The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

A different feminism?

So is this really a thing?

Or a tiny minority within the feminist movement as a whole?

Open your eyes, pro-life feminists are everywhere

When I began working in the pro-life movement in the late 1980s, while the "boots on the ground" were often female, the C-suites of organizations like the National Right to Life and Americans United for Life were occupied by men. 

Today, hands-down, the most visible voices and leaders in the movement are women -- at the National Right to Life Committee, at Students for Life, at Live Action, at Americans United for Life, and at the March for Life.

In recent years, too, women have begun to spearhead many pro-life groups with explicitly pro-women agendas, which articulate how women's rights are co-extensive with children's rights: Feminists for Life, the Susan B. Anthony List, New Wave Feminists (with the inimitable slogan: Badass.ProLife.Feminist.), Rehumanize International ("Working to make aggressive violence a thing of the past through education, discourse, and action"), the Sisters of Life (a contemplative order dedicated to the "protection and enhancement of the sacredness of every human life" and providing ongoing support for mothers) and my own organization, Women Speak for Themselves (Empowering.Local.Voices).


If you're paying attention, it's impossible to miss the trend.


I'm a feminist against abortion. Why exclude me from a march for women?

I did not vote for President-Elect Donald Trump and continue to question his fitness to serve. 

Thus I am unsurprised that hundreds of thousands of women would want to protest his election this coming Saturday, the day after the inauguration. 

I am surprised, however, that the leaders of the Women's March on Washington—and most feminists today—are so unwilling to listen to an alternative feminist perspective, one with deep roots in feminist history and a good deal to offer to women today.

As a pro-choice activist who helped lead my college's Women's Center in the 1990s, and now, decades later, as a pro-life feminist, I too have looked forward to the day when a strong and accomplished woman would lead our nation. 

But however strong and accomplished, Secretary Clinton was not the woman for me. 

To me she represents all the contradictions of abortion rights feminism, contradictions also conspicuous in the guiding principles of the Women's March. 

In my view, an authentic women's movement—one that properly extols human dignity, care, and non-violence—must be unabashedly pro-life.

Note the rather archaic misandry of this author, which sounds, oddly, rather Catholic to me.

That and her wholesale criticism of the sexual revolution makes me suspect a strong dose of social conservatism extending well beyond this single question of the right to kill the unborn.

Or maybe it's a dash of old-fashioned sociobiology.

If I could say just one thing to those at the Women's March, it would be this: the constitutional right to abortion has only made men like Trump worse.

Contraception fails. It just does. 

But constitutionalizing the right to abortion as Roe did in January 1973 hasn't relieved women of the consequences of sex or the vulnerabilities of pregnancy. 

Rather it has detached men even further from sex's procreative potential and, for the poor in particular, increased the vulnerability of both women and children. 

That is, easy abortion empowers the male illusion that sex can finally be completely consequence-free. 

For men, anyway.

The ascendancy of abortion rights feminism over the last fifty years has failed to remedy the sort of objectification of women on particular display by our president-elect in the unearthed Access Hollywood video and beyond. 

As pro-life feminists have long argued, the undisciplined testosterone-driven male libido, interested in no-strings-attached sex, benefits most from an abortion-permissive culture. 

And when male sexuality goes undisciplined, bereft of the deep emotional bonds once demanded by self-respecting women, sex is sought for pleasure alone. 

For the most callous of men, women become mere pleasure-providers, the objects of the male libido's aggressive demands.

And more, and worth the reading.

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