With a slight shake of the head, actress Allison Janney lamented not knowing about her fertility window until she was apparently in her 40s in a 2025 interview with Monica Lewinsky that started trending on X this week. “I was … under the impression that women could have kids until they were 50,” she said.
Janney expressed a frustration with American sex education that many women feel today: “They didn’t teach us anything about our bodies growing up,” she said.
Since the 1950s, American public schools have taught at least some version of sex education. Many “professional” doctors or educators would probably argue that the modern state of sex ed is far more advanced than anything from the ignorant past.
Yet both Janney, who is in her 60s, and her interviewer, Monica Lewinsky, who is in her 50s, both reported feeling uneducated on the limits and strengths of the most incredible aspect of the female body: its ability to conceive and grow a new life. Modern feminists will likely blame “all the misogyny in the world” for their lack of education, as Lewinsky did, but the culpability actually lies with the feminists themselves.
The average American birth rate has exponentially declined ever since the 1960s and the rise of the sexual revolution. In response to the family values of the 1950s and the seeds of sexual liberation in the 1920s, young adults in the 1960s began to believe and spread the lie that a person’s telos, or foundational purpose, is not in glorifying his Creator, but in pursuing personal fulfillment.
In 1960s culture, women were told to leave behind the Christian “chains” of chastity before marriage and embrace sex whenever and with whomever as a form of personal liberation. This precept tore apart sex and childbearing from the sanctity of marriage and devalued both actions altogether. Then, instead of appreciating the home, feminists began to worship work through the influence of books such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
Soon after, sex education became, as it still is today, focused on preventing pregnancy so that women can be “empowered” by licentiousness and participating in the workforce. In 1964 the then-medical director of Planned Parenthood created the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) to use sex education to push the radical feminist view of sex as a morally “neutral” act.
Sex education and U.S. law then expanded to focus on preventing pregnancy through contraception as the vastly increasing rate of teen pregnancies rocked America. By the 1980s, radical feminists had embraced abortion as a valid “cure” for the oppressive consequence of sex: children. One research paper found a 13 percent decrease in teen pregnancies in the wake of Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion.
Increasingly since the 1990s, institutional leftists have pushed women to use contraceptives as part of a cultural movement telling young women to embrace being a “girlboss” first and a wife or mother second. Many 2000s movies balanced empowered, working-class women with surface-level romantic relationships to spread the idea that the true American woman can have both.
Yet that idealized woman continues to be a myth. As finite creatures, humans are not made to work the full-time job of being a mother and the full-time job of corporate work simultaneously. Businesses seem to know this yet continue to exploit the feminist lie to keep potential or burnt-out mothers in their factories.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, large companies like BlackRock, Disney, and Macy’s began subsidizing their employee’s abortions instead of encouraging maternity leave because “a lot of these companies believe childless women are more productive and better for their profitability than mothers would be,” The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd wrote. In fact, half of all Fortune 100 companies “champion abortion for their employees.”
Another reason why companies enjoy women in the workforce is that the two-full-time-worker household allows organizations to pay both men and women less yet receive more work.
The sex education Janney and Lewinsky probably received and the culture they grew up in told them to use contraception, have abortions, put off having children, and to treat sex like a fun pastime. The results of said feminist lie are clear. Janney regrets not having children sooner and is left loving lesser creatures instead of kids and grandkids.
During the interview with Lewinsky, Janney pivoted to address her family legacy: her pets. “My true love in my world besides my friends and family are dogs,” she said. “Animals, and especially dogs … are my heart. I could not love dogs more.”
