Pro-Lifers Go Back to the Roots of Feminism
A ZENIT DAILY DISPATCH
PRO-LIFERS GO BACK TO THE ROOTS OF FEMINISM
Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life Views the Abortion Debate
WASHINGTON, D.C., 5 MAY 2003 (ZENIT).
The U.S. Senate's vote in March for a ban on partial-birth abortion may signal a growing pro-life trend in the country.
Recently, Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life of America, shared her thoughts with ZENIT on pro-life feminism and on trends in the abortion controversy. Her lecture, "The Feminist Case Against Abortion," was included in a 2001 book entitled, "Women's Rights."
Q: Your name, Feminists for Life, strikes some as contradictory. What do you see as the connection between feminism and being pro-life?
Foster: We are often asked: "How dare you call yourself a feminist?" We proudly continue a legacy of pro-life feminism born more than 200 years ago when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." After decrying the sexual exploitation of women, Wollstonecraft condemned those who would "either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born." Shortly thereafter, abortion became illegal in Great Britain.
The now-revered feminists of the 19th century were also strongly opposed to abortion because of their belief in the worth of all humans. Like many women in developing countries today, the early American feminists opposed abortion.
The early feminists understood that, much like today, women resorted to abortion because they were abandoned or pressured by boyfriends, husbands and parents, and lacked financial resources to have the baby on their own. They knew that women had virtually no rights within the family or the political sphere. But they did not believe abortion was the answer.
Abortion was commonplace in the 1800s. Sarah Norton, the first woman to successfully argue admission to Cornell University in New York state, wrote, "Child murderers practice their profession without let or hindrance, and open infant butcheries unquestioned. Perhaps there will come a time when an unmarried woman will not be despised because of her motherhood, and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with."
Without known exception, the early American feminists condemned abortion in the strongest possible terms. In Susan B. Anthony's newspaper, The Revolution, abortion was described as "child murder," "infanticide" and "foeticide."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in 1848 organized the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, classified abortion as a form of infanticide and said, "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." Stanton would raise a flag in front of her home announcing the birth of her children. Women should celebrate their life-giving capacity.
Anti-abortion laws enacted in America during the latter half of the 19th century were the result of advocacy efforts by feminists who worked in an uneasy alliance with the male-dominated medical profession and the mainstream media. Ironically, the anti-abortion laws that early feminists worked so hard to enact to protect women and children were the very ones destroyed by the Roe v. Wade decision 100 years later.
Q: How has feminism, in the wide sense of the word, changed over the years?
Foster: The goals of the 1970s women's movement, led by the National Organization for Women [NOW], with respect to abortion, would have outraged the early feminists.
What Elizabeth Cady Stanton had called a "disgusting and degrading crime" has been heralded by Eleanor Smeal, former president of NOW and current president of the Fund for a Feminist Majority, as a "most fundamental right." NOW hailed the legalization of abortion as the "emancipation of women."
Betty Friedan, credited with reawakening feminism in the 1960s with her landmark book, "The Feminine Mystique," did not even mention abortion in the book's early edition. It was not until 1966 that NOW included abortion in its list of goals. Even then abortion was a low priority.
It was a man, abortion proponent Larry Lader, who credits himself with guiding a reluctant Friedan, the first president of NOW, to make abortion a serious issue for the organization. Lader had been working to repeal the abortion laws based on population-growth concerns, but state legislators were horrified by his ideas. Immigration and improved longevity were fueling America's population growth—not reproduction, which in fact had declined dramatically.
Lader teamed up with a gynecologist, Bernard Nathanson, to co-found the National Alliance to Repeal Abortion Laws, the forerunner of today's National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League [NARAL]. Lader suggested to the NOW leadership that all feminist demands—equal education, jobs, pay, etc.—hinged on a woman's ability to control both her own body and procreation.
After all, Lader argued, employers did not want to pay for maternity benefits or lose productivity when a mother took time off to care for a newborn or sick child. Lader successfully convinced the NOW leadership that legalized abortion was the key to equality in the workplace.
Dr. Nathanson, who later became a pro-life activist, states in his 1979 book, "Aborting America," that the two were able to convince Friedan that abortion was a civil rights issue, and claimed that tens of thousands of women died each year from abortion. Nathanson later admitted that in order to gain Friedan's support, they had simply made up the numbers—a major point in their argument.
Lader's and Nathanson's strategy was highly effective. NOW has made the preservation of legal abortion its No. 1 priority. Its literature repeatedly states that access to abortion is "the most fundamental right of women, without which all other rights are meaningless." With this drastic change, a highly visible faction of the women's movement abandoned the vision of the early feminists: a world where women would be accepted and respected as women.
Q: Where do you fit in with the bulk of feminists today?
Foster: While we agree on many things—fighting sexual assault, domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, etc.—we are at odds with those who believe that abortion is a "right" or "necessary evil" to achieve equality in the workplace.
The basic tenets of feminism are nonviolence, nondiscrimination and justice for all. Abortion violates all three. Abortion is discrimination based on age, size, location, and sometimes gender, disability or parentage. As pro-life feminists, our values are woman-centered and inclusive of both parents and child.
Abortion has hurt women in that it has diverted feminist attention from other issues, particularly those that help mothers, such as affordable child care, comprehensive health care and a living wage.
Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the needs of women. Women deserve better than abortion.
We support nonviolent choices, practical resources and support for pregnant and parenting women.
Abortion advocates pit women against our own children. Babies are not obstacles to success! We should refuse to choose between giving up our education and career plans and sacrificing our children. Feminists for Life is committed to finding holistic solutions that address the root causes that contribute to abortion. FFL believes that women have a right to be women in the workplace and school. Women shouldn't have to pass as men.
As FFL's honorary chair, two-time Emmy winner and New York Times best-selling author Patricia Heaton has said, "Women facing an unplanned pregnancy also deserve unplanned joy." ZE03050523
WOMEN DESERVE BETTER: CHANGING THE ABORTION DEBATE
Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life on a Key Strategy
WASHINGTON, D.C., 6 MAY 2003 (ZENIT).
Putting an end to abortion will require redirecting the debate, says a pro-life feminist.Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life of America, shared her thoughts with ZENIT on pro-life feminism and on trends in the abortion controversy....
Q: A recent New York Times story reported that young people are more pro-life than their parents. What have you found in your experience of dealing with young people?
Foster: It is certainly evident with teens. Even as early as 1996 a Gallup poll reported, "Women with a high school education are more pro-life, 47%, than pro-choice, 37%."
But they also found that the college experience for women is "a major—even revolutionary—influence" when it comes to their views on abortion: "Women who have attended college but not completed a four-year program are more pro-choice, 59%—an increase in the pro-choice group of 22 points. The margin of pro-choice over pro-life responses is even greater among women who have completed a four-year college program—73% to 24%."
As I began lecturing about our rich, pro-life feminist history I began to ask, "Do you know anyone on campus who has become pregnant?" Audience members nod. Then I would ask, "Have you ever seen a visibly pregnant student on campus?" The nodding stopped.
According to Planned Parenthood's research arm, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 10% of all college-age women become pregnant each year. Where have all the pregnant women gone? Most often, women in college have abortions. In fact one in five abortions are performed on a woman in college.
Why? Too often women cannot find the practical or emotional support they need to be both parents and students. Abortion doctors know this and they set up clinics on the outskirts of campus.
As one former FFL board member said when she became pregnant while in grad school, "They say I have a free choice. But without housing on campus for me and my baby, without on-site daycare, without maternity coverage in my health insurance, it sure doesn't feel like I have much of a choice."
Feminists for Life is leading forums on college campuses that challenge university officials to provide housing, on-site child care, and maternity coverage within student health care plans, and to inform women about their hard-won right to child support. We have developed comprehensive Pregnancy Resources Kits to give women resources to support nonviolent choices.
A generation of young people live with the knowledge that many will never know their own siblings and ask "why not?" In ever-increasing numbers, those who oppose making abortion illegal are beginning to work with Feminists for Life on solutions that challenge the status quo. Momentum is growing. Minds are changing.
Q: What are the most effective arguments for winning over young people to a pro-life viewpoint?
Foster: For three decades those of us in America have been arguing at cross-purposes: "What about the baby? What about the woman?" We must redirect the abortion debate by demanding better for women. We should be asking the all-important questions, "What do women want? What do women need?"
At a 2002 "Women Deserve Better" briefing on Capitol Hill, Feminists for Life's honorary co-chair, actor Margaret Colin, asked members of Congress to "remember the woman" and ask themselves, "Is this the best we can do?"
Rather than falling into the baby-vs.-the-woman debate, we challenge the abortion rhetoric with women-centered solutions. Women who are pregnant and abandoned or poor deserve unconditional love, even from perfect strangers.
I recently presented my lecture—which encompasses feminist history and today's lack of support for pregnant women and parents—to medical students at the University of Pittsburgh. Afterward, a student told me "at lunch today, I swore that I would be an abortion provider as a doctor, because I saw it as a right and a necessity. I have held my position and been involved in political protests for 15 years. In the time you spoke, I rethought my position completely."
Q: Is the United States ready to abandon the precedent set by the Roe v. Wade abortion decision of the Supreme Court?
Foster: Until women believe that they deserve better, legalized abortion will continue. But the tide is turning.
Approximately 25 million American women know the truth about abortion firsthand, and many are not willing to pass on this terrible legacy to the next generation. They are beginning to speak out in ever-greater numbers about the devastating damage—both physical and emotional—as a result of abortion.
Our goal is bigger than making abortion illegal.
It will not be good enough for us to have laws without resources and support for women. Abortion providers will simply move the front office to the back alley. We need to focus on making abortion unthinkable.
Women deserve better, and every child deserves a chance at life. ZE03050624
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