Julie Burkhart was recently interviewed by Mother Jones on her efforts to re-open the infamous Tiller abortion clinic. This comment stopped me in my tracks:
This community has just been so embroiled in the abortion…I hate to say the abortion “debate,” but just the turmoil. Some people would say, “Just leave it alone and let it go.” However, we can’t really have true freedom in this country until everyone can access that right.
Is she arguing that women can’t be free if they’re pregnant or that pregnant women can’t fully participate in society?
Feminists for Life has a good response to this argument:
How can women ever lose second-class status as long as they are seen as requiring surgery to avoid it? This is the premise of male domination throughout the millennia – that it was nature which made men superior and women inferior. Medical technology is offered as a solution to achieve equality; but the premise is wrong…[I]t’s an insult to women to say women must change biology in order to fit into society.
I hope that’s not what Burkhart meant, but it’s an argument that pro-choicers have advanced for years, so I’m not optimistic.
If society is structured in such a way that pregnant women can’t fully participate, or are guaranteed fewer rights or freedoms than men or non-pregnant women, then society needs to change. Not women.
by 
I don’t know if you have given a fair characterization of her argument, Faye, because, well, it is kind of true that women can’t fully participate in the adult world as it stands right now while they are pregnant or recovering from childbirth. And it is true that, once you have kids, you aren’t as fully free as you were before they came along.
Kids tie you down, and make you a less “free” person. However, they also make you grow up, learn the joys of self-sacrifice, and teach you more about Love than you could possibly imagine. I think that Ms. Burkhart here is arguing for an adolescent understanding of freedom, and, unfortunately, that adolescent understanding is the prevailing idea of what freedom is in this post-modern world. It’s kind of a sad and empty freedom she’s arguing for, really: the freedom to have sex without commitment, the freedom to love and leave, and the freedom to create new life, and then destroy it. I really wish more people would see through the facade of the worldview she is offering, to the emptiness and broken lives such a worldview chews up and spits out.
Hi Melissa,
I appreciate your comment. As I noted above, it’s not clear exactly what she meant.
That type of argument has been advanced quite often by the pro-choice movement, even if it’s not what she might have meant.
For example Kate Michelman of NARAL has said that “We need to remind people that abortion is the guarantor of a women’s right to chose and her right to participate fully in the social and political life of a society.”
These types of arguments inextricably link women’s rights to the “right” to abort one’s child.
Randy Alcorn has commented on that quote and he makes the point better than I did: “Notice that abortion is called “the guarantor” of women’s rights. Are there no women’s rights unless there is license to kill unborn children?”