The Pink Pill Pipeline Isn’t Working

Conservatives’ tradwife push is losing to feminism. For now.

Turning Point USA kicked off their annual “Women’s Leadership Summit” today, a national conference aimed at convincing young women that the rapid erosion of their human rights is a good thing, actually. The event is part of conservatives’ multimillion dollar pink pill pipeline—where young women are exposed to anti-feminist ideologies disguised as ‘lifestyle’ content, mostly on social media.

It’s not a coincidence that the rapidly growing creator economy of “tradwife” and female lifestyle influencers who oppose birth control and abortion comes at the same time those rights are under unprecedented threat. Anti-abortion leaders know their policies are unpopular with young people—certainly with young women who woke up on June 24, 2022, with fewer rights over their bodies than their mothers and grandmothers.

But despite sweeping declarations of victory from outlets like Fox News, the truth is that this pink pill pipeline isn’t working: Gen Z women are the first feminist majority generation. According to a 2025 Ipsos survey, 53% of Gen Z women identify as feminists—compared with 46% of millennial women, 37% of Gen X women, and 39% of baby boomer women.

We know conservatives have a long-term goal: they’re looking decades into the future, building toward a reality in which women have no options but to marry and have children. They’re priming girls and young women, today, to accept this reality. And while we don’t know what the state of our rights and feminist resistance will look like in a few decades, we do know that right now, this propaganda doesn’t appear to be working on young women. In fact, conservatives’ attacks have activated the next generation—who are now on the frontlines for abortion and reproductive freedom.

College students across the country have successfully organized for emergency contraceptive vending machines, access to birth control, and abortion pills at their campus health centers. Thanks to student organizers, public universities are now required to offer medication abortion on campus in states like California, Massachusetts, Colorado, and others.

Taylor Joy Chambers, a recent graduate of the University of Oregon, had a life-saving abortion for her ectopic pregnancy in her sophomore year of college, where she served as Secretary of Gender and Sexuality Advocacy in her student government. Born into a Catholic, anti-abortion family in Arizona, Chambers nevertheless found her calling organizing for reproductive rights on campus and became a sex educator. She had an IUD and used condoms during sex, but faced a dangerous, unplanned pregnancy, anyway.

It’s not lost on Chambers that abortion saved not just her life—but her future and education. She now works at a clinic in Arizona near a university, and many of the patients she serves are students.

Rika Poscover, president of Temple University’s Planned Parenthood Generation Action, just graduated in May. Earlier this year, she successfully organized for a cost-free emergency contraception vending machine that dispensed over 120 units within just five days.

There was never a question of whether Poscover would get involved in organizing for reproductive freedom in college: her first day of school came just weeks after Dobbs. Not only did her mother take her to feminist rallies and protests throughout her childhood, but as she recalls:

“When I was little, from when my mom was tying my shoe laces before school, she always told me I had to be independent, get an education, be able to stand on my own two feet, not rely on a husband.”

From the moment Poscover encountered the tradwife influencer ‘Ballerina Farm’ on her social feed, she clicked “Not Interested”—because she wasn’t. She’s now working toward her MPH and plans to work in sex education.

For Reproaction organizer Stephanie Spector, it was the overturning of Roe that first galvanized her to get involved at George Washington University. She and fellow student organizers looked to the three dozen U.S. universities that won access to abortion pills on campus—and demanded GWU do the same. They successfully pushed for $5 Plan B vending machines on campus, and campaigned against their university health center, which exclusively referred abortion seekers to a facility that would send students to religious, anti-abortion centers.

Today, Spector leads education campaigns on self-managed abortion and organizes with young people who want to do what she did—bring abortion access to campus. For all the bumps and barriers along the way, Spector credits getting involved with reproductive rights organizing at a young age with her ability to “see tradwife influencers and birth control disinfo for what they are,” and to understand how anti-abortion propaganda is increasingly packaged as “a form of feminist empowerment.”

“They’ll talk about ‘being your own type of feminist,’ or rebelling against the medical system and reclaiming their health,” she says.

Of course, everyone has different experiences with different birth control methods, and our health system has failed many young women as they search for the right method for them. The U.S. economy has certainly failed many young women. Anti-birth control social media content flattens all of these complexities. These posts are solely meant to convince young women that birth control is bad and must be restricted, and marrying and having kids as early as possible is good, and even essential.

Conservatives aren’t interested in improving conditions within the health system or directing us toward real solutions—they’re interested in convincing us to blame feminism.

But it’s feminism that’s helping women see through the lies. Spector says that after campaigning for over-the-counter birth control options for years, myths about birth control simply don’t work on her. But she still sees the disinformation everywhere.

Pink pill pipeline content often follows the same recipes and lines of attack: alternative health TikToks questioning the safety and efficacy of hormonal birth control, ‘tradwife’ videos starring young mothers of a whole litter of small children, or, increasingly, celebrity and tabloid stories with predictably misogynistic undertones.

Run-of-the-mill pink pill pipeline content most prominently features supposedly apolitical dating advice on finding a man who will provide for you. You may also see posts from women like far-right Heritage Foundation researcher Emma Waters, who tells her followers they can strive to be both a “girlboss” and a “tradwife” in one—by being a “side hustle tradwife.”

The right knows exactly what they’re doing: creating cultural support for their repressive, unpopular political agenda. They’re also replicating the success they’ve had with the “manosphere,” which attracts young men first with ‘apolitical’ content about weightlifting and dating. The pink pill pipeline similarly lures young women with seemingly apolitical content—ultimately steering them toward anti-birth control articles from the right-wing billionaire-backed women’s magazine Evie, or Candace Owens’ rants against voting rights.

And while most young women aren’t falling for it, some do. Haley Beavers Khoury, a student leader at Medical Students for Choice, says it’s frustrating when her friends will come to her with random, inaccurate factoids about abortion, birth control, or sexual health. “I’ll ask them, ‘Where’d you hear that?’ And it’s always, ‘Oh, some influencer.’”

It’s an exhausting, recurring phenomenon—but it’s only reassured Khoury that she’s chosen the right career trajectory, positioning her to fight this disinformation and be a trusted resource to her community.

Khoury just finished her fourth year of medical school and is beginning her residency in Louisiana—which doesn’t just ban abortion, but has also criminalized possession of mifepristone and misoprostol. She grew up in Ohio, an active member of her Catholic church’s youth group. But once Khoury realized that she wanted to study and practice medicine, she says she “didn’t care about anything but reproductive care,” awed by the “miracles” in advancements in women’s health, and all the political and economic gains we owe to these advancements.

For Khoury and her peers, the last few years have only made them more determined:

“The way many of us see it is, no matter the legal or societal threats, no matter what, people are still going to need reproductive care, need abortion. So, we’re going to train to provide that—no matter what.”

Chambers, too, will come across TikToks of young mothers proclaiming how happy they are to be tradwives, and young women ranting against birth control or even insisting they don’t want the right to vote.

That, of course, is the end goal: This year, the Heritage Foundation—the architects behind Project 2025—articulated a 250-year plan for the U.S. in which young women will ‘voluntarily’ forgo work and school and pop out an endless flow of babies because there are no other options.

They don’t just want to take away women’s choices—they want to romanticize our oppression. But there’s nothing romantic or empowering about the actual impacts of denying young people options.

Like so many other young women, none of it appeals to Chambers: growing up, she struggled with eating disorders and is intimately familiar with the desire to shrink oneself down into nothing.

“That’s the message I see in all this tradwife content, glorifying frailty of both body and mind to young women and girls. I don’t want to be encouraged to be weak.”