March is Women’s History Month and the annual celebration of International Women’s Day. Magazines, networks and organizations have taken the month to feature the career achievements of many women, while adding suggestions about how they can be improved upon. 

On International Women’s Day (IWD), the United Nations released a video statement by Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed reminding the world that “gender equality is essential to the effectiveness of our work, and we cannot afford to miss out on the contributions of half of the world’s population.”

“Let us be clear,” Ms. Mohammad explained, “we cannot build the future we want and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals without the full participation of women.”

U.N. General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa added that “we need more women leaders participating in public life and taking decisions.” 

The online site Axios asked leading women what they thought  the “one big thing” is that matters most to women in 2019. Tory Burch said what matters “is shattering stereotypes and embracing ambition.” Melinda Gates suggested it “is access to tech. Ensuring that women have access to technology both as users of it and as creators of it.” And Anne Finucane, vice chairman of Bank of America, said: “I think we can be more hopeful. Just take a look at business: We see more women on boards, and those boards and companies are doing better than ever. Our research finds lower volatility and higher returns if you have two or more women on a board. Then look at politics: More women than ever in Congress — and not just more women, but greater diversity.”

The general message to women for the last several decades, and smartly echoed on IWD, is that the future of women is in work, that we need equal pay, more opportunities, more avenues for our ambition, more domains for our dreams. In fact, as we are told, women’s work is so vital and pivotal to our happiness, that abortion must remain the law of the land so that no woman is saddled with an unwanted pregnancy getting in the way of her dreams. Rose McGowan just reminded us of this in her recent statement: “I realized I could not bring a child into my world and simultaneously change the world.” 

The overwhelming cultural message fed to women is that we will finally be equal, free, and happy when we have the work we want. That work will set us free — free from discrimination, financial restraints, controlling men — free to be who we are. Work is where women will find freedom. 

There is just one small problem with all of this: it forgets history. As I read through these lofty sounding sentiments, it struck me like never before that this message, so thickly layered into our contemporary culture, has roots somewhere else — in a dark place where we don’t dare shine too much light. There are austere signs hanging in historically haunted ghost towns in Germany and Poland. They read: Arbeit Macht Frei, or “work will set you free.” This was the broken promise held out to prisoners of Auschwitz, of Dachau, of Sachsenhausen. 

A closer look at the link between our culture and Auschwitz is even more chilling. Hitler killed roughly 11 million. Our culture has made abortion our own “Final Solution” to what it considers the obstacle of female happiness. Sixty million children have been “erased,” but in a way that would impress even Adolph — the “solution” no longer involves dirty, disease-ridden, lice-infested, hungry places, with the undesirables arriving in box car after box car, but young women heading into abortion clinics in T-shirts and TOMS who believe that they are empowered by their choice. “Shout Your Abortion!” they say. Be proud that you exercised your right. In the new Hulu series Shrill — based on the book written by Shout Your Abortion co-found Lindy West — the main character Annie tells us that her abortion made her feeling “powerful.” The propaganda is complete. Who needs stormtroopers with guns when you have mothers, grandmothers, fathers, celebrities and politicians doing the work?

As for women, has this war on their children made them happier? Sadly, every metric available to us says “no.” Statistics on depression, substance abuse, suicide and STDs all point to some incredibly unhappy women — many of whom get to their fifties, sixties, seventies, alone with a couple of cats to call their children. They wonder what happened. How did they end up like this when they did all the things the culture told them to do?

A cheap common tactic in debates is to “Go Hitler,” to assert that your opponent agrees with Hitler and, therefore, must be dismissed out of hand. Mine is not that argument. As I explain in-depth in my latest book, The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity, the roots of radical feminism go deeper than Nazi Germany per se — drinking from the same socialist well from which the Nazis drank, but drawing ultimate nourishment from the flawed 19th-century anthropology/philosophy of Marxism and socialism. Feminists reject the notion that human nature created by God is fundamentally good. Like the ideologues from the failed Soviet and Nazi states, radical feminists embrace a diabolical view that nature can and should be changed and that men and women should live without family, faith, love and authentic community. Critical to all that is the idea that women need to become efficient workers. Even the two hot-button issues of 2019 reveal this link with the further reach of abortion to include infanticide and a rebranding of socialism with the “Green New Deal.” Women committed to work over the family is an essential element of socialist dogma.

“So are you saying women shouldn’t work at all?” is the common reaction to my argument. The human mind, as Aristotle pointed out millennia ago, likes to swing from one extreme to the other. No, I’m not suggesting that women shouldn’t work, but there has to be a happy medium where we don’t buy into the lie that our children are the enemies of our success.

As much as we look down upon those primitive cultures that offered human sacrifice, our own culture has thoroughly adopted it, albeit in a much more sanitized form. Work has become yet another idol to which humanity is sacrificing — but tragically, it is our own children who are the victims. But as women grow older and find themselves broken and alone, they too are realizing, just as the victims of the Holocaust learned well, work will never set you free.