The Feminist Case Against Abortion

In the final days of her campaign, Kamala Harris is running strong on support from young women who have been told their autonomy is at stake, although she is in fact unable under both the U.S. Constitution and political reality to invoke any federal protections for abortion, just as her opponent is unable and unwilling to invoke any federal bans. Harris is essentially asking women to vote for her as a feminist gesture of symbolic support for abortion rights.

As the argument goes, society needs “feminism” rather than “equalism” because it is the feminine traits that society devalues and dismisses.

By this definition, today’s abortion debate marks the death of the feminist movement, which began to deteriorate sometime in the 1990s, when feminists abandoned the fight for equal rights as a lost cause and declared anything female inferior after all.

No longer fighting for equal recognition, equal space, and equal accommodation, feminism turned its demands on women: we must shed and diminish ourselves. We must kill our power and contort our existence in accommodation of the masculine world. Equality was surrendered for sameness. We must be men.

In this great betrayal, feminism became male identity theft, our grandmothers’ proud legacy of equal rights traded for a self-mutilating orgy of female erasure. If we could only shrink and spay ourselves, our biology and unique power to create life, we could be like men. At least Eve ate her fruit in pursuit of divinity! We could have forced society to bend to us and made a better world, instead we accepted the world on men’s terms.

Treating maleness as the standard is misogynistic, but such is the Satanic deal third wave feminism struck, dooming women to a stunted existence as not women, but as permanent second-class men.

Abortion as birth control is the final form of misogyny because it treats the supernatural power to grow life, unique to women, as an expendable nuisance to be destroyed at the convenience of a greedy society. Abortion on demand would be as unthinkable as voluntary castration in a society that valued motherhood as much as it values masculinity.

And so the popular pro-abortion adage: “If men could get pregnant, you could get an abortion at a vending machine.” Feminists imagined what the male attitude might be, and adopted it.

Perhaps if men could get pregnant, they would view pregnancy for what it is: the single greatest power given to humanity of either sex. Society would prize pregnancy, protect pregnancy, treat pregnancy as precious, carrying an inherent mandate worthy of society’s investment in capital and consideration. Maybe third wave feminism, in its self hate, sold our birthright.

The response could have been: Women understand the sacred capacity of life creation because only we carry it; it is ours to guard fiercely and demand that society respect. Almost 70% of women who have had abortions say they felt coerced or pressured to do so; women are being left to carry the moral, physical, and psychological weight of abortion alone for the convenience of others. Feminism with any kind of teeth and self-respect would have rejected this as a crime against womanhood; a barbaric medical malpractice scheme that violates our power, treats it as disposable, subject to the whims and pressures of others.

A man does not “become a man” one day; a man must prove himself a man. The history of male achievement is a quest to prove worthy of participating in the creation of life; with the requisite ability to protect, provide, and guide. Women are born centered, calm in the knowledge that we contain the world inside us, the secret Mona Lisa knew.

Likewise, a man can become a father without any physical change. A woman cannot bring forth life without a complete biological and psychological revolution. For months or years, she is made vulnerable in the sacrificial act of giving humanity.

An equal society would honor this sacrifice. An equal society would study female biology and reproductive health and extended fertility instead of limiting women’s health to daily contraceptive pills and invasive devices that disrupt our exquisite hormonal makeup and subject us a host of side effects that men, in a test of male birth control pills, considered so unacceptable the entire project was shut down. Abortion is dubbed “healthcare” by a manipulative political machine; pregnancy an inconvenience in the march to male sameness. In the world modern feminism made, almost half of adult women do not know what ovulation is—almost 70% do not know when it occurs. An equal society would expend energy on education and technologies to better facilitate reproductive sovereignty. Instead, three whole waves of feminism has left us with little more than a medieval understanding of our own bodies.

An equal society would view motherhood as so vital that workforces and educational institutions would absorb and facilitate its inherent limitations, while women who chose to forego career for motherhood would not be pitied or punished, because the trade-off would be obvious. Feminists were right: Women must have equal access to financial security, education, career opportunities, life experiences, the full range of human potential. But we do not have to change ourselves to achieve these things. True equality would crave and demand the distinction of women. When we let power and success be defined by men, we lost.

An equal society would offer better pre-natal, birth, and post-natal care, policies that demand paternal responsibility such as mandatory child support beginning at conception, a host of solutions to ensure the tremendous value of motherhood was acknowledged and rewarded. An equal society would bend the world for a mother.

Feminism could have fought for all of these things. It is possible to imagine a world that treats, as divine and not disposable, the creation power of Woman.