Abortion Rebellion is Rooted in Realities Feminists Ignore
Colleen Carroll Campbell
From the Nov/Dec 2007 Issue of Lay Witness Magazine
Colleen Carroll Campbell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a research institution based in Washington, DC. Author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, Campbell has served as a speechwriter to President George W. Bush and as a commentator on religion, politics, and culture on CNN, FOX News, and PBS. She speaks to audiences across America and hosts her own show, “Faith & Culture,” on EWTN. To learn more about her work, visit her website at www.colleen-campbell.com.
I was a 24-year-old journalist covering a White House conference on Social Security when I met them: two well-heeled women in their late 50s who belonged to a national feminist organization. As they settled into the seats next to me, they sized me up as a fellow comrade and began describing a discouraging new obstacle to the quest for women’s equality.
It was December 1998, and our conference host, President Bill Clinton, was facing impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice. Lurid details of his adulterous affair with Monica Lewinsky, a fresh-faced White House intern nearly 30 years his junior, had made international headlines.
Yet my feminist interlocutors were not worried about Clinton’s abuse of power with a subordinate female staffer. Nor did they seem troubled that some Clinton defenders had excused him by painting him as the hapless victim of a scheming seductress. Such offenses might have infuriated the feminists of yesteryear, but these women had a more pressing concern: the lack of youthful enthusiasm for the feminist “reproductive rights” agenda.
“There are no young women taking up the cause,” the first woman told me, shaking her head.
The other nodded solemnly. “We need more young faces. The conservatives have all the pretty young faces.”
They gestured toward a young woman standing a few feet from our seats. Simple and stunning in a modest black suit and pearls, she was forcefully defending the policy position of her conservative Washington think tank. The subject was Social Security, but my seatmates murmured that this woman and her ilk were also known to oppose abortion.
“Conservatives recruit that kind on purpose and tell them what to say,” the second woman whispered. Then, looking me over, her eyes brightened. “We need more young women like you-women to speak for our side.”
I started to tell her that I was not on her side, but she was on a roll and tough to interrupt. So I listened as she and her friend confided their fears about a new generation of women too naïve to understand the value of unfettered access to abortion. As they saw it, the sexual revolution that had swept America in the late 1960s and early 1970s was feminism’s high tide and the legal right to abortion its crowning achievement. Their generation had bequeathed a liberating legacy to mine, they told me, and we were letting it slip through our hands.
Women’s Shifting Views
Snippets of that conversation have come back to me many times since I first heard grumblings about my ungrateful postfeminist generation. I thought of those two women again a few months ago, when a law was passed in my state to impose stricter health and safety regulations on abortion clinics.
As soon as Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt signed the legislation, the chorus of criticism began. Abortion-rights leaders decried the regulations as an attempt to stymie women’s freedom. Feminists criticized the law as proof of a stealth campaign to wrest reproductive rights and self-determination away from Missouri women. Implicit in their criticism was the assumption shared by my feminist seatmates at the White House conference: that abortion is synonymous with women’s liberation.
Feminist leaders argue that the right to abortion is the premier women’s right, so support for unfettered abortion access is the litmus test for concern for women. And restrictions on abortion or abortion providers-such as the new provision in Missouri law that holds abortion clinics to the same health and safety standards as other outpatient surgical centers-are, by definition, anti-woman.
This view has become axiomatic in America’s long-running abortion wars and it permeates press coverage on the issue. The terms “women’s rights” and “abortion rights” are used interchangeably. Pro-choice politicians are presumed to have a lock on the women’s vote. Pro-lifers are depicted as fanatical about babies but indifferent to their mothers.
Like most conventional wisdom, these assumptions have grown stale. The claim that advocates of legalized abortion have a corner on compassion is belied by the reality of prolife crisis pregnancy centers that offer women food, shelter, clothing, and emotional support. These centers, for which state support was solidified under the new law, serve women abandoned by a society that considers pregnancy a woman’s choice-and a woman’s problem.
As for women’s views on abortion, they are mixed. The much-hyped “gender gap” in presidential politics has shrunk sharply in recent years, with pro-choice Sen. John Kerry winning the women’s vote over pro-life President Bush by only three percentage points in 2004. Polls show that women feel more strongly than men about abortion, but also are more divided.
And their views are not static. A recent study from Overbrook Research found that the share of Missouri women identifying themselves as “strongly pro-life” rose from 28 percent in 1992 to 37 percent in 2006, with the ranks of the “strongly pro-choice” shrinking from about a third to a quarter of Missouri women. The shift was even more pronounced among young women, whose “strongly pro-life” ranks jumped to 40 percent from 24 percent during that time period.
“Abortion Is Not Liberating”
Women, and particularly young women, are beginning to question the feminist establishment’s reduction of the abortion debate to a zero-sum game that pits a mother’s welfare against that of her unborn child. Although most feminists portray abortion as a liberating choice, groups such as Feminists for Life challenge this idea by noting that most women choose abortion because they lack resources and social support. Through lobbying and college outreach, Feminists for Life advocates for pregnant women’s needs and urges women to refuse to choose between having a future and having a baby.
This pro-life, pro-woman message has attracted a strong following among young women who consider opposition to abortion a crucial component of defending women’s dignity. Their views have precedent: Early American feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton considered abortion a form of degradation too often pushed on women by men seeking to dodge responsibility. That old story is painfully resonant for many women today, whose regrets over past abortions have led them to buck feminist orthodoxy on the issue. Although abortion-rights activists generally portray abortion as a routine medical procedure without moral import or lasting consequences, women in the Silent No More Awareness Campaign dispute that storyline with their own stories of post-abortion emotional trauma.
These women were out in force at San Francisco’s Walk for Life West Coast last January. The event was launched three years ago by two young women seeking to show the prowoman face of the pro-life movement. The 20,000-strong Walk for Life featured marchers holding signs that said, “I regret my abortion” and “Abortion hurts women,” a resource fair for women grappling with crisis pregnancies, and speakers who shared personal testimonies about their abortion experiences. As Talitha Phillips of Silent No More told the crowd this year, abortion “is not freeing; it is not liberating; it is the most humiliating experience of your life. . . . The procedure itself was horrific. I could hear every sound, feel everything, but I was being held down so that I wouldn’t move. They put a mask over my face so they couldn’t see me screaming.”
The feminist establishment has tended to dismiss such stories as evidence of patriarchal brainwashing. That explanation may comfort pro-choice feminists who see their ranks dwindling. Yet today’s young women are questioning abortion not because they know too little, but because they know too much. They have paid the price for the modern feminist embrace of counterfeit liberation. Now they are standing up to demand the real thing-whether or not their elders approve.
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