LTTE: True feminists can only be Anti-Abortion.
May 1, 2017
Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by the Collegian or its editorial board.
Dear Collegian,
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Have any of you ever heard of Alice Paul? How about Susan B. Anthony? I think most of us are familiar with those names. They were feminists. True feminists. Not these abortion supporting women arguing for bodily rights and parading around with their shirts off. They were fighters against true injustice.It seems that another injustice has plagued us in the United States; abortion.
Alice Paul once said, “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women”. She didn’t say that abortion is the ultimate exploitation of the unborn. She said it is the ultimate exploitation of women. So, if a true feminist made the case against abortion as harmful to women, what does that say about modern-day third wave feminists who support it? Is it really even feminism at all? The point that was being made with the anti-abortion displays on campus this week, was that you cannot truly be a feminist and be ok with abortion at the same time. The two are highly contradictory and should not and cannot go hand in hand.
McWilliams commented that, “Saying that women who are anti-abortion are not feminists is incorrect, because they are the ones advocating for women to choose what happens to their own bodies”. Wrong. Anti-abortion advocates, aka ‘Pro-Life’ advocates, are in fact not the ones supporting a “woman’s choice” to do what she wants with “her” body. They are the ones sticking up for both the mother AND child, which sounds way more like true feminism to me. Women who claim to be feminists are also the same ones championing the idea that every woman has the right to do what she wants with her body. This is fake feminism. Maybe it is well-intentioned and maybe these modern-day feminists just don’t understand basic biology or are in some denial about it, but what they fail to recognize is that when a woman is pregnant, that is no longer just her body. Think about it this way. Is it possible for one person to have 2 unique and distinct sets of DNA? Is it possible for one person to have two different sets of fingerprints? Is it possible for one person to have two different heartbeats? The answer to all of these is no. They are all part of the reason that biology proves that when a woman is pregnant, it is no longer “her body” because there is another life growing inside of her womb that is human. I mean, it has to be human, right? The last time I checked the only product of two human beings is a human being.
“My body, my choice” does not mean that a person can do what they want with their body when there is another little human being living in it. “My body, my choice” ends where another human being’s life begins. This is why anyone who claims to be a feminist cannot be a feminist unless they protect both mother and child from abortion and all of its harmful consequences. I love babies, of course. But I also love their mothers and want to love them both, during and after pregnancy. And because I believe in the basic right to life for all, including women and babies, this makes me a true feminist. True feminism cannot survive with abortion around.
I think Alice Paul would be proud of all of us, true, Pro-Life feminists out there.
Emily Faulkner, Biology
Vice chairman of the Conservatie Interest Group
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Rita, Canberra • May 2, 2017 at 1:27 am
An excellent letter! Thank you.
I would add that Feminist historians have rightly condemned the shameful old injustice where sometimes and in some places children were considered the ‘property’ of their fathers. But over time, they say, a shift has occurred, and we now understand children as rights-bearers, not simply as objects of protection.
The tragic irony, however, is that to our pro-abortion sisters, children before birth are now considered neither as objects of protection nor as rights-bearers but rather as the ‘property’ of their mothers, subject to arbitrary treatment and disposal at least as vile as anything that paternalism was ever responsible for.
To accord ourselves the “right” to abort our children is to allow ourselves the most pernicious of all the powers attaching to the alleged rights of ownership and domination—powers of life and death.
The pseudo-right to abortion stands in direct contradiction to the long, hard-won tradition of human rights and freedoms, a tradition forbidding that any one human being should have ownership and lethal disposal rights over any other human being, no matter how small or dependent or troublesome or unwanted.
Feminism did indeed take a wrong turn when it focused so narrowly on abortion.