# Mary Pride — "family planning is the mother of abortion" > [!quote] "Family planning is the mother of abortion. A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion could be popular." > — Mary Pride, *The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality* (Crossway, 1985) ## Context The founding text of the [[Quiverfull]] movement, written by a former feminist activist who reframed her conversion to conservative Christianity as a return to "reality." Pride argued that a wife's calling is full-time childbearing and homemaking, and that contraception itself — not just abortion — is a rejection of God's design. The book seeded the conservative Christian homeschooling world and the maximal-fertility theology later associated with families like the Duggars. ## Why this matters This is the female-facing complement to the male-authority theology in this collection: where [[Douglas Wilson - penetrates conquers colonizes]] and [[Mark Driscoll - gullible and easier to deceive]] define men's dominion, Pride defines women's confinement to the womb, casting reproductive choice itself as the original sin behind abortion. It is the 1980s religious-right root of the [[Pronatalism]] that resurfaced in secular, political form in the 2020s — the line connecting Quiverfull to [[JD Vance]]'s fertility politics and the broader pronatalist turn. A foundational [[Antifeminism]] receipt. ## Verification - **Movement history citing the book:** [Apologetics Index — Quiverfull](https://www.apologeticsindex.org/389-quiverfull); [Rewire News — "Quiverfull: More Children for God's Army"](https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2006/11/30/quiverfull-more-children-for-gods-army/). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed; from Pride's own book, the movement's founding text. ## Related quotes - [[Douglas Wilson - penetrates conquers colonizes]] — the male-authority side of the same patriarchal program. - [[JD Vance - childless cat ladies]] — the secular-political descendant of fertility-as-virtue. - Featured in [[Misogyny on the Right]].