The Other View

Abortion Does Not Liberate Woman

A Feminist for Life Perspective

Most modern feminists have made easy access to abortion the very symbol of liberation for women. The literature of the National Organisation for Women repeatedly refers to abortion as ‘the most fundamental right of women’ – more important even than the right to vote and the right to free speech. NOW has designated the protection of abortion rights as its top priority.

This is ironic, because abortion does not liberate woman. On the contrary, abortion – and the perceived need for it – validates the patriarchal worldview that holds that women, encumbered as they are by their reproductive capacity, are inferior to men.

Abortion liberates men, not women. There are three reasons for this:

1. Efforts to establish abortion as a legitimate solution to the problems of being a woman in a male-dominated society surrender women to pregnancy discrimination.

Those feminists who demand the right to abortion concede the notion that a pregnant woman is inferior to a non-pregnant one. They admit that pregnancy and motherhood are incompatible to being fully functioning adult, and that an unencumbered, unattached male is the model for success. By settling for abortion instead of working for social changes that would make it possible to combine children and career, pro-abortion feminists have agreed to participate in a man’s world under man’s terms. They have betrayed the majority of working women – who want to have children.

2. Abortion allows men to escape responsibility for their own sexual behaviour.

A man whose child is aborted is relieved of the requirement that he support his children. It is not surprising that the Playboy Foundation is a major supporter of abortion rights, because abortion is a natural consequence of the Playboy’s ideal of uncommitted, anonymous sex without consequences. Woman can be reduced to the status of a consumer item, which if ‘broken’ by pregnancy can be ‘fixed’ by abortion.

3.Pro-abortion feminists have corrupted feminism by embracing male standards, which hold that it is permissible to treat ‘unequals’ unequally, and for the powerful to oppress the weak.

By accepting this patriarchal worldview, these feminists have capitulated to male dominance. Women who agree to conform to the ideals of a world made by and for men are not liberated; they have merely altered their roles within the patriarchy.

Truly liberated women reject the male worldview that accepts violence as legitimate solution to conflict. Rather than settling for mere equality – the right to contribute equally to the evil of society – pro-life feminists seek to transform society to create a world that reflects true feminist ideals.

Feminism is properly, part of a larger philosophy that values life. Feminists believe that all human beings have inherent worth and that this worth cannot be conferred or denied by another. True feminists thinking recognises the interdependence of all living things and the responsibility we all have for one another. True feminist thinking recognises the interdependence of all living things and the responsibility we all have for one another. This feminism rejects the male view that sees all individuals as functioning separately from their fellows, in mutual competition.

Abortion is incompatible with this feminist vision. Abortion atomises women. It pits them against their own children as competitors for the favours of the patriarchy. Abortion is of no great benefit to employers – who do not have to make concessions to pregnant women and mothers, to schools – which do not have to accommodate to the needs of parents, and to irresponsible men – who do not have to commit themselves to their mates or their children. Women who accept abortion have agreed to sacrifice their children for the convenience of a man’s world.

Women who have been liberated from male thought patterns refuse to participate in their own oppression and in the oppression of their children they refuse to accept abortion, which denigrates the life-giving capacity of women. They strive instead to create a world that recognises the moral superiority of maternal thinking and is, therefore, gentle, loving, nurturing, and pro-life. Every abortion frustrates this goal and perpetuates the patriarchy. Liberated women will not co-operate. They refuse abortion and what it represents.

Reprinted with acknowledgements to Feminists for life

Feminists for life

"Feminists for Life " proudly continue in the pro-life tradition of our feminist foremothers, who recognised abortion as the ultimate act of violence against women and children, and envisioned a better world for all humankind... a world in which abortion would be unthinkable.

"We believe in a woman's right to control her body and she deserves this right no matter where she lives, even if she is still living inside her mother's womb".

The Feminist Pro-Life Tradition

The feminist movement has, since the late-sixties and early seventies been regarded as the main advocate of abortion rights.  This has not always been the case.  Traditionally feminists have bee pro-life.  During the course of research for her book, Pro-Life Feminism: Yesterday and Today, Mary Krane Derr came across dozens of essays by a wide range of feminists who opposed abortion and the violence that it did to women.

"According to the early feminists", writes Ms Derr, abortion resulted from the denial of the pregnant woman's humanity as much as from a denial of the unborn child's ".

She goes on to say that "Women felt pressured into aborting because they were deprived of truly life-affirming sexual and reproductive options. This is still very much the case.  If we don't want  unborn children to be treated as unsenate clumps of tissue, we must first of all ensue that their mothers are not treated as insensate clumps of tissue."

A list of women who have supported a pro-life position during the past hundred years would provide a virtual whose-who of feminist activists.

They include Susan Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Gage, Mattie Brinkerhoff, Victoria Woodhull, Sarah Norton,  Emma Goldman, Alice Paul,  Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Rich, Germaine Greer, Shelley Douglass, Jane Thomas-Bailey, Mary Krane Derr, and Maureen Jones-Ryan.

Support for abortion must not be regarded as a prerequisite for feminism. Many women favour a consistent ethic of life which rejects all violence, including in the womb.

Back to Contents