Opinion: 'Feminists' and Abortion. Real Feminism Does Not Kill!

Antonia Senior: 'Yes, abortion is killing, but it's the lesser evil.'

An entire class of human beings are denied the right to live and even be called a person - this is the odious fruit of pro-abortion feminism.  When all pretense about 'choices' and 'reproductive freedom' is stripped away and the euphemisms have worn themselves out, the naked selfishness of this approach to "feminist" doctrine is laid bare in all its depravity:  'Yes, the child in the womb is a life; a separate person who came into existence at the moment of conception.  But we don't care.  The baby only gets to live if we say so.  We can kill if we want to and no one can tell us otherwise.  We are all that matters; no one and nothing else.' Antonia Senior tells the London Times, 'Yes, abortion is killing, but it's the lesser evil.' 

WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) - Several times in the last month now I've heard this claim:  You can't be a feminist and be opposed to abortion.  Gloria Steinem, for example, insists that a woman can say she would not choose to have an abortion herself, but she cannot say that other women cannot choose abortion and still call herself a feminist.  Championing abortion, it seems, has become the only true litmus test for some who identify with the movement called feminism.

There is growing outrage among some who claim to be "feminists" these days over the emergence of pro-life feminism in America.  That any woman would dare to separate women's rights from what they call abortion "rights" is such an affront to what passes for modern-day feminism it instantly brings the claws out.   Most notably, they have latched onto Sarah Palin because she had the temerity to bring a child with Downs into this world and still continue to work full-time as governor of her state.  The audacity!  "That's not feminism!" they cry. "There is no such thing as pro-life feminism!"

Their "feminist" creed insists a woman must be willing to kill her own child for the cause of liberation and independence.  This demented abortion ideology has turned women against themselves, against their own bodies and required them to at least be an accomplice to murder in order to be "free."

But it doesn't stop there.  The abortion ideology also destroys any hope of a healthy, mutually-respecting relationship between the sexes.  It pits men and women against each other and both of them against their own descendants.

Abortion has both left men in an impossible situation and given too many of them an excuse to flake out on their responsibilities.  Either a man has no say over his progeny and no power to protect his own child; or he can abandon the child he helped create and go on his merry way; or worse, he can drive his underage, pregnant victim to an abortion clinic to have the evidence of his crime conveniently and secretly destroyed.  (Yes, that truly seems like progress for women.)  Abortion is the ultimate multi-purpose weapon - it kills the child, wounds the woman, and demolishes all respect for motherhood and fatherhood. 

For all their ranting about protecting women's rights, the false "feminists" are not the sisterhood they claim to be.  If the sisterhood was truly interested in protecting their own and securing equal rights for the future, they would not sanction snuffing out other sisters before they're even born.  Yes, I know these false "feminists" will say the rights of the woman who's born and grown and pregnant are all that matters, not the "supposed" rights of the fetus (even if she is a girl), who is merely a "potential" life, not an "actual" one.

Clearly, abortion has not only turned these false "feminists" into baby killers, it's also made them desperate liars clinging to stupid arguments in order to justify their actions.  What is most frightening is that more and more pro-aborts - er, false feminists, I mean - are brazen enough to admit it and even wear their bloodlust like a badge of honor.  Such as Antonia Senior did last week in the London Times when she insisted that "Yes, abortion is killing, but it's the lesser evil." 

She begins by saying she can think of only one cause she would be willing to stake her life on and that is a woman's freedom and right to live her life as she chooses, including having "complete control over her own fertility."  She then admits that her absolute conviction about the moral certainty of abortion is "under siege" and "wavering."  She confesses that having a baby changed everything.
 
While she fumbles around for a simple way to define human life (absent any moral foundation), she ultimately concludes with surprising honesty, "What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition, a fetus is a life by any subjective measure.  My daughter was formed at conception, and all the barely understood alchemy that turned the happy accident of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg into my darling, personality-packed toddler took place at that moment.  She is so unmistakably herself, her own person - forged in my womb, not by my mothering."

"Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life.  That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life.  In a resentful womb, it is not a life, but a fetus - and thus killable."

When all pretense about choices and reproductive freedom is stripped away and the euphemisms have worn themselves out, the naked selfishness of this kind of "feminist" doctrine is laid bare in all its depravity:  Yes, the child in the womb is a life; a separate person who came into existence at the moment of conception.  But we don't care.  The baby only gets to live if we say so.  We can kill if we want to and no one can tell us otherwise.  We are all that matters; no one and nothing else.

Ms. Senior herself says it in the most chilling way:  "As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil.  The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the U.K. each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter.  If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too."

There you have it.  A true "feminist" must be prepared to kill for the cause.  It is a greater evil to give equal human rights to the baby than to execute the baby.  Every other consideration is secondary to the inviolable "right" to demand the death of the baby.  So says the "feminist" doctrine.

A feminist creed that turns a mother against her own child is anything but feminine.  It is the antithesis of the privileged, life-giving nature God has given women; a nature which, of course, these kinds of "feminists" spit on with disdain. 

Okay, fine.  Eschew the honorable gift of co-creating new life with the Almighty in favor of exterminating your sons and daughters.  Still, Ms. Senior is wrong when she says "the debate is fetal rights versus reproductive rights."  Abortion is the greatest violation of human rights our world has ever seen.  An entire class of human beings are denied the right to live and even be called a person - this is the odious fruit of pro-abort feminism.  That is the "progress" pro-abort feminists can rightfully say they've achieved.

It is many despicable and evil things (none of them lesser), but it is not real feminism.

Real feminism does not kill. 

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Jennifer Hartline is a grateful Catholic, a proud Army wife and mother of four precious children (one in Heaven).  She is a contributing writer for Catholic Online.  She is also a serious chocoholic.  Visit her at My Chocolate Heart.

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