Jessica Valenti is excited. Very excited. In a recent article, she celebrates Planned Parenthood’s new program offering women abortion pills to keep at home “just in case” they might need them someday.
Reading it, I couldn’t help wondering how we got here. Women were once promised a movement centered on opportunity, independence, and expanding possibilities. Now one of modern feminism’s most enthusiastic victories sounds suspiciously like an abortion kit tucked next to the aspirin and Band-Aids.
What Exactly Are We Celebrating?
The program is called “Just in Case Abortion Pills,” and it does exactly what the name suggests. Women can get abortion medication ahead of time, before they are pregnant, before they know they need it, and before any urgent circumstance exists. Valenti calls this “so exciting” and says she has been telling anyone who can get pregnant that they should keep these pills in their medicine cabinet.
Well, there it is.
The feminist medicine cabinet.
Tylenol for headaches. Band-Aids for paper cuts. Abortion pills for that little just-in-case pregnancy.
Sorry, but some of us still think abortion carries more moral weight than a seasonal allergy flare-up.
The biggest threat to this baby is the abortion pill. Tens of millions of preborn babies like this are killed every year using abortion pills. The victims are not “clumps of cells” or “tissue” – they are humans like you and I, and we were all that size once. pic.twitter.com/BnstMmvEvV
— LifeSiteNews (@LifeSite) May 29, 2026
Valenti sees this as empowerment. I see something bleak. Not because women should be helpless. Hard situations happen. Pregnancies do not always arrive at convenient times, and life is rarely a Hallmark movie. Still, the enthusiasm is what stops me cold.
This is not framed as a tragic backup plan. It is not framed as something serious, heavy, or morally complicated. It is framed like progress. Like convenience. Like one more item women should keep stocked at home.
That is where the divide becomes obvious.
A Very Small Vision For Women
Modern feminism keeps insisting it exists to lift women up. Yet somehow the movement’s loudest celebrations often seem tied to helping women avoid motherhood, delay motherhood, erase motherhood, redefine womanhood, or treat pregnancy as a problem to manage.
- Where is the excitement for marriage?
- Where is the excitement for fathers?
- Where is the excitement for babies?
- Where is the excitement for building a family, raising children, and creating a stable life?
In this worldview, pregnancy appears mostly as a threat. Something to prepare against. Or something to neutralize. That might happen to you if you are not careful, so better keep the pills nearby.
That is a strange thing to call liberation. Feminism sold women a bigger life. Somehow the grand finale keeps looking like women being told to treat pregnancy as a medical inconvenience.
What a sad little victory lap.
The Part Progressives Never Want To Say Out Loud
Plenty of Americans disagree on abortion. We all know that. Some see abortion as health care. Others see it as the ending of an unborn life. That disagreement will not be solved in one blog post, and I am not pretending otherwise.
But can we at least stop pretending this is morally neutral?
An abortion pill is not a cough drop. It is not a vitamin. It is not emergency chocolate hidden in the pantry for a rough Tuesday.
For many of us, abortion is sad. It is serious. It involves more than one life. That does not disappear because activists wrap it in cheery language and call it access.
The casual tone matters because culture is shaped by what people celebrate. When abortion becomes something to stock up on, promote to friends, and keep around the house for later, that tells us something about the movement pushing it.
- It tells us pregnancy has been downgraded from blessing to burden.
- It tells us motherhood has been treated as an obstacle.
- It tells us modern feminism was never really about building families. It was about making sure family never got in the way.
Just In Case We Forgot
Maybe that is what bothers me most. Not that Jessica Valenti has her opinion. She does. I have mine. That is how this works.
What bothers me is the joy.
She reads about advanced abortion pills and sees progress. I read about advanced abortion pills and see a culture that has lost the plot.
Somewhere along the way, feminism stopped sounding like a movement that wanted more for women and started sounding like a movement that wanted fewer attachments, fewer obligations, fewer babies, and fewer reasons to slow down and build something lasting.
That is not my version of freedom. I wonder what Jessica would have to say about this video. My guess is she’d shrug her shoulders and call it a lie.
Freedom should not require women to view their own fertility as a threat. It should not teach young women that pregnancy is a crisis waiting to happen. It should not reduce empowerment to a pill pack sitting beside the toothpaste.
Women deserve better than the feminist abortion kit.
They deserve a culture that speaks about motherhood with at least as much enthusiasm as it speaks about ending pregnancies. Instead, they get a movement that struggles to say women and keeps shrinking womanhood down to avoiding babies and calling it progress.
Valenti sees “just in case” abortion pills and cheers.
I see them and wonder how modern feminism managed to make womanhood feel so small.
Feature Image: AI-generated illustration.