‘Mass Exodus’: Dr. Jay Richards on the Demise of Gender Ideology and What It Means for the Pro-Life Movement

by Emily Washburn | February 5, 2025 | Life Marriage

What do gender and sexual ideology have to do with protecting preborn babies?

Dr. Jay Richards explained at this year’s National Pro-Life Summit, an annual event designed to help people, particularly students, defend and advance the pro-life cause.

Richards, who directs the DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family at the Heritage Foundation, joined Kristen Hawkins, Charlie Kirk, Ben Carson, Kayleigh McEnany and dozens of other experts in Washington D.C. to help attendees understand the pro-life landscape in 2025.

“To protect [preborn babies], we need to think about them [within] the institution of the family, and the destruction of the family as a result of the sexual revolution,” he exhorted aspiring activists.

Hosted by Students for Life, the Summit drew energy and inspiration from pro-life wins in the White House. But Richards emphasized the pro-life movement’s unique opportunity to change hitherto inaccessible hearts and minds.

To take advantage of this opportunity, he argued, pro-lifers must understand the President’s actions in the context of a larger backlash against the ideology of the sexual revolution.

To do that, Richards explained the connection between abortion and gender ideology.

Killing children in the womb and abolishing the sexual binary might seem unrelated. But Richards contended both are distinct consequences of the sexual revolution, an ideology that “exploded” in the 1960s with the introduction of birth control.

Richards suggested picturing abortion and gender ideology as two stations on a train track.

Imagine the sexual revolution is a train trip. You’re on a track, so the train is moving you in a particular direction. And there’s different stations along the way to your destinations … At every stop, people can get off the train.

Contrary to popular belief, the sexual revolution isn’t moving passengers to a more sexually liberated society.

“If that’s what it is [doing], we wouldn’t be sterilizing children who are confused about their bodies in 2025,” Richards remarked.

Instead, the fundamental premise of the sexual revolution is the legal and social “fracturing” of marriage, sex and childbirth, or, “The idea that those things don’t have to go together, ought not to go together, might be better if they don’t always go together.”

Abortion and gender ideology should be understood as phenomena that contribute to the rupture of God’s design.

Abortion is one of the revolution’s earliest stops. It is what Richards calls an enabling technology — something that makes the ideas of the revolution feasible. The sexual revolution’s first enabling technology, and train stop, was the birth control pill.

“There’s been types of contraception or contraceptive behaviors for as long as there have been humans,” Richards acknowledged, continuing,

But it was not until the approved birth control pill that it seemed at least [plausible] to have sex, all you want, right in the middle of the most fertile years of your life without having to deal with the consequences, namely a baby.

But birth control didn’t sufficiently delink sex and childbirth. In fact, Richards noted, “It so greatly increased out-of-wedlock sexual activity that it vastly increased the numbers of out-of-wedlock births as well.”

The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 made abortion the new stopgap — an enabling technology that stopped childbirth by killing the child.

Gender ideology comes quite a few stations down the line, after the Supreme Court detached sex and marriage in 2015.

Prior to the dissociation of sex and childbirth, Richards argued, the state had a compelling interest to recognize marriage as a productive partnership between a man and a woman:

Marriage is the institution that socially ratifies, recognizes, protects and reinforces a basic biological reality, that it takes a fertile male and a fertile female, one of each, to mate.

There’s a widespread assumption, now widely confirmed by social science, that, all things being equal, the well-being of a child is enhanced dramatically if that child is raised by his or her married mother and father.

So, there’s a state interest in recognizing and protecting and distinguishing this institution from, say, a rotary club, voluntary association, or a religious body, or a medical license or a real estate license.

But, by 2015, Americans had largely accepted the idea that sex, marriage and childbirth weren’t related — and didn’t need to be.

Richards decoded the logic behind Obergefell v. Hodges: If sex doesn’t have to take place within a marriage, and marriage doesn’t have anything to do with producing or raising children, then marriage need not be between a man and a woman.

Within a week of the Obergefell ruling, trans activists began appearing on the covers of magazines. The T, joked Richards, began jockeying for a place with the Ls, Gs, and Bs.

Where once all relationships — including homosexual ones — assumed a sexual binary, the introduction of gender ideology now made the sexual binary obsolete, and even discriminatory.

Richards explained the progression like this:

Obergefell decided that the sexual binary did not matter for the institution of marriage. Gender ideology just says the sexual binary does not matter, period.

A logical next step.

Until gender ideology, most people had passively accepted a ride on the sexual revolution express. But this stop struck passengers differently from its predecessors, Richards found:

We’re now far enough along that the victims [of gender ideology] are telling their stories. That makes this different from abortion. The primary victims of abortion very rarely live to tell about it. The detransitioners do. This is a different issue from every one before. This train station is different from every other train station before.

Confronted with the consequences of demolishing the sexual binary, Richards said people have gotten off the ride.

It’s a mass exit of people wanting off this train. People who were partisans in favor of same-sex marriage, people who had been pro-choice their whole lives, people who thought free sex was great, people who had never spent two seconds thinking about the sexual revolution saw Rachel Levine, and big ol’ Leah Thomas standing next to Riley Gaines, and said, “This is insane.”

This is the environment pro-lifers find themselves in, Richards concluded — on a train station with a bunch of confused, disillusioned people that “are open to conversations [they] were not open to five years ago.”

Richards urged pro-lifers to equip themselves to have these important, delicate conversations. His advice? Connect the systematic destruction of God’s design with bizarre ideology making them exit the crazy train in the first place — station by station.

To walk it back, you have to connect pre-born babies to the sexual revolution. You have to be able to situate the sexual revolution as responsible for the destruction of the family and categorize abortion as a weapon of that attack.

If we can convince people in the train station of that, Richards said he’s convinced we can end “the scourge of abortion.”

This author tends to agree.

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Important New Research on How Married Parents Improve Child Well-Being

Here’s What Happens When Good People Don’t Connect Gay and Trans Ideology

Sorry ‘Gays Against Groomers,’ But Gay Activists Helped Start This Transgender Fire

Sorry ‘Gays Against Groomers,’ But Gay Activists Helped Start This Transgender Fire — Part Two

WSJ is Wrong About Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Having No Dire Effects

How the Binary in ‘LGBTQ+’ Reveals Its Utter Incoherence