OPINION:
March is Women’s History Month. Since 1988, we’ve taken this month to celebrate women’s strengths and recognize their achievements. It’s a time to rejoice in cultural advancements in the struggle for equal rights, equal dignity and equal worth between men and women.
Despite significant amelioration, our contemporary culture has lost touch with what women’s empowerment is all about. For too many women today, feminism is synonymous with pro-abortion politics. Women everywhere are sold the lie that they have to choose between becoming mothers or furthering their future.
But a society that disrespects and devalues motherhood is a society that disrespects and devalues women. Real women’s empowerment affirms a woman’s whole person — including the unique calling to motherhood that only women can fulfil. To be truly pro-woman means also being pro-motherhood, pro-family and pro-life.
Not more than 100 years ago, women in America had very few rights. Women were not allowed to vote. They were unable to run for political office or go to college. And they had minimal legal protections in cases of domestic violence, abuse or divorce. Women were even prohibited to serve as the independent legal guardians of their own children. In almost every area of life, women were socially, politically, personally and financially dependent upon men.
That dependence created systemic injustices and social inequalities that inhibited women in nearly every arena. Intelligent and creative women struggled to cultivate their talents without institutional support. Enterprising women possessed very little, if any, opportunity to create businesses or exercise leadership. And without the right to vote, no woman anywhere had a voice in how society was governed.
The original feminists treated none of this as inevitable or inescapable. They fought to change the culture around them to better support women. To women like Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women’s empowerment meant attacking systemic marginalization of women at the root and creating new methods to provide women with the resources, opportunities and support they needed to thrive.
Fast forward to the present day, and women enjoy more freedom and greater opportunity than ever before in history. Women succeed in all arenas and at every level.
But somewhere along the way, our culture forgot one essential truth about the women’s empowerment movement: For decades, the fight for women’s rights was profoundly and essentially pro-life. In fact, every one of our feminist foremothers proudly championed motherhood, pregnancy and the dignity of the unborn. Their fight for women’s suffrage and women’s rights was inspired by a fervent desire to free women from all forms of systemic oppression — including abortion. Suffragist Alice Paul even called abortion “the ultimate exploitation of women.”
What our feminist foremothers understood is that a coersed choice is never a real choice. And abortion is most often a choice made under pressure. The vast majority of abortion-seeking women say that outside factors, like financial difficulties or problems at work, are the predominant reasons for obtaining an abortion. At Human Coalition, our internal data indicates 75% of women seeking abortion state they would prefer to parent their child if their circumstances were different.
Contemporary feminism gravely misunderstands women’s real needs when it pushes for abortion as a key part of women’s empowerment. That’s because abortion does nothing to rectify the underlying challenges driving most women to seek abortions in the first place. Abortion deprives women of choice; it limits them and says “you can’t have it all, you have to choose between being a mother and your future.” Abortion advocates convey that for women to succeed they must, in fact, be more like men. This is anti-feminist.
Women deserve better than abortion. The suffragists’ fight for women’s rights did not take social inequalities and systemic prejudice as a given. Instead, they fought to change society to better meet women’s needs. They did not push women to conform with society’s broken expectations, moral injustices and disordered systems. Rather, they strove to make a society where women flourish or have the opportunity to advocate on a more equal playing field.
We need to do the same today. We should strive for a society where no woman feels pressured by circumstances to seek an abortion. We should fight for a culture where women and children are protected and prioritized — receiving the support they need, when they need it most.
That’s what it means to live out the intrinsic connection between being pro-life and being pro-woman. Women’s empowerment must be holistic. A society that protects the whole woman, ensures women are free from social, economic or cultural pressures to make decisions against life. That’s what the original women’s rights activists believed. And it’s what we need to fight for today.
• Chelsey Youman is a pro-life actvist and attorney, serving as the national legislative adviser for Human Coalition Action. Human Coalition Action is the public policy arm of Human Coalition, one of the largest pro-life organizations in the nation, operating a growing network of telehealth and brick-and-mortar women’s health care centers across the nation.
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