women with seemingly apolitical content—ultimately steering them toward anti-birth control articles from the right-wing billionaire-backed women’s magazine Evie, or Candace Owens’ rants against voting rights. ...

Cheung know where this is going:

... This year, the Heritage Foundation—the architects behind Project 2025—articulated a 250-year plan for the U.S. in which young women will ‘voluntarily’ forgo work and school and pop out an endless flow of babies because there are no other options.

They don’t just want to take away women’s choices—they want to romanticize our oppression. But there’s nothing romantic or empowering about the actual impacts of denying young people options. ...

The whole article is worth reading. 

As we, the largely gray-haired resistance to MAGA, speak out against war and fascism, for democracy and taxing billionaires for the common good, let's never lose sight of the young women fighting for their freedoms.