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** Daily Newsletter: October 16, 2025
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** In today’s newsletter:
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MARY HARRINGTON: Metaphysics of Care ([link removed])

CARMEL RICHARDSON: Expanded Abortion Pill Access Puts Death in Women’s Hands ([link removed])

Welcome to the First Things daily newsletter, your guide to the ideas and events shaping our shared moral, cultural, and religious life. Each article we publish continues the conversations First Things has led for thirty-five years.

Today, two pieces about women and their dependents: Mary Harrington reviews two books about care, while Carmel Richardson explores the failure of care in the Trump administration’s approval of a new abortion pill.
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** Metaphysics of Care ([link removed])
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** Mary Harrington
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From the November issue: The necessity of caring for those who cannot care for themselves is an inconvenient reality in the age of self-actualization. Mary Harrington reviews two books that argue care and dependence are actually essential to human flourishing: Leah Libresco Sargeant’s The Dignity of Dependence and Tim Jackson’s The Care Economy. Harrington writes that both authors tap into something real about human nature in their respective realms (motherhood and the family for Sergeant, the economy for Jackson) yet could push further their assertions that the nature of interdependence is immutable, not optional.

For further reading: Harrington wrote more about the contradictions within the women’s liberation movement in “Reactionary Feminism ([link removed]) ” (June/July 2021). On the dependent nature of marriage, she wrote, “I have found more peace and equality—not to mention more freedom from futile power-games—in the cooperative enterprise of building a home and family than I ever had in my progressive twenties.”
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** Expanded Abortion Pill Access Puts Death in Women’s Hands ([link removed])
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** CARMEL RICHARDSON
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With the FDA approval of a new generic version of the chemical abortion drug, Trump’s (always tenuous) pro-life credentials are on the rocks. The drug, which is responsible for 63 percent of all U.S. abortions, will now be cheaper and more widely available than ever before, despite the fact that 11 percent of women who take it experience life-threatening side effects. Carmel Richardson writes that the administration’s de facto promotion of this kind of abortion shows that 1) “the Trump-Vance ticket was never pro-life” and 2) we can expect disastrous consequences from relegating abortion to a purely private act.

For further reading: Rachel Roth Aldhizer wrote about the dangers of chemical abortion in her essay “The Case Against the Abortion Pill ([link removed]) ” (May 2024). Normalizing all abortion, but especially chemical abortion due to its ease of access, creates many stories “in which a child dies and a woman’s body becomes collateral damage in the culture war.”
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** What Is the Longhouse? ([link removed])
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** L0m3z
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In the news: Today, contributor Helen Andrews has a piece out in Compact on “The Great Feminization ([link removed]) .” The feminization thesis argues that “wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” The article is picking up steam, and it draws on a phenomenon labeled, in internet parlance, “the Longhouse.” Passage Press founder Jonathan Keeperman (under his pseudonym L0m3z) wrote about the Longhouse in these pages in 2023, to much controversy. It is also our most read article of all time.

Upcoming Events
* November 2, 2025: A Night of Poetry with Ben Myers | New York, NY. Register here ([link removed]) . ([link removed])
* November 3, 2025: The 38th Annual Erasmus Lecture: In Praise of Translation with Bishop Erik Varden | New York, NY. Register here. ([link removed])
* November 11, 2025: The Future of Higher Education, a discussion with Mark Bauerlein and Mark Regnerus | Irving, TX. Register here. ([link removed])
* January 9, 2026: Second Annual Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida | Sarasota, FL. Details coming soon.

Until next time.
Virginia Aabram's signature


** VIRGINIA AABRAM
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Newsletter Editor
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