My book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto is comprised of a set of words, each of which I was counseled against using, whether it be dignity, dependence, feminist, or manifesto, though at least manifesto is a warning about the other three. I’d like to begin considering what may be the most controversial of those words: feminist.

Why do I say that this book is a feminist book, a feminist project? Feminism, obviously a contested movement over time, is at its core about responding justly to women as women. Not women as neutral human beings—a kind of being who has never existed in all of human history—but as women. Not women as defective men, but distinctively women with our own needs. I contend that women’s equality is not premised and cannot be premised on our interchangeability with men.

That mindset that turns up in various ways in the feminist movement, attempting to help women get over the hump of not being men by finding better ways to “pass as men.” You can say, obviously we aren’t fully inter-changeable with men. There are some differences, some more or less dramatic, more or less morally valenced. A trivial difference between men and women is not even height—which is one of those cases where you see those overlapping bell curves move a little further apart—but grip strength. Men and women are perhaps most easily distinguished on grip strength, where 90 percent of women have weaker grip strength than all but 95 percent of men. The two bell curves are pretty far apart. This is the kind of difference between men and women it feels safe to acknowledge because even though this is true, I don’t think anyone says, “this is why we have to repeal the 19th amendment.”

When Fairness Looks Unequal

But when we look at other differences between men and women, we see that they become a little more threatening a little faster. Consider the example of the WNBA which has to decide what it means for women’s basketball to exist on parity with men’s basketball. I’m not going to touch the salary dispute here; I mean something more straightforward: Should the hoop for women be lower than the hoop for men? Is what’s fair a hoop that’s equivalently hard to dunk on when women are shorter? Or is it a hoop that’s exactly the same height as men’s?

This has been controversial when it comes to the three-point line, partly because you can see the difference. When colleges have two different three-point lines for their men’s and women’s teams, everyone can see there are two lines. It’s made people extremely uncomfortable to the point where it’s been rolled back to require women to play from the men’s line. Players were divided, but a number of women felt as long as people could see women weren’t playing the exact same game, women couldn’t make the case for being treated equally as players. If the line was a little closer, even if that made it equally hard to shoot, it wasn’t the same game, and they couldn’t be treated with the same respect.

They’re right to worry. Acknowledging differences between the sexes feels profoundly dangerous, precisely because we rely on the crude measure of interchangeability to make the case for equality. If I don’t know that you share my premises on what gives dignity to men or women, the easiest way for us to agree is to say, “We can agree they’re equally dignified because they are basically the same.” Everything that testifies against that sameness puts women’s equality in jeopardy.

Now, we might think this is not too consequential. You can put the three-point line at the same place as the men’s and all you’re doing is making it a little harder to shoot. Certainly some very strong words have been exchanged over it, compared to grip strength, but it doesn’t have that much force on my own life. But there are other differences between men and women that we find it harder to sidestep or cover up—other ways the physical differences between men and women play a role in our lives that are a lot harder to com-promise on.

Responding to a World Calibrated for Men

If you share a car with your spouse, you probably have had the experience of getting into the driver’s seat and either cranking it all the way back or cranking the seat all the way forward so either the husband or wife can reach the pedals comfortably. The problem with this isn’t just that it’s tedious to move the seat back and forth; it’s that airbags are designed assuming the person sitting in the driver’s seat is sitting back at a male-typical distance. When women scrunch the seat forward for an average car ride, it’s not a problem besides the actual moving of the seat. But when you get into an accident and the airbag goes off and it expects to come to a halt and cushion you several inches further back than you actually are, it hits women’s chests with a lot more explosive force because it hasn’t reached the end of its expansion. As a result, women in minor car accidents are much more likely to be sent to the hospital with broken ribs or pierced lungs than men are because it isn’t calibrated for the actual distance you’re sitting behind it.

There have been efforts to figure out what can be done about this. Some very short women petitioned the U.S. government for the ability to turn off their airbags, thinking they were safer without them than with something that they were so close to at the maximum expansive force. A safety regulator in Europe said, this was very sad, but it was also very hard to solve and wasn’t the car maker’s problem; you can’t expect manufacturers to deal with this. Just because females are slightly weaker and sit closer to the wheel, they can’t possibly be expected to accommodate. The act of being a woman in the world is interesting because it’s every individual woman’s problem to bridge the gap between herself and the way the world is prepared to receive her.

Abortion and the Price of Interchangeability

There’s another way that America has responded to the problem of women being too exposed, and too close, that has a very different set of victims. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, before Roe v. Wade, never thought abortion should be a matter of a constitutional appeal to privacy, which she thought was a weird and muddled way to make this case. She thought the strongest grounds for a claim to a right to abortion was on equal protection under the law grounds—that it would be hard for women to be treated as equal citizens under the law if they were not equivalent interchangeable with men, and abortion was a way of restoring that equality when the differences and asymmetries in re-production had robbed women of equal stature.

What she and others argued is that when there is an unexpected pregnancy, men and women biologically have very different capacities to walk away. For a man to abandon a baby he has fathered requires only cowardice. He just has to disappear and leave no forwarding address—it’s just a matter of running. For a woman to separate herself from her baby cannot be done as a mere act of the will; it requires an act of violence. It requires lethal drugs or a surgeon scalpel to sever the connection that she and her baby inhabit. Gins-burg argued that the strong asymmetry between men and women here made it hard for women to be treated as equal citizens and to make their case under employment law that they could be treated the same way as a male worker. The way she framed it is that abortion is the entry price for being an equal citizen in America. You must be equally able to walk away from childrearing responsibilities to be able to ride the rides.

Where she and I agree is I think she’s descriptively correct—that is the expectation we place on women. It’s even the expectation we place on men that obviously a man would choose to walk away when things were hard, when a baby is disabled, when some constraint or thing that’s asked of him is too much for him to easily bear. I just don’t think helping women reach an equality of vice with men is a real vote for the equal dignity of women.

Why Needing Others Does Not Degrade Us

As I noted earlier, one of the provocative words on this book cover is feminist, but one of the other ones is dependence. I was counseled several times, does it have to say dependence? Can’t it say mutuality or sharing or some-thing else? Because dependence isn’t bad, but how could it be dignified to be dependent? But that’s why it’s on the cover—to warn you that the book will make you uncomfortable, that I’m arguing for a revaluing of values.

Because when we look at the arguments dehumanizing the baby in the womb, they often start with the baby’s dependence. There can even be an instinct within the pro-life movement to eagerly respond with what the baby can do, as if embarrassed that the baby indeed is dependent on the mother. We appeal to what the baby does have: Did you know after x many weeks old, the baby can hear you? Did you know the baby can sense light and darkness from outside the womb? Did you know, as they say in the movie Juno, that your baby has fingernails? Fingernails aren’t quite autonomy, but they’re a gesture toward the autonomous, walking-around person this baby will one day be.

I understand why people make these appeals to abilities a baby does have to get others to consider their personhood. But I was moved when I read O. Carter Sneads’ What It Means to Be Human, because instead of analogizing the baby to its mother (i.e., this baby is almost as good as a woman), he analogized the mother to the baby. Part of what we must remember is that the baby is desperately needy, and the mother is made needy by the way her child depends on her, by the things it requires from her body, by the way her own strength is diverted to serve the baby’s needs.

It’s very unusual to ground a dignity claim that way. To compare someone to a baby is usually viewed as insulting—our word for it is infantilizing. We view it as an insult because we think it is to some degree disgraceful to be a baby, and that being a baby in utero, or a baby who is unwanted, is something that can cast you out of the human family.

The Fantasy of the Autonomous Adult

But dependence is not a temporary embarrassment we all get over in our infancy and gradually learn to walk and eat and eventually graduate to autonomy. Dependence is the pattern of our human life. Every single one of us starts our life utterly dependent on one woman in particular. Although American law began its abortion jurisprudence around the viability line (when could a baby survive outside the womb), that’s still just a question of when could a baby survive dependent on someone other than his or her mother, because a baby delivered is not a viable baby in any meaningful sense. Babies need to be fed, need to be held, need to be changed. They require immense sacrifice and love but it can be from a broader range of people and not from their original birth parents.

Human beings are dependent during infancy, for much of childhood, possibly longer now that we’re pushing off adulting to like the mid-twenties, but eventually, gloriously as an adult, we’re not dependent on anyone, especially if we’re male—so every day you can walk with total confidence that no one is bodily dependent on you. All of your ties are chosen ties, or at the least they’re ones you’re aware of.

From the autonomy-centered perspective, the peak of human existence is walking around as let’s say a 32-year-old man who is unmarried, so not exposed to his wife’s need; whose parents are currently well, so he’s not exposed to their need; and whose siblings are all relatively stable. If we consider what the best version of human life is from the point of view of the experience of autonomy, then I suppose we celebrate this young man as he gets hit by a bus at 32—maybe 38 depending on how you feel about the is-sues he’s having with his back. He’d be cut down in his prime, having lived a full vibrant human life.

Who Gets to Be Human

That might sound absurd, but this logic is increasingly creeping in as we see the expansion of euthanasia in Canada and in country after country, taking as its assumption that not all human lives are fully human and therefore not worth living. That as the 32-year-old man becomes exposed to others’ needs and eventually once again needs his diapers changed himself, he has to some degree lost his hold on what it means to be a human being in society with others and might prefer to make his quietus if not with a bare bodkin than with a surgeon or with his doctor’s prescription.

When we look at the states in the U.S. with legalized euthanasia, we see the most commonly cited reasons for seeking medical aid and dying are not questions of pain, they’re questions of embarrassment: “I don’t want to burden my family” is one of the most commonly cited reasons for seeking suicide at a doctor’s hands. “I don’t feel dignified going on this way.”

This outlook is something we catechize each other into day by day. It’s very hard to have a society that says children are non-persons when they de-pend so utterly on others and then assert the dignity of the elderly when they are dependent in the same way, and on a broader suite of people without any one mother responsible for them at that time.

It is very hard to disvalue the disabled, to talk openly about rationing care during a pandemic based on whether or not someone has Down syndrome, and then make the case that elderly lives are worth living. Piece by piece, we chip off parts of human life from a full, flourishing human life—in the womb, across the scope of life and disability, for large swaths of pregnancy when you’re not able to do everything you once did, and then at the end of life. When you look at it, you see this thin patchwork of a human life almost as though you were a swimmer drowning where you only bob your head above that waterline of autonomy occasionally. To be honest it’s easiest to do during the period where you love the fewest people, because even when you yourself are strongest, when you are exposed to the needs of others, your own autonomy becomes fragile because someone is capable of interrupting you, of making large claims on you that will blow up other parts of your life to be able to answer properly.

I don’t think this is a compelling account of a human life, and almost no one does when they look at it in toto—when they see how much of human life they have to write off as not fully human to hold on firmly to the idea that the baby in the womb is not human and that a woman is endangered by the way she is specifically asymmetrically exposed to need.

We Are Not Our Own

What is the alternative? There’s a quote I love by St. John Henry Newman:

We cannot be our own masters. We are God’s property by creation, by redemption, by regeneration. He has a triple claim on us. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous, but as time goes on, they as all men will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state that may do for a while but will not carry us on safely to the end. No, we are creatures, and being such we have two duties: to be resigned and to be thankful.

But we live in a culture that increasingly tells us we have two rival duties if we want to pass as autonomous. We have to obscure our dependence, and we have to privately resent it. This burden falls more heavily on women because women are more obviously and intimately exposed to the claims someone else can make on them. But it doesn’t do men any favors either. Men no less than women are beloved by God.

When you think about the catechism of autonomy we are offering ourselves—hiding and resenting the ways in which we are creatures, the way in which our needs direct us to rely on the loves of others—we aren’t just disordering our horizontal relationships with our brothers and sisters, we’re doing violence against our vertical relationship with God. We can’t day by day think we are made undignified, degraded by needing things from other people and then turn in prayer to God and say with thanksgiving, “Thank you for making me. Thank you for redeeming me.”

In life, there’s some hope, and people certainly strive for it, of paying people back—if not in kind, then to the best of your ability. If you can’t gestate your mother to make things up for her, then at least you will take care of her in her old age, and hopefully the number of diapers changed on both ends winds up roughly equal and she dies with you having paid back your debt in full. This is ludicrous, of course, but this is a mindset we slip into often without meaning to—that our relationships are best when they are relationships between equals—and when they aren’t, at least we try and pass things on in some way.

The Courage to Be Helped

There’s a piercing example of this. A man who was a veteran made a long drive to visit his wife daily in assisted living. She had passed beyond the point where he could care for her himself, but every day he went and sat with her. Then one day, in from the Pacific Ocean, an atmospheric river dumped heavy snow on him and his driveway. He went out once the snow storm had passed and started digging. He dug until he’d injured his hands. But he couldn’t move enough snow to clear the path to get his car out. Only then, after he had hurt himself in his attempt to get to his wife, did he post in his neighborhood Facebook group that he needed help.

In his call for help, he didn’t lead with the fact that he needed help shoveling out, or with how much he loved his wife. The opening words of his post to his neighbors were, “I am so ashamed.” When he posted it, people came to help, and it took a lot of people because it was a big snowstorm. They shoveled him out, and he drove off again to visit his wife. But I get teared up thinking about him waiting until he was hurt before he asked for help—thinking for a moment that when his neighbors saw his first priority in the storm was to go see his wife again to make sure she didn’t miss a day, that his neighbors would think badly of him for asking for their help.

This man was a veteran. He’d spent his whole life in service trying to put his strength at the disposal of other people who needed him. Every day he put what he could at the disposal of his wife, even if it was only his presence and his hand in hers. I don’t believe he thought that when he joined the army, he was degrading civilians by offering his strength to help them. And I certainly don’t believe that when he drove out to see his wife, he thought, “She’s so humiliated to see me here, every time I show up here, it makes her feel ashamed.” But he couldn’t see himself as a recipient of the same love he offered others. He couldn’t see his own need as parallel to theirs—not degrading—and that by having such a tremendous love for his wife that wouldn’t let him skip a day, he had made himself vulnerable.

If he loved her less, he wouldn’t have needed his neighbors. If he thought, “I can wait a day or two until I go. This is too much for me,” he wouldn’t have needed them. He was made vulnerable by the largeness of his love, which exceeded his own strength. But we only can receive the full blessing of that love if we are willing to accept the help of others, if we are willing to love in ways that go beyond what we ourselves can supply, if we make ourselves humble and say simply, “I need help to love this baby, to love my wife, to love my mother.” I do not think, if we catechize ourselves by opening our requests for help with our shame and humiliation, that we can say to God, my love here is so great that I need your help to give it force.

Learning to Rest in Dependence

My goal is to tell the truth not just about who women are, but who women and men are. Women are the canary in the coal mines of a society that makes an idol of autonomy. To imagine we are not creatures, to imagine our loves can be made small enough to be answered by our own strength is not a lie men or women can live comfortably within. The real difference between the sexes is that men can live with the lie for longer on average. But this is one of the differences that has overlapping bell curves, not an absolute difference like reproduction. Women are exposed early to the ways that our mere existence makes us vulnerable to the need someone else can place on us, but, for a man, to live an autonomous life can only happen when his life is narrow and lonely. So when I look at these questions of feminism and abortion, what I see is the blaring fire, the signal that something is very wrong in how we conceive of the human person, male and female. It’s only by acknowledging that we are in fact very like the child in the womb, held by Someone much greater than ourselves, sustained without regard for our merit, dependent—and be-cause we rest in dependency, able to grow and thrive and flourish—that we can understand ourselves truthfully as we are, as the sons and daughters of God.

__________________________________________________

Original Bio:

Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of The Dignity of Dependence, as well as Arriving at Amen and Building the Benedict Option. She runs the substack Other Feminisms, a community focused on advocating for women in a world that makes an idol of autonomy. This is a version of her talk given at the Catholic Information Center on October 7, 2025.