Introduction
Without a doubt, abortion is one of the most passionately heated topics of our time. There has been much said about regulations such as term limits and methods of abortion, or whether or not Roe vs Wade should be overturned altogether. And even if abortion were to be outlawed, there is still the debate about whether or not there should be exceptions in the cases of rape or incest, which account for a total of 1.5% of all abortions according to the Guttmacher Institute. While all of those debates have their place, they are outside the scope of this discussion.
Abortion itself has become a staple in the feminist movement. Proponents claim that abortion is a means of empowering and liberating women, while any anti-abortion rhetoric or legislation is patriarchal and oppressive. However, the exact opposite is true. Choosing life is actually much more empowering and liberating for women than choosing abortion. Abortion robs women of their power, destroys little women in the womb, cheapens true bodily autonomy, and gives men an avenue by which to oppress women. This paper will focus on the empowerment that comes with choosing life and the bondage that comes with choosing abortion.
Real Empowerment, Real Heroes
It was the Spring of 1984 when Cheryl Heath secretly walked into a Florida medical clinic in order to get a pregnancy test. This teenaged girl was terrified because she was weeks late on her period, and being pregnant would be a fate worse than death at this point in her life. She had no real family support, no direction, and the potential father was no longer in her life. Unfortunately, her fears were confirmed. She was pregnant.
Cheryl could’ve had an abortion and avoided nine months of carrying a child, labor and delivery, and not least of all, telling her mother. However, she didn’t do that. She made the hard decision and chose life. Cheryl gave birth to a son in November of that same year. Her son was immediately taken out of the room at birth because Cheryl had given him up for a closed adoption. He had been adopted by a couple from Mississippi who could not conceive children on their own. The reason that I know this story is because I am the son and Cheryl is my mother. We were miraculously reunited in 2012, and despite the long distance we have a wonderful relationship.
Many abortion proponents would yawn at such a story because it doesn’t fit their narrative. According to them, the freedom to abort babies is “central to women’s empowerment” and one of the few “strategic life choices which are critical for people to live the lives they want” However, this mentality is the exact opposite of powerful and heroic. The headlines will praise the firefighter who risks his life by rushing into a burning building to save a helpless child, not the one who sits in the safety of the fire truck and lets them burn to death. The former shows real empowerment. Even the fear of sacrifice and death can’t deter the heroic firefighter.
On the other hand, wouldn’t it be asinine to praise the firefighter who fearfully sits in the truck, and then talk about his freedom of choice as empowerment? Truly empowered people don’t feel as if they have to take the easy way out. My mom is a real hero. She did the hard thing and gave me the gift of life. Not only that, through her sacrifice she was able to give a child to total strangers who at the time couldn't have children of their own. She also gave a husband to my wife and a father to our three children, not to mention the gift of their very existence. That’s real female empowerment.
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| Reunion with Cheryl, March of 2012 |
Real Bondage, Real Slavery
In a recent interview with The Guardian, famous Fleetwood Mac singer and abortion rights advocate, Stevie Nicks, talked about the early days of her career when she was dating Eagles singer, Don Henley. She became pregnant in 1979 and chose to have an abortion. This is what she had to say about that event, “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away.” Earlier in this same interview she stated that “Abortion rights were my generation’s fight” The incredible irony in these statements is that Nicks is bragging about her empowerment, based on something that she couldn’t do. She openly admits that she could not raise a child because she was a slave to drugs, and to her career. This isn’t a story of empowerment, it’s an admission of weakness. The story would have been much more powerful and praise worthy if Nicks had gotten clean and been a mother to her child. What a story of empowerment that would have been. However, instead of taking a chance of sacrificing her career, she chose to sacrifice her child on the altar of her career.
Forty one years later, the glory days of Fleetwood Mac are long gone. In fact, it’s been almost two decades since they released a studio album. Now at age 72, Nicks lives alone and childless in her Santa Monica mansion, when she could be enjoying a house full of grandchildren.
The mistake that Nicks and the feminist movement make is that they equate empowerment with the ability to make a choice, instead of the moral fortitude to make the right choice. The renowned German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel wrote extensively about this form of “empowerment”. He said, “The common man thinks that he is free when he is allowed to act arbitrarily, but this very arbitrariness implies that he is not free.” In other words, the truly empowered person doesn’t need permission or popular support in order to make their decisions. Their choices are based on internal convictions, rather than external circumstances. This is very telling, considering that the very essence of bondage is to be controlled by external circumstances. Yet, feminists have found a way to champion this bondage as a form of empowerment. Hegel went on to say, “A person who does something perverse gives the greatest prominence to his particularity. The rationale is the high road which everyone follows and no one stands out from the rest.” Put into modern terms, if the decisions that we make are dictated by immediate gratification and the easy way out, or if our movement is backed by the media, the vast majority of academia, and society as a whole, then we’re not the resistance. To walk down the smooth path in lockstep with popular opinion regardless of its morality, and then claim the empowerment status of a martyred rebel is the epitome of arrogance and hypocrisy. This is real bondage.
Real Oppression, Real Victims
In 1939, Adolf Hitler authorized the T4 project, which allowed German physicians to legally exterminate Jews, mallatos, those with mental handicaps and anyone else that they deemed as “life unworthy of living” In similar fashion, blacks in the United States were once viewed as sub-human. Sadly, at one time it was official U.S. policy that blacks were only ⅗ human and were treated as such. In order to give slave owners a tax break, “Congress settled upon a formula that prefigured the Three-Fifths Compromise both in the ratio of 5 to 3 and by substituting the anodyne “other persons” for “slaves.” All of these atrocities were committed legally and with the blessing of the majority of society because the targeted groups were viewed as less than human. Fortunately, there were people in both instances that rose up against the law of the land and the status quo in order to challenge these inhumane policies. They are heros.
We currently find ourselves in a similar situation, both in the U.S. and abroad. There is an enormous percentage of the population who are being murdered in the womb, both legally and with the blessing of much of society because they are viewed as less than human. That this is a reality is even admitted by feminists like Dr. Sally Markowitz, “I am proposing that feminists override the fetus's right by the right of women to live in a sexually egalitarian society? This is a difficult position for feminists but not an impossible one, especially for feminists with utilitarian leanings” With this statement, Markowitz warns pro-abortion advocates that use oppression by men as a reason for supporting abortion, to be ready for pro-life advocates to use the same argument about babies being oppressed in the womb. Her only solution to the problem, to state that women’s rights are more important than baby’s rights. She goes on to say, “it may not make sense to count fetuses as an oppressed group. A disadvantaged one, perhaps.” I would say that being dismembered and sucked out of your mother’s womb and thrown into a dumpster is pretty oppressive.
The point here absolutely cannot be missed. Just like Hitler authorizing the killing of those that fell short of his master race, and just like slave owners in America mistreating and murdering their ⅗ human slaves, the pro-abortion crowd kills babies in the womb because they are treated as sub-human. The Nazi’s were viewed as more important than the Jews, the slave owners more important than their slaves, and now adult women are deemed more important than their babies. History is repeating itself and according to the Guttmacher institute, over sixty million babies have been aborted in the U.S. alone since 1973. The cry for women’s rights completely ignores the rights of the little women in the womb who have their own distinct DNA, as well as their own heartbeat. This is real oppression.
Real Power, Real Influence
The feminist movement has become so radical about women’s liberation and abortion rights that it has decreed that mothers are slaves and need to be “freed from the servitude of motherhood” This line of thinking is a relatively new phenomenon, less than two centuries old. According to the Encyclopedia of Motherhood, “during the 19th and 20th centuries, feminist movements have strongly reclaimed the right to freely decide about one’s body, especially concerning access to abortion.” This is in direct contrast with all of prior history. According to Dr. John Byron, it was a travesty to be a barren woman in the ancient world. He writes, “So often the situation is not appreciated for the potential disaster that hung over a childless woman. Without a child of her own, the status of a wife in antiquity was ambiguous.” This is because children were celebrated in the ancient world, and throughout history. It’s also the result of women realizing where their power comes from.
It’s unthinkable that the feminist movement has become so radical that in trying to keep up with men, that they have forsaken and demonized literally the only thing that women can do, that men can’t, bringing life into the world. In all of human history, there has never been a single man that has given birth to a child. What greater place of power and influence could there be? There has never been a king, president, doctor or anyone else that didn’t have a mother who brought them into this world.
It would have been unthinkable even two hundred years ago for a woman to hire someone to murder their children in the womb for the purposes of independence, career or anything else. So either today's feminists have it completely wrong, or they are literally the only ones in history to get it right. I’m going with the former. Only the modern feminists would celebrate a woman for working forty plus hours a week for an employer, and yet criticize that same woman for choosing to have children, and opting to raise them and serve her husband instead.
Another reason that motherhood has been overwhelmingly celebrated down through the centuries is that throughout history it was just expected and assumed that the children would grow up and take care of their elderly parents. This was especially true in the case of a widowed mother. Here in America, we have been somewhat shielded from this way of thinking over the past seventy five years or so. Many have bought into the nursing home mentality. However, one thing is for sure, elderly women don’t sit around the bridge table at the nursing home and brag about all of their aborted children that won’t be coming to visit them. That’s because motherhood is real power and influence.
Real Independence, Real Autonomy
In 2016, my wife and I lost our baby at twenty five weeks. She had to sign papers that would give the doctors permission to induce labor and “terminate the pregnancy”. It was so difficult for my wife to sign the papers after reading those words. Even though the baby was deceased, it went against every God-given maternal instinct that she had. In the end she tearfully signed, and after eighteen hours of labor she gave birth to a stillborn girl. The nurses took the baby out of the room in order to clean her up, and later rolled her back in on a bassinet just like they would do for a healthy baby. They had also put a little pink dress on her. My wife held our lifeless child and loved her no less than if she had been born alive. It’s one of the hardest things that we have ever had to go through. Needless to say, that abortion is a crime against nature. If it hurts that badly to lose a child, I can’t imagine how overwhelming it would be to know that I was the one responsible.
So what would put a woman in a position to even have to make such a decision as aborting her own offspring? Although many reasons could be listed, one of the main ones is men. Many times men have a huge impact on whether or not a woman aborts her baby. “They exert their influence by withholding support, denying paternity, threatening or committing violence, or abandoning the woman.” And, according to Emily Freeman, “men’s denial of paternity or discontinuation of the relationship becomes a catalyst for what was to follow [in reference to abortion].”
I have experienced this very thing first hand during my time as a sidewalk counselor at two different abortion clinics. I have personally seen young men grab their tearful girlfriends by the arm and all but drag them into the abortion clinic. I’ve also seen fathers and grandfathers doing the same thing with their young daughters and granddaughters. There have also been many women tell me that they would keep their baby but their partner would not support it, and would leave them if they didn’t have an abortion.
This brings up a major point in the abortion debate that the feminist crowd has absolutely hijacked, a woman’s bodily autonomy. This is really the battle cry of abortion rights today. However, the ironic thing that has to be pointed out is that if a woman really had power over her body, she would never be in such a position in the first place. In many cases, women are treated as sex objects and exploited by men, who do not even care enough about them to support them and help raise their child. Instead of being able to say “no” to the man, she says “no” to the voiceless child, which in many cases is just saying “yes” to the man twice whether she wants to or not. This isn’t empowerment, and it isn’t bodily autonomy. The only bodily autonomy that is violated in abortion is the preborn child’s. This is why it’s so outlandish that feminists like Markowitz claim that “Anti-abortion policies promote oppression by men”, when the exact opposite is true. Abortion actually gives men another avenue by which to legally oppress women.
Conclusion
Contrary to the feminist narrative, abortion rights in no way empower or liberate women. In fact, abortion harms women, destroys little women in the womb, cheapens bodily autonomy and gives men another avenue by which to oppress women. Make no mistake, abortion isn’t about a choice, it’s about avoiding the consequences of a choice at the expense of the innocent. I can’t think of anything that’s less empowering than that.
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