I like to think that there aren’t a lot of hard and fast rules when it comes to feminism. I think you can be married and have kids and be feminist. I think you can be single and childless and be feminist. I think you can be a stay-at-home mom and be feminist. I think you can be a working mother and be feminist. I think you can breastfeed and be feminist. I think you can formula-feed and be feminist. I think you can wear cute dresses and pretty pink lipstick and a giant fucking bow in your hair and be feminist. I think you can wear jeans and combat boots and cut your hair real short and be feminist. I think you can be a woman and be feminist. I think you can be a dude and be feminist.
I don’t, however, think that you can be anti-choice and be feminist.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark decision by the United States Supreme court to legalize abortion (up until then, the only legal abortions in America were those done in cases of rape or incest).
In the 40 years since Roe vs. Wade, the abortion issue has only grown more contentious. There are many people who are still vocal supporters of the pro-choice movement, but there are also many people who don’t support a woman’s right to bodily autonomy.
And you know what? I wish I could say that I understood, but I don’t.
I don’t understand why you would try to enact a ban on abortions when banning abortion does not actually affect the abortion rate.
I don’t understand why you would try to create legislature that is almost certainly going to be dangerous to the health of women, sometimes even leading to their deaths.
I don’t understand why you would spend your time preaching at women about dead babies, telling them at what gestational age they develop fingers and toes and referring to abortion as “murder”, rather than using your time to promote access to things like birth control and sex education.
And I really, really don’t understand how and why Ross Douthat thinks he can convince women that they can be anti-choice and feminist.
I think that part of the problem is that Douthat doesn’t seem to understand what the feminist movement and the abortion debate are all about. And you know what? Far be it for me to elect myself the Boss of Explaining Feminism and The Pro-Choice Movement to Ross Douthat, but I guess someone has to do it, so here goes.
Douthat begins by complaining that Nellie Gray, a former-WAC-corporal-turned-bureaucrat-turned-lawyer who helped establish the March for Life, the annual rally against Roe vs. Wade, is not a “case study for students of second-wave feminism.” This, Douthat argues, is because “cultural stereotypes” cause us to believe that the anti-choice movement has a more “complicated relationship” to women’s advancement than all those Liberal left-wingers want us to believe.
I bet you are wondering how on earth banning women from exercising their reproductive rights is anything more than a reverse of all the hard-won equality that feminism has fought for. I know that I sure am! Let’s see what Ross Douthat has to say.
First of all, Douthat wants you to understand that one of the “stereotypes” about the anti-choice movement, the idea that they are trying to reinforce traditional gender roles by forcing women to have children and stay out of the work force, just isn’t true! He notes that,
Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College pointed out last year, pro-life sentiment has been steady over the last four decades even as opposition to women in the work force (or the military, or the White House) has largely collapsed. Most anti-abortion Americans today are also gender egalitarians: indeed, Shields notes, pro-life attitudes toward women’s professional advancement have converged so quickly with pro-choice attitudes that “the average moderately pro-life citizen is a stronger supporter of gender equality than even the typical strongly pro-choice citizen was in the early 1980s.” Among the younger generation, any “divide over women’s roles nearly disappears entirely.”
Translation: the anti-choice movement totally gives you permission to work outside of the home! And wear pants! And vote! They support all kinds of radical choices for women!
I mean, except whether or not to have kids once you’re already pregnant.
You’re totally allowed to be in control of your own body right up until that one, single, solitary sperm encounters that one single, solitary egg – after that moment, you’re up baby creek without a paddle.
Douthat then goes on to assert that,
“The pro-life cause has proved unexpectedly resilient, in other words, not because millions of Americans are nostalgists for a world of stricter gender norms, but because they have convinced themselves that the opportunities the feminist revolution won for women can be sustained without unrestricted access to abortion.”
What he actually means is that SOME of the opportunities the feminist revolution won for women can be sustained without unrestricted access to abortion. You know, all the opportunities that don’t involve a woman’s right to choose whether she has kids or not.
And before you jump in to tell me that if a woman doesn’t want to have kids, she should just use birth control, let me tell you that that’s not how it works. Even with all sex education in the world, even with easy access to birth control, women are still going to have unplanned pregnancies.
Sex education is easily forgotten in the heat of the moment. Birth control fails. We all know that no form of birth control is 100% effective, except for abstinence.
Please, go ahead and raise your hand if you think that preaching abstinence is going to work.
Lindsey Graham, you can put your hand down right now.
Douthat finishes his article by saying that,
“For its part, if the pro-life movement wants not only to endure but to triumph, then it needs … [to offer] … realist’s explanation of how, in policy and culture, the feminist revolution could be reformed without being repealed.“
Ross Douthat, let me explain this to you using small words, so that you will understand:
If you are trying to take choices away from women, that is not feminist. If you want to enact policy that will quite certainly lead to women’s deaths, that is not feminist. If you think that you, as a man, get to have any say over what happens to women’s bodies, that is really not fucking feminist.
Got it?
Good.
And you know what? If you really, truly believe that life begins at conception, why not work to fund research and raise awareness regarding miscarriage and infertility? One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage, and those are only the pregnancies that women know about. It’s actually estimated that 50-75% of all embryos fail to implant due to genetic problems, hormone imbalances and other factors – if you really want to save unborn babies, why not go that route? You’d be saving way more “lives” that way than by banning abortion.
And let’s not even talk about all the ways in which you don’t help the children you’ve “saved” from being aborted. You know, the children born to mothers struggling to make ends meet, the children who don’t have access to healthcare, the children who don’t get enough to eat on a daily basis. Those children.
The thing is, Ross Douthat, you and I both know that this isn’t about saving unborn children. This isn’t about the fact that you believe that abortion is murder. This is about controlling women, plain and simple. This is about you thinking that you can use the rhetoric of the feminist movement to somehow trick women into agreeing with your anti-choice stance.
So please refrain from ever using the word “feminist” in conjunction with the anti-choice movement ever again.
p.s. Also, please never use the term “mansplaining” ever again.
p.p.s. No one says “chauvinist” anymore. Just sayin’
p.p.p.s. I don’t like you.
I remember when this argument first started failing miserably: when Feminists for Life started making news in the 90s. Dumb then, even dumber now. The Bush years made abortion access so much worse in the States and we are seeing the fallout: injured women, jailed women, desperate women. Shameful.
Thanks for taking this on. I saw the headline in my inbox this morning and was just like, “No. I just — effing no.”
I grew up in a very pro-life environment and some of those ideas were the hardest for me to intertwine with my nascent feminism. The thing that ultimately convinced me that the two could not co-exist (at least not for me) was the thing that you hit upon in the end of this post. Too many of the people I knew who were “pro-life” were only concerned with this narrow, debatably-defined sliver of “life,” with very little regard for all the lives that were clearly suffering and dying. The narratives of morality were simply masks for control. If we want fewer abortions to happen, we do that by giving women more agency over the choices in their lives, not less.
Brave. And much needed.
The abortion debate is always challenging for me- wait before you get your backs up, I will explain. I believe in Pro-choice, I believe a woman should have autonomy over her body, but here is the BIG BUT..I don’t believe a woman, who has planned the pregnancy, should have an abortion because she has discovered her child has Down Syndrome, Spine Bifida or Cystic Fibrosis. The life expectancy and quality of life for a person with Down Syndrome, Cystic Fibrosis and Spine Bifida that can be detected via amniocentesis has improved immensely. I work with people with disabilities. I feel like it would be hypocritical of me to support someone who was having an abortion because their baby had Down Syndrome. In someways it would be like me telling my friends with Down Syndrome that I didn’t think their life was worth while. (as always I like reading your views, even when we disagree
)
So if you worked with people who were poor would it mean that women shouldn’t be able to abort if her reason was that her baby wouldn’t have resources?
Or if you worked with teen moms or children of teen moms would a girl or woman feeling she is too young not be a reason.
You don’t get what pro-choice is.
First, I have to say to The Belle Jar: Thank you for a wonderful post.
Then, gatsby78, I get what you’re saying. But I don’t think that supporting free abortion is like telling people with Down Syndrome that their life is less worth. People make abortion for all sorts of reasons, and if we were trying to find out the exact reasons behind an abortion, and thus restricting the choice, that wouldn’t end well. In the end of the day, only the woman who is pregnant can decide whether she wants to carry on the pregnancy or not, and her reasons are not important – that is not anyone else’s business. But the problem you’re talking about is serious. Likewise, in China and India, a lot of female fetuses are aborted, resulting in a huge demographic gap. But the problem is not abortions, the problem is the society and the fact that women are considered to be of less worth.
I think, if we want people to stop making abortions because the child might have disabilities, we have to change views in society – not force people to carry on with an unwanted pregnancy.
Wait an article to think about or write about-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51671-2005Apr13.html
I came across this post from someone sharing your most recent ‘wife, sister, daughter’ post, which, by the way, I thought was excellent. I have to firmly and respectfully disagree with this post. The problem is that ‘pro-choice’ has become a monster unto itself… crusading for partial birth abortions, no parental consent and most notably for this argument, making it Illegal… yes, illegal, for doctors to share potential side effects and/or complications to abortions. I am a feminist. I have had to council numerous women who had an abortion without being fully informed of what they were going through and then suffered through years of depression. Many were inconsolable when they got pregnant later in life and, for the first time, saw an ultrasound and realized just how developed the ‘sack of cells,’ was. I am a feminist who stands up for women being informed (would any doctor perform an operation without showing the patient the x-ray or ultrasound of a tumor? no, so of course women shown the ultrasound of the fetus.) I am a feminist who stands up for the mother of the daughter that should have the right to be there for her daughter in a difficult situation (again, would a doctor remove an ovarian cyst in a 14 year old without parental consent? not in a million years) and I, yes, am a feminist standing up for the baby girl in the womb that has a higher percentage chance of being aborted. all in all though, I respect your posts and respect people willing to talk about abortion in detailed and intelligent ways.
Yes, I agree and came acroos this blog in the same way. I just believe that all people have total autonomy over their bodies – until the choice they make with their body hurts someone else. I can get a tattoo on my hand a paint my nails black and whatever – but I cannot use it to punch someone in the face. That’s assault. My right to do what I like with my body is restricted when the rights of someone else to be safe are involved. In this case, that “someone” is the baby. All other arguements- quality of life, etc.- are irrelevant to this fundamental principle. And lastly, you are right that what pro-choice has evolved into, in many cases, is an all-out-madhouse where zero restrictions are acceptable to SOME feminists. Some want no restrictions based on age of mother, developement of baby, gender, viability….it defies common sense and make me wonder how we have come to this point of such total disregard for something so vunerable as an innocent, unborn child.
One of the great things about feminism is the idea that anyone can be feminist. Excluding a certain demographic just goes against everything that feminism is. This blog post made me ashamed to call myself a feminist–my version of feminism includes everyone–no matter class, age, gender, sexual orientation, or political views.
Me, too.
And as Kermit Gosnell is on trial for infanticide and murder (of the woman), I think we can agree the abortion industry has been protected by this argument for far too long. Anyone who wanted abortion facilities to have the same standards as out patient surgery centers were deemed ‘not a feminist’.
Know what? Feminists want to do more than ‘educate against unplanned pregnancies’. We want to make sure women aren’t butchered and breathing babies don’t have their spines cut by teenage minimum-wage workers.
But I’m sure this will be seen as ‘unfeminist’.
Sad.
I completely agree.
Feminism isn’t about discrimination – it’s about acceptance, equality and justice for all, and that includes people whom you disagree with. Some feminists view abortion as an injustice to women – some feminists view abortion as a woman’s right – and regardless of your opinion on the matter, I don’t think it’s helping the women’s movement to say that someone else can’t be a feminist just because you don’t see 100% eye-to-eye on every issue. It’s not helping women to say that pro-lifers aren’t allowed to believe in equality in areas not regarding abortion, because that’s just taking away less equality in the world.
*taking away more quality
If you are a feminist you should be horribly appalled by the (lack of) regulation on abortions. Sex selective abortions are a huge issue. In many parts of the world, notably in India and China but also in N.A,, the words “Its a girl” are deadly. The recent film by Sasha Cohen, “The Dictator” makes light of this issue with the joke, “so, are you having a boy or an abortion?” but this is a reality!
Being Pro-Life has nothing to do with whether or not you are a feminist, it is an issue of whether or not you value the life of the unborn child.
Just coming back to say I’m sorry you’re getting so much recent… ungoodness… on this post. :/
Yes, because disagreeing means we’re not ‘good’. *sigh*
Women have minds, too. We have opinions. We can argue a point. And we can all be feminists.
Thank you Virginia, I agree completely. We’re all women, we’re all feminists, we need to stick together. I simply believe that the right to not be killed extends to the unborn, as it does to the rest of the human population. Children in the womb deserve the same as we do, nothing more, nothing less.
I am that outspokenly liberal feminist you’ve heard about, in favor of birth control, sex education and the freedom to do what you want with your body. That includes when you want to have sex, who you want to have sex with, where you do it, how you do it, all of that is up to the individuals who take part in it. I was completely pro-choice, you might even call me pro-abortion. the pro-life movement didn’t make any sense to me, in fact, they seemed like a bunch of restricting brainwashed conservatives, trying to push their morales and values on others. But then i met a group of fabulous feminist ladies, who also happened to be prolife. i began to open up to them, and my opinion on the issue was completely turned around within a few months. I began to research what abortion really is, and view the fetus as an actual life instead of a worthless parasite. once you believe that fetus is a human, equal to you or I, you can’t go back. because once you acknowledge that everyone deserves to be born, there’s no going backwards, just like in 40 years it will seem ridiculous that we ever restricted two men or two women from marrying.
Thank you for your post. I stumbled across your blog today.
I agree with you that the pro-life movement should focus on reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies but I think you missed an important part of that in your post.
In addition to not having proper education or access to contraception for sex we also face a problem with empowerment of both women and men to say no to sex. Abstinence only education does not work but not every person waits until they are ready for sex and I also believe this due to a lack of education. A lack of education that it’s okay to wait if you want to, that not everyone is having sex, that you are not weird for being a virgin.
I think in this sexualized nation that this is missing from our sex education and has negative repercussions just the same as abstinence only education. Like you said, contraception fails and the only 100% effective method of birth control is abstinence so why aren’t we teaching our kids that it’s okay to wait? Why aren’t we empowering them to realize that they don’t need to have sex to be loved or respected by their significant others or friends and there are alternatives to having sex for showing affection or just having fun?
I know that my last paragraph sounds like I am pushing abstinence only education but I’m not. It’s just I think we are doing our kids a disservice by not presenting all their options to them in an equal manner that doesn’t make one option seem outdated. Many men and women wait till adulthood to have sex because it was their choice. I think that we need to teach kids that it’s okay to choose that option.
Thanks.
I am a feminist. I struggle with my view on abortion. My question to you is: if you are pro-choice, meaning you believe a person has te right to choose whether to have a child, shouldn’t the father also have the right to choose? Because right now, he does not in most states. He cannot require that a mother have his child so that he can raise it as a single dad without her help.
Cant agree more with what you have written for banning abortion: an anti-choice act!! It’s not about protecting the rights of the unborn. Protecting the rights of the born should come in all form, a family with good parents and the opportunity to combat poverty and so on. One can’t just give an opportunity for an unborn to be in this world without all the basic needs of life and expects them to emerge a champion
Thank you for your great post, and your great blog. I wish Douthat could be safely ignored, but I’m glad you call him out.
I was pro-life as a high school student, and I think I gradually changed my mind as I became convinced that body autonomy should be viewed as a fundamental right. Even if we ignore socioeconomic questions of babies born into inhospitable situations, I think it is wrong to force women against their will into the various trials and potential complications of late-term pregnancy and delivery. It is all too easy for us men to trivialize this process. More generally, even if, in some hypothetical universe, childbirth were somehow riskless and painless, it would be wrong to force a reasonably preventable biological process on someone who doesn’t want it, whatever their reason. I don’t think such a decision is any of my business, or society’s business (but obviously there are those who disagree, often for rather awful reasons).
One of the stumbling blocks in my transition to pro-choice was that I had trouble formulating a robust ethical framework where newborn babies were individuals deserving of protection while reasonably mature fetuses were not. The obvious difference is that newborns can be fed by others while fetuses are dependent on participation by the mother. I think most people agree that this parasitic relationship makes the fetus less deserving of protection, but there seems to be a lot of disagreement about how much less. In particular, I think a woman’s bodily autonomy is primary here, but there is no shortage of people who think otherwise, and I certainly don’t have a knock-out argument up my sleeve for why I am right.
Anyway, I hope it wasn’t a complete waste of your time to read a complete stranger’s evolving views. I wish I knew a reliable way to sway people the same way that I was swayed. It certainly took somewhat longer than I would like to admit for me to change my mind.