#AbortionMatters on Women’s Equality Day
[On 27 August 2013] President Obama declared a Women’s Equality Day. It is the day the United States celebrates women gaining the right to vote.
But somehow, between then and now, the right to vote morphed into something else: an inexcusable right – the right to kill.
And our society re-accepted an unconscionable equation: women < men
How is that, you say?
Women can vote, women have “power over their own bodies”, and … women are less than men?
What about this right to kill, where does that come from?
Abortion kills.
Abortion kills women before they get the chance to vote.
It is the act of a mother consenting to the killing of her child.
And it is the construct that sets up our equation. Because if abortion equals the doorway through which a woman must enter to be on equal footing with men, then woman is again reduced to her reproductive function.
She is not equal because she is inherently valuable and worthy of rights and protection under the law.
She is equal because she is willing to sacrifice her child on the altar of selfishness, fear, sex, and power..
Early pioneers of women’s rights such as Anthony and Stanton abhorred abortion. They called it “anti-natal”, “infanticide”, and “evil”.
Stanton wrote in 1873, “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading for women to treat their children as property, to be disposed of as they see fit.”
So women < men.
Abortion = oppression of women.
Equality of women is not something I can freely celebrate today, because today, in my nation, women are not treated as equal.
Today, in my nation, women are brainwashed with the lie…
that oppression is liberty;
that subjugation is equality;
that killing is just.
Today, in my nation, women are wholesale pitted against their own children, whom they are expected to murder in order to participate in society.
Women today have co-opted the very anti-feminist attitudes of the anti-suffrage men of two centuries ago: power, domination, and “might over right”.
“Four are dead,” said my aunt. “Abortion. I thought it was them or me.”
By accepting abortion, we accept that we have failed women.
By accepting abortion, we accept that society abandons women, and we condone it.
By accepting abortion, we accept chauvinism – we just let the girls use it too.
My aunt thought it had to be her, or her children.
Legalized child-killing just gave her the right to kill when she had been abused and abandoned – gave her the right to oppress where she had been oppressed.
Is that the message we as a nation want to send our women? Is that the truth?
And if a man is too poor to support his wife, or feels abandoned by his community, should he be allowed to kill her?
Marian Kopp of Feminists For Life puts it in a nutshell:
“By insisting on abortion as necessary for equality, we assume the traditional male worldview: equating personhood to manhood, denying women’s reproductive capacities.
Women must become essentially wombless and unpregnant like males, and resort to violence to do so.” [1]
In an abortion nation, the equation will always be women < men.
Until we confront this, we do not have an Equality Day – at least not with a straight face.
Until we return to protecting our most vulnerable, we are not promoting feminism, but the most grotesque chauvinism.
Until we value women enough to provide resources and respect, not drugs and the sharp instruments of an abortionist, we are an unequal society. [2]
Let us note that today. Let us acknowledge the injustice, so that we can change it, and then truly celebrate women’s equality.
[1]Promoting a right to abortion keeps women from achieving full liberation. Marion Kopp. 26 Aug 2013 —
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/08/promoting_a_right_to_abortion.html#incart_river_defaul
[2] 8 Facts About Abortion’s Effect on Women —
http://www.lifesitenews.com/blog/eight-facts-most-dont-know-about-physical-and-psychological-consequences-of
[28 Aug 13, C.J. Williams, Social Media Coordinator, Survivors,
http://www.survivors.la/blog/2013/8/28/v8vyh1ke9c2ok5tzjl2s8wtw912h8n]