“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals.”153
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
While “choice” is important to some left-wingers, others emphasize the power of abortion itself. Abortion is a good thing, they say. Left-wing author Katha Pollitt writes, “The framing of abortion as reproductive justice rather than simple choice is important.”154 One of the most remarkable arguments of the pro-abortion advocates is that abortion promotes reproductive equality for women. Without abortion, the pro-abortion activists say, women don’t have reproductive freedom or equality with men. Since men don’t have to live with the consequences of free sex, women shouldn’t have to either.
The pro-abortion activists ask—Are you trying to take us back to puritanical times before the Sexual Revolution, when women had virtually no control over their own bodies and over their own pregnancies? If women are forced to birth children, we hear, they won’t be able to finish school, will have to take maternity leave, and will be left behind in the workplace. They will face unfair social stigma for being a mother. We hear that abortion produces greater equality between the sexes because it enables women to control their own bodies.
First, is it really true that without abortion women can’t control their bodies? Left-wing feminists argue that abortion is like contraception in that both are a means for women to control their bodies. This is incredibly misleading and factually untrue. Most of the time hormonal birth control creates an environment that prevents fertilization from occurring the first place, but there are rare times depending on the type of birth control when a fertilized egg is prevented from being implanted. However, this is never the case for barrier methods of contraception. In these cases, of course, abortion is nothing like contraception. Scientifically, barrier contraception devices—be that a male condom diaphragm, cervical cap, or contraceptive sponge—prevent pregnancy from occurring in the first place. While barrier contraception works to prevent pregnancy from occurring in the first place, abortion terminates a pregnancy. Those two things, far from being the same, are in fact opposites. Left-wing feminists lump contraception and abortion together as “reproductive health,” acting as if they are a package deal. In fact, because men and women have access to contraception, we should not need abortion.
There’s also natural family planning, which is limiting your sexual activity to times of the month when you are less fertile. Condoms are 98 percent effective, but even taking into account user error, which renders them typically 85 percent effective, if you combine natural family planning with using a condom, your chances of getting pregnant are even lower than your chance of being in a plane crash. Couples can have 99.99 percent control over their bodies in terms of pregnancy if precautionary measures are taken. While natural family planning and condoms can be used if you don’t want to have a child at this time in life but may want to later, there are other means of preventing pregnancy if you never want to have children, like a vasectomy, hysterectomy, or tubal ligation. Never in the history of the world have there been so many convenient ways to avoid becoming pregnant. And that, it would seem, is the ultimate control a woman has over her body. With this sort of control, there is simply no reason why abortion should be used as a form of birth control.
Our culture pits sexuality and the family against each other. Through the media, the culture conveys the message that having casual sex is the definition of living a single and free lifestyle, while being married and having children is the definition of a sexless lifestyle, when in fact, it is and should be the opposite. Having children and being married inherently involves sex, and this makes sense. When sex is freely exercised in marriage, problems like abortion for reasons other than to preserve the life of the mother rarely arise. The beauty of fun, frequent sex in marriage is an idea the Leftist culture we live in vehemently opposes because it thwarts their goal to promote casual sex. To the Left, sex outside marriage should be the norm. But what the Left leaves out is that this casual sex culture leads to the breakdown of the family, the source of many other problems.
Consider now the broader topic raised by this debate on equality. In My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins sarcastically quips, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Feminists on the Left, however, take the idea very seriously. They often say, “Even with birth control, the genders aren’t equal. Why doesn’t the man have to carry the pregnancy? Why doesn’t he have the big belly showing everyone that he’s pregnant? The man has it easier than the woman.”
The attorneys in Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, a 1969 case before Roe v. Wade, drew attention to the clear discrepancy between men and women in order to argue in favor of abortion rights for women. The attorneys claimed that “the man who shares responsibility for her pregnancy can and often does just walk away.”155 The attorneys argued that women must enjoy that same freedom—to walk away. Abortion, they argued, is the necessary answer, so that woman can enjoy full equality on par with the man in this respect.
So, as you can see, rather than calling upon men to step up to the plate, the Left decided that it is better to let both parties off the hook. Both parties being able to engage in free sex without consequence is the highest value here, and being able to walk away from an unforeseen outcome must be the gold standard. The Left sort of expects men to not step up and expects women to just get an abortion. How horrible is this? The prevalence of abortion in the country has made both parties perhaps more “equal” in a weird sense, but only by leveling them to a lower playing field, free of responsibility.
Gloria Steinem, the leader of the left-wing feminist movement that is tied to abortion, coined the term “reproductive freedom.” In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be awarded to civilians in the United States.156 Referring to gender equality, she told Variety in 2020, “If we did not have wombs, we’d be fine.”157
Unfortunately, many women who follow the left-wing feminist ideology of Gloria Steinem are constantly waging war on the female body while acting like men are the greatest. In her article “If Men Could Menstruate,” Steinem says that if men had periods, “menstruation would become an enviable, worthy, masculine event.”158 But this shows that she underlyingly thinks that men have the upper hand just by virtue of having better minds than us, of framing the same situation in a better way. They’re more positive. They’re go-getters. They make lemonade out of lemons. But I don’t like this attitude. Women are plenty good at making lemonade out of lemons, and I certainly do not even agree with her assumption because I think if men got a period, or something like it in an alternate universe, they would probably get used to it and learn to live with it, as women do and as humans do with most bodily functions. They’d probably hate that time of the month like we do.
The feminist Shulamith Firestone famously describes the fetus as “the uninvited guest.” Political essayist Ellen Willis echoes this notion by describing abortion as “an act of self-defense.”159 Firestone even goes so far as to say that “pregnancy is barbaric.”160 Not only does this ideology purport that babies are intruders, but it also implies that women’s bodies are inherently treacherous for housing these intruders. Since pregnancy is unique to women, it creates a feeling of self-loathing for the woman who believes this warped ideology. If the standard of greatness is literally “being a man,” women will inherently never meet that standard. The female body, pre- or post-motherhood as well as during pregnancy, should be accepted and celebrated.
Women often fall into the trap of thinking that “we have to be like men in order to be powerful. Whatever a man does, I’m going to do.” And to a certain point that makes sense. Since men were traditionally the ones coming up with the great inventions, the great books, the great ideas, aspiring to do those things is what women should strive for, not because men do them but because they are inherently great ambitions in and of themselves. But there are also inherently beautiful things about being a woman, and there are tangible benefits to being a woman in many situations as well.
But do men really have it better? Take their inherent strength. What are the consequences of men being stronger? Well, when there are dangerous tasks, like going into a mine, fighting in a war, or being drafted, then men are called upon to serve first. The superior strength of the man is taken as a starting point because social demands are placed on men that are not automatically placed on women. To this day, if a family is attacked by a marauder or an outsider, the man is expected to be the one to take the lead in fighting back, to risk his life for the women and children.
As for the downside of being a woman, let’s start with pregnancy since that is framed as the bane of the woman’s existence by the modern-day leftist feminist. I admit that if a woman who works a full-time job gets pregnant, yes, she has to take maternity leave and will miss out on the meetings that took place during that time. But let’s look at why maternity leave was created in the first place. It was created in order to protect women in the workplace, so that they can be a mom and return to their job. It was created so that they would get paid in full during their maternity leave. I fully support paid family leave and think that it is essential in order for women to work and also have children. If we did not give women maternity leave, we would be putting an undue burden on her, deterring women from having children and also working, creating a situation where women really wouldn’t be able to do both. It is ironic how the leftist feminist takes a blessing like maternity leave and turns it into a curse.
So let’s not pretend that maternity leave is ruining your life. It isn’t. It’s completely different to take a few months or even a year, off from the workplace than to take twenty years off from the workplace. Leftists often conflate the two, but the situations are not the same. I agree that if you haven’t worked for twenty years, then it’s going to be difficult to jump back in and catch up to your male counterparts who have been in the workforce that whole time. But if you take maternity leave or a year off, you can jump back in. I fully support whichever decision women make, whether that is to take a little time off and jump back into the workplace or a lot of time off, perhaps to be a stay-at-home mom. We should celebrate both, but the Left often ruthlessly beats up women who choose the latter or act as though women who chose the former are being held back by something great like maternity leave.
Or consider the teenage girl who is pregnant. I think of the movie Juno. The main character, a sixteen-year-old girl named Juno, considered getting an abortion, chose not to, and went to school while pregnant. She gave the child up for adoption and continued high school, dating a guy who was one of her closest friends. It was certainly an emotional and physical journey for her to have a baby, but it didn’t preclude her from continuing her high school education.
Leftists who are pro-abortion promote the idea that motherhood is at best a drawback and at its worst a curse. And certainly they think this is true of motherhood when it is unplanned. They even think it warrants killing. Celebrating both men and women, as well as children, is important in order for our society to combat the toxic messaging of the far Left. We are often so consumed with discussing the war on women that we forget that there is a full-fledged war on babies.