I'm a feminist against abortion. Why exclude me from a march for women?Erika Bachiochi
(CNN) — I did not vote for President-Elect Donald Trump and continue to question his fitness to serve. Thus I am unsurprised that hundreds of thousands of women would want to protest his election this coming Saturday, the day after the inauguration.
I am surprised, however, that the leaders of the Women's March on Washington—and most feminists today—are so unwilling to listen to an alternative feminist perspective, one with deep roots in feminist history and a good deal to offer to women today.
As a pro-choice activist who helped lead my college's Women's Center in the 1990s, and now, decades later, as a pro-life feminist, I too have looked forward to the day when a strong and accomplished woman would lead our nation. But however strong and accomplished,
Secretary Clinton was not the woman for me. To me she represents all the contradictions of abortion rights feminism, contradictions also conspicuous in the guiding principles of the Women's March. In my view, an authentic women's movement—one that properly extols human dignity, care, and non-violence—must be unabashedly pro-life.
With both Trump's inauguration and the 44th anniversary of Roe v Wade decision fast approaching, I have been concerned that Donald Trump the man—as president of the United States—would actually strengthen in the American imagination the popular feminist fallacy that abortion is necessary to women's equality. After all, Donald Trump as "pro-life candidate" fit perfectly the pro-choice caricature of an abortion opponent: degrading to and disrespectful of women.
If I could say just one thing to those at the Women's March, it would be this: the constitutional right to abortion has only made men like Trump worse.*snip*
The ascendancy of abortion rights feminism over the last fifty years has failed to remedy the sort of objectification of women on particular display by our president-elect in the unearthed Access Hollywood video and beyond. As pro-life feminists have long argued, the undisciplined testosterone-driven male libido, interested in no-strings-attached sex, benefits most from an abortion-permissive culture. And when male sexuality goes undisciplined, bereft of the deep emotional bonds once demanded by self-respecting women, sex is sought for pleasure alone. For the most callous of men, women become mere pleasure-providers, the objects of the male libido's aggressive demands.
Indeed, worry over the tendencies of dissolute men was a key reason women's suffragists of the late 19th century did not see abortion as the panacea their successors have. Unlike today's abortion-rights-feminists, the suffragists feared that sex unmoored from its procreative potential would increase male sexual immorality and infidelity. The suffragists were seeking just the reverse:
"Votes for women, chastity for men" was actually a suffragist slogan. More follows
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/17/opinions/prolife-and-feminist-under-trump-bachiochi-opinion/index.html
