Here is an interesting article on National Review Online about women and religiosity.  Of particular interest is this comment about why, contra today’s feminists, Judeo-Christian religion empowers and dignifies women:

Judaism’s view of women departed sharply from that ancient model. The practice of “holy prostitution” so common in the ancient world was renounced, as was the image of the pagan goddess as sexual ideal. The Hebrew Scriptures revealed a personal God who had created men and women in his image. Women now were connected to the realm of the spirit, not just the flesh, and motherhood was seen as a personal event in the life of the mother and a blessing from God, not merely a woman’s duty-bound contribution to the increase of the tribe.  The Gospels continued on this trajectory. They depicted God taking flesh in the womb of a woman, a woman who was free to accept or reject her role as the mother of Jesus. […] Although Christians themselves often have failed to live up to Jesus’ example regarding women, Gerl-Falkovitz said, feminism is an outgrowth of Christian ideas about women’s equal dignity: “Only in Judeo-Christian culture sprang up this humanization of women.”

Hmm, prostitution and pagan sexuality as the paradigm for women’s worth, that doesn’t have anything at all to do with today’s secular culture, does it?

So much of the abortion debate abortion rhetoric takes it for granted that pregnancy and motherhood is inherently a blight, a burden and a hardship that should only under very narrow circumstances be borne by a woman.  How inhuman this is compared to the “unenlightened” religious view of a child as a blessing and a gift, and of motherhood as sanctified, and especially in Christian thought, even miraculous.  I believe that the Woodstock generation sincerely thought they were creating a utopia, but the secular leftist world is becoming increasingly joyless and grim, as well as misogynistic.