“What would it take to create a world in which every baby is welcome, without this coming at the cost of his or her mother’s personhood?”
This was the question that Mary Harrington, contributing editor at UnHerd and self-described “reactionary feminist,” asked at the outset of the 2026 Women’s Convention, a three-day conference I attended last month in Rochester, New York. Harrington and I disagree on just about everything, but her question struck me as a good one. What could be more true to my own liberal politics than ensuring the dignity and well-being of women who choose to have children?
The conference was co-hosted by the “sex-realist” publication Fairer Disputations and the anti-abortion advocacy group Feminists Choosing Life of New York. Like Harrington, most of the 200 women in attendance were white, married, and Christian. I met a publicist from Colorado, a chaplain living in Texas, and a homeschooling mother of four from New Jersey. All of them gave me the impression that they could breastfeed and debate Aristotle at the same time.
No one I spoke to was enthusiastic about Donald Trump (or the Democratic Party). Several expressed concern about the growing threat of misogyny on the right. A gaggle of conservative college women from Michigan told me they worried about their male classmates who joked about repealing the 19th Amendment. When guest speaker Helen Roy, a popular Catholic Substacker, mentioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth onstage, the auditorium collectively groaned.
One morning, I carpooled to the conference venue, a Tudor Revival mansion in a leafy part of town, with a group of chatty ladies in a minivan. If they were put off by my press badge and libbed-out vibe, it didn’t show.
And yet, however friendly I found this congregation, however well-read and well-dressed, improving the material lives of mothers was not what they wanted to talk about.