Viewpoint: Pro-Life and Feminism Aren’t Mutually Exclusive

Time Magazine ^ | 1/3/12 | Emily Buchanan

[Jean S]

From its early beginnings, feminism was a young women’s movement. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Charlotte Lozier and so many others began their suffragist work in their 20s. These women — the original feminists — understood that the rights of women cannot be built on the broken backs of unborn children. Anthony called abortion “child murder.” Paul, author of the original 1923 Equal Rights Amendment, said that “abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”

So the pro-life movement hasn’t changed the meaning of feminism, as has been suggested. It was the neo-feminists of the 1960s and ’70s who asked women to prize abortion as the pathway to equality.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, along with a group of mostly Democratic women, started the Susan B. Anthony List in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman, when numerous pro-choice women were elected to Congress. Dannenfelser, then in her mid-20s, saw a need to support more pro-life women running for elected office. Twenty years since the organization’s founding, we now have two pro-life women in the Senate, 17 in the House, four in governorships and hundreds more in state legislatures.

Pro-life feminism has captivated a new generation of young women who reject the illusion that to be pro-woman is to be pro-choice. Gallup polling showed that among 18-to-29-year-olds, there was a 5% increase in those labeling themselves “pro-life” between 2007–08 and 2009–10. The past few years have seen the emergence of young leaders like Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America, who is responsible for organizing more than 675 pro-life groups on college campuses across the nation, and Lila Rose of Live Action, whose undercover video work has forced the abortion industry to confront and amend practices it cannot defend

[HokieMom]

Feminists for Life:

http://www.feministsforlife.org/

[Tax-chick]

The contraception and abortion movement, and the attendant “sexual revolution,” can be viewed as an attempt to turn women into men. If men want a sexual partner who is always eager for sex, doesn’t want an emotional attachment, doesn’t ever have any physical complications, and never conceives a child or gives birth ... well, what they really want is another man, but they don’t want to admit that, or even find it aesthetically distasteful. Hence, the drive to “neuter” women by making them un-female, uncaring, life-destroying.

[Lorianne]

Yep, been around awhile. Time magazine has a lot of catching up to do

[Lorianne]

Exactly right.

That’s why whey people say the number of gay men in the country is overestimated I have to disagree. There are many men who are ‘gay’ in exactly the sense you described.

[sarasmom]

You nailed it!

[Tax-chick]

Thanks for the responses. I’ve just started thinking through this idea. It’s common to see the concept that “feminism” is about women’s trying to be men, but I think it’s driven more in the other direction.