Recently on the Washington Post website a few questions were posed, which included a quote by Sarah Palin, “choosing life may not be the easiest path, but it’s always the right path.”
I like that. It’s honest, because choosing life really isn’t always the easiest path. And the right path often isn’t the easiest anyway. It’s usually the more difficult one because that’s kind of the way life is. It is the path that helps people learn how to become better people and persevere and build character, and that’s one of the things I really like about it. You might even call it . . . the rocky road. Like if you’re in Texas right now like I am and the weather is ridiculously hot so that you’re thinking about ice cream all the time.
Anyway, the Washington Post asked about 16 different panelists from different backgrounds to respond to the quote and a question about abortion. One of the panelists, Colleen Carroll Campbell, whose short piece was titled Pro-life feminism is the future, overwhelmingly had more reader comments than any of the others.
It is a consequence of [the abortion-rights lobby and the feminist establishment’s] decades-long campaign to make feminism synonymous with a woman’s right to abort her child and to marginalize any free-thinking feminist who dares to disagree.
It only takes a quick look at the comments at the end of her article to confirm that to be pro-life is to be anti-woman (of course!). Never mind the fact that feminists are supposed to be pro-choice and one of the choices has traditionally been life. Choosing life is anti-woman. Woah, my head is spinning.
For many American women, the feminism that once attracted them with its lofty goal of promoting respect for women’s dignity has morphed into something antithetical to that dignity: a movement that equates a woman’s liberation with her license to kill her unborn child, marginalizes people of faith if they support even modest restrictions on abortion, and colludes with a sexist culture eager to convince a woman in crisis that dealing with her unplanned pregnancy is her choice and, therefore, her problem.
Many women are not buying it. They are attracted instead to the message of groups like Feminists for Life, which tells women facing unplanned pregnancies that they should “refuse to choose” between having a future and having a baby. They believe that the best way for a woman to defend her own dignity is to defend the dignity of each and every human person, including the one that grows within her womb. And they reject the false dichotomy of abortion-centric feminism that says respect for human dignity is a zero-sum game in which a woman can win only if her unborn child loses.
The intellectual dishonesty of the old feminist movement is what is driving young women away from it. I don’t know about anybody else, but to me it says “you’re not smart enough to make a good decision, so we’re just giving you these two: success with an abortion or failure with a child” and that sort of insults my intelligence. The new pro-life feminist movement respects us and knows we’re smarter and stronger than that – women can both have a child and be successful.
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Perhaps that’s why the “old feminists” are engaging in shrieking instead of discussion. When your arguments fail, all you have left is shrieking.
This issue brings to mind an old episode of Sex and the City (how’s THAT for a “sex in the Media” subject??). The show consisted of the girls going to the suburbs to a friend’s baby shower. Sounds simple enough. I was pregnant at the time and got all excited.
The excitement didn’t last long.
The entire show was a string of slams against women who chose to be mothers. It railed against the CEO’s who had given up their jobs, screamed against a mother who was breastfeeding a “child who could chew steak”, and essentially condemned thes women to lives of drudgery and submission both to their husbands and their children. It ended with the self-congratulatory women returning to that bastion of reality — downtown Manhattan — and then the baby shower recipient showing up trying to relive her party-girl days…since of course as a modern woman, she cannot possibly be REALLY happy if she’s a mother in the ‘burbs.
I was absolutely horrified. I can’t blame all the tears I shed on the preggo hormones, although they definitely played a part.
This is what “feminism” has done to us. Much like pro-abortion people claim of pro-lifers, they have made *their* choice the *only* choice. Women who become mothers are stupid, are less valuable, and are not to be respected but looked at with distain.
We cannot be real women unless we are like men. That show mocked my choices, mocked my life and my happiness. Later, when one of characters (the weakest, most spoiled one, of course) was trying to get pregnant, I couldn’t help but wonder if the writers noticed the hypocrisy.
I have to believe that the young women see past these trends embedded in our culture. That women are smarter than that. Darn it.
Heather, if there’s anything to said about that episode (I haven’t seen many, maybe 10-15 tops and it’s one of the few I’ve seen), it made Carrie and the other single ladies look VERY insecure and bad, and it made the show look bad. But I guess that is the main problem of the show — the characters are weak, insecure, petty, and selfish. They don’t really respect themselves, and certainly don’t respect men (which isn’t surprising, most of the male characters are pretty weak too, but that’s no excuse for disrespect, the women absolutely use them which is terrible). A real feminist should be secure enough in herself that she doesn’t need to disrespect men or other women’s choices to have a family.
I totally agree with your point and these ladies comments..
I saw that episode too and literally groaned and shut the tv off.