“Oh, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but tyrannous to use it like a giant.”161
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Measure for Measure
In the previous chapter we discussed arguments commonly made by the powerful left-wing feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. But today we hear a very aggressive, much more celebratory argument in favor of abortion from leftist feminists. This is the notion that abortion empowers women. Abortion is a form of strength, of female empowerment. It is an expression of women’s control over themselves, over their bodies, and over their futures. Left-wing feminism embraces this ideology and the two are almost inseparable today. Abortion is something women should be proud of. Something not to feel bad about. Abortion is lauded as a form of power, and not exclusively women’s power. They argue that abortion helps men, too, not just women. Men can be grateful to a woman they slept with who got an abortion.
We hear this a lot these days, especially from young women who see themselves as abortion activists. They’re not just pro-choice; they’re pro-abortion. They wear signs that say “abortion is freedom.” We see this in the campaign called “Shout Your Abortion,” which Oprah promoted in her magazine and on Oprah.com. The idea is that you should own your abortion. Work it. Make it part of your feminine strength. Amelia Bonow, who founded the movement in 2015, wrote, “Plenty of people still believe on some level if you’re a good woman, abortion is a choice that should be accompanied by some level of sadness, shame, or regret. But you know what? I have a good heart and having an abortion made me happy in a totally unqualified way.”162 Since then, Shout Your Abortion has grown into an organization that describes itself as “a movement working to normalize abortion through art, media, and community events all over the country.” 163 The organization also sells merchandise, with award buttons like “I Had an Abortion and I’m Great” and foam fingers that point skyward and proclaim: “Thank God for Abortion.”
The Shout Your Abortion website also has a slew of articles. Here’s a list:
“2 abortions in 1 month and I’m fine!”
“I had an abortion and it wasn’t scary, it was empowering”
“About to have a third abortion”
“I wouldn’t change a thing”
“Having had an abortion I feel more connected to myself than ever before”
“My abortion made me love myself more”
“It doesn’t really matter what your reason for having an abortion is”
“Live your truth”
There is also a movement called Thank God for Abortion.164 This movement’s Instagram frequently posts pictures of women holding babies, sometimes posing with crosses, halos, and other religious symbols resembling the Virgin Mary in order to appropriate these images, flout them, and say that God is for abortion.165 People recently ran a piece titled “26 Celebrities Share Their Abortion Stories to Help End the Stigma.”166
This movement seeks to normalize abortion, to make it seem as if it is nothing out of the ordinary in a woman’s life experience, like it’s not only morally okay but also something to be celebrated. This is the reality of what is going on in our country, and these are the voices our media outlets are amplifying. Outlets like this would never present views like mine, a pro-life position, in this kind of positive way or give me the megaphone that they have because what I am saying does not fit their agenda. Many good-hearted Democrats can’t believe this is happening in our country, but it is. Abortion is now openly described as a positive good. It would be inaccurate to say that these voices are pro-choice. They are pro-abortion.
Recently, the actress Michelle Williams gave a speech at the Golden Globes while accepting an award for best actress in a series. She used the occasion to talk about her abortion and to celebrate her “choice.” Williams said upon receiving her Golden Globes statue, “When you put this in someone’s hands, you’re acknowledging the choices that they make as an actor, moment by moment, scene by scene, day by day, but you’re also acknowledging the choices they make as a person.… I wouldn’t have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose.”167
Leftists may wonder why conservatives find Hollywood satanic. It is primarily because of moments like this, where Michelle Williams appears to say essentially that she killed a child growing inside her in order to win a golden statue. She used her acceptance speech to position herself as an advocate for abortion and to encourage other women to do the same. She was seemingly proud of having had an abortion and in effect said that it enabled her career and her success, and of course, there she was holding the precious golden statue. What will little girls who saw her give that speech on TV, girls who hope to be an actress or win an award one day, think? “That’s what I need to do to achieve my dreams.”
Girls are bombarded with the messaging that abortion is empowering, spinning abortion as the road to the pinnacle of success. Glamour magazine wrote, “The internet exploded with praise for the moment—perhaps the most memorable of the night.”168 Actors, pundits, and leftist activists posted on social media about Michelle Williams’s speech. Actress Reese Witherspoon wrote, “What a speech by #Michelle Williams! Thank you for being a champion of women, you are an inspiration.”169 Elizabeth Banks called Williams an “icon.”170 Golden Globes presenter Tiffany Haddish yelled, “Preach!” in the middle of Williams’ speech.
Every little girl should know that she does not need to kill another person to be successful, beautiful, smart, or admirable. Or to win a golden statue.
Let’s look at this question of whether abortion really empowers women. We can begin by consulting the original feminists to see how they looked at the issue. Abortion is often portrayed as something that is a natural outgrowth of the women’s rights movement, and yet we discover that all the original feminists, from Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were pro-life. They knew about abortion, rare as it was in those days, and were vehemently against it. Anthony and Stanton fought for women’s economic opportunity and political opportunity. But they also knew that abortion was anti-woman and anti-life. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “It is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we fit” and referred to abortion as no different from “infanticide.”171 The newspaper that Anthony and Stanton ran together refused to run ads for abortifacients. Susan B. Anthony wrote in the newspaper The Revolution that abortion burdens the woman’s “conscience in life, and soul in death.”172 And Sarah F. Norton, who worked with Susan B. Anthony on getting Cornell to admit women, took a similar position.173
Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and was perhaps the first feminist philosopher, also wrote disapprovingly of abortion. She said that women who “destroy the embryo in the womb or cast it off when born” lack strength and dignity. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, wrote in her diary that she was filled with indignation over what she called “the gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist.”174
Stanford University scholar Michael McConnell writes in “How Not to Promote Serious Deliberation About Abortion” that “the nineteenth century anti-abortion movement was strongly supported by the women’s movement.”175
The original feminists realized that women’s rights begin in the womb. As we see today with the radical pro-abortion leftists who call themselves “feminists,” true feminism has been hijacked. I consider myself an original feminist in line with the desire for political and economic opportunity for women. But I cannot align myself with the radical leftist feminism that is fundamentally anti–human rights. We need to take back true feminism.
We talk about empowerment a lot today, especially in the context of women’s empowerment. It is brought up in the abortion debate as if abortion automatically equals empowerment or somehow produces empowerment. But what is empowerment, really? Simply, empowerment is based on the idea of power. Empowerment, as the word is used today, also has an inherent positive connotation. But we have to look at how power is used to see if true empowerment really applies here.
Let’s say, for example, that you’re standing at the edge of a precipice holding a baby, not an unborn baby but let’s say a one-year-old, in your hands. You have the power to drop it over the cliff and send it plunging to its death. If you drop it, it will be gone. You clearly have immense power. That is without question. You’re holding somebody else’s whole life, their whole future, in your hands. But would you consider it a form of empowerment to let go, to exercise this power? This is nothing more than tyrannical power if used in this way. It is merciless killing. This is not empowerment.
“Oh, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength,” Shakespeare writes in Measure for Measure, “but tyrannous to use it like a giant.”176 We keep hearing from our culture that women should be empowered, and I agree. But is it empowerment to take innocent children’s lives? Of course, as women we have power over them. They’re largely helpless. But what if we use that power to kill them? What does that make us? Women do have the power to kill the innocent, but that doesn’t make us powerful in the way we ought to be. We should seek the power to do good in the world and to improve the lives of others, not to take them.
I was pretty appalled when I saw that a woman named Emily Letts uploaded a video of her in-hospital abortion procedure. Emily is a twenty-five-year-old pro-abortion activist and works as a counselor at the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in New Jersey. I was ready to watch the video, squinting so as to prepare myself for what I was about to see, but the video briefly showed her from the waist up in the operating room, and all that was shown was her smiling; the video then cut to her talking directly to the camera in a monologue fashion, so we didn’t see the abortion take place. In her monologue she says that she did this “to show women that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story.”
One might think that she got an abortion because she didn’t see the baby as a life. But remarkably, she says in the video, “I feel in awe of the fact that I can make a baby. I can make a life.” She adds, “I knew what I was going to do was right. Because it was right for me, and no one else.”177 She couldn’t be more correct in saying that the decision was only right for her and no one else. Clearly what was “right” for the baby inside her did not affect her decision. She wanted to exercise her strength over the baby. And she did. It’s dead.
Emily proceeded to take on a lot of media interviews including with HuffPost and Cosmopolitan magazine. She told Cosmo, “Every time I watch the video, I love it.”178 Was one negative word written about her by the mainstream media? Nope. She admitted that she was not on any form of birth control and that the man was never involved in her decision.179
After seeing her video and reading her interviews, all I could think of was Lady Macbeth, a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays. Before she gets ready to participate with her husband in the murder of the king, she talks about suppressing her feelings and specifically about extinguishing her feminine instincts. She has to defeminize herself in a sense, producing a kind of extinction of nature in order to carry out this dastardly deed. For Lady Macbeth, femininity is sweet; it’s empathetic. But for her to be able to carry out the awful deed, the awful murder, she finds that she must stamp out her femininity, developing a hardness if you will, that will enable her to kill. What does Lady Macbeth want? She wants power. She wants to have access to the throne. Shakespeare’s account is a macabre demonstration of how killing can lead one to murder and destroy one’s own nature.
After the murder, we see Lady Macbeth trying to wash her hands. “Out, damn’d spot,” she shrieks.180 There is no blood on her hands in the physical sense, but she thinks there is, and in her washing her hands she is trying to rid herself of the deed she’s done. This is Lady Macbeth’s attempt to stifle her own conscience, to forget the killing she did. And I think deep down this is what Emily Letts, the Shout Your Abortion movement, and the leftist feminist campaign to celebrate abortion are all about. They are about “out, damn’d spot.” They’re about celebrating something so awful in order to stifle one’s own conscience. They’re about extinguishing one’s empathy and natural disposition of love and affection to your child so that one can become desensitized and, in celebrating it, not have to face the guilt.
When I think of ultimate power, omnipotence, if you will, and what that means, I think about God’s power. Whether or not you believe in God, I am referring to the concept of ultimate power. One of God’s powers is the power to create: God’s creation not only of the universe and its complexities but also of life on Earth and specifically human life and each unique human life. This is a marvelous demonstration of divine power. Remarkably, it’s a power that women, and only women, to some extent share. Women and only women have the power to physically give birth to life. Where would the world be without women? And so to take the power to bring life into this world and then use that power to kill that same life is a twisted evil. It is a true abuse of power. If women’s empowerment is killing your baby in the modern American “feminist” movement, I want no part of it. It is not empowerment. When we become advocates for the taking of innocent lives, we cancel out any beauty or exquisiteness we once had in our feminine power, and it becomes black as soot.
Abortion, far from being “women’s empowerment,” actually supports the concept of the patriarchy. Leftist feminists argue that abortion is a way to “bring down the patriarchy,” for women to not have to be controlled by men, and for the structure to be turned upside down. But the truth is abortion doesn’t support women, and it ultimately supports a structure of male domination and male authority. And today’s leftist feminists who promote abortion have acquiesced in this.
The hard truth is that men who can get away with cajoling or even coercing their partner to have an abortion are able to have sex without consequences. They don’t have to deal with the child. They don’t have to even pay child support. They don’t have to be responsible to women. They don’t have to be responsible for fatherhood. Think of the common sight of a couple in a bar. They flirt. One thing leads to another; they have sex in his or her apartment. The night ends. The woman discovers she’s pregnant, shoot. She texts the man; she wants to talk. They meet after work, and he goes, “Hey, here’s $500, go take care of it.” This happens all too often.
Is this acceptable? Is this what feminists should fight for? For men to have sex with women and then treat them like mules for hire? Ultimately, to pay them off to “get rid of the contents of their womb”? The legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon says of Roe v. Wade, “Roe does not free women. It frees male sexual aggression. The availability of abortion removes the one remaining legitimate reason that women have had for refusing sex besides the headache.”181 What she’s saying is that abortion encourages male irresponsibility, leaving women to get abortions, something they might not otherwise do, just because it is more convenient for men. I know that many men reading this can probably relate to this sentiment.
Think of all the men out there who are thankful for abortion—CEOs, movie executives, sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein. These are male jerks who like abortion because it enables their promiscuous lifestyle and lets them use women as playthings. Why should empowered women enable these people? Men who force abortion on women are the dregs of society. And ironically, feminists have become their enablers.182 Notice that feminists who champion abortion rarely mention the fact that it was seven men who voted to legalize abortion. Seven men who probably knew that other men would benefit from it.
The worst men in society love abortion. There was a case in Indiana where a man killed his pregnant girlfriend and was sentenced to sixty-five years in prison. Why did he do it? Because she was past her sixth month and it was too late for her to get an abortion in her state.183 He felt so entitled to be able to kill this child that he went ahead and killed them both. Abortion, and the feeling of entitlement to abortion, by men as well, has unleashed a culture of violence.184
I’m reminded of the novel The Great Gatsby, when Nick Carraway says, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”185 The fetus, the unborn that ends up in the dumpster, that’s the mess that people make in our society today. These men who benefit from abortion are the moral successors to Tom and Daisy Buchanan.
“Abortion empowers women” is merely leftist media messaging. What we are getting is public propaganda that doesn’t resemble the reality of the world. In a way, it reminds me of all the rhetoric we hear from some of the same people that prostitution is a form of empowerment. I ask myself—What is a more accurate picture of the prostitution community? Is it really women who are championing their freedom? Or is it women who are destitute, desperately in need of funds, feeling they have to do this in order to survive? This is not even the idea of having a lot of sex, it is the idea you have to have sex with whoever can shell out a few bucks. It doesn’t matter how fat, ugly, and smelly the guy is. You gotta let him stick his penis inside you. Feminists call this “freedom.” They call this “empowerment.” Really? I would much rather empower these women to break free from the pimp that often controls a group of prostitutes, be rehabilitated and given nutrition they often lack, be able to go back to school, and have a life beyond prostitution.
The reality of abortion is similar. It’s not an expression of freedom. It’s not empowerment. It’s a girl who is terrified going into an abortion clinic on a Saturday morning, who’s going to have to lie on a stretcher, who’s going to either have an invasive form of surgery or, if she goes in early enough, take an abortifacient pill only to go home and have a painful, bloody, flushing-out experience on her bathroom toilet, quietly moaning and weeping, hoping nobody hears her. That’s what feminists today call empowerment. This is a sick, twisted lie that the pro-abortion movement is selling. This is not what the original feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought for.
Statistically, abortion does not empower women. Most babies aborted around the world are girls. Look at China, the most populous country in the world, where there is widespread killing of the unborn, mostly girls. But I am referring to more than China. In all countries where abortion is legal after the gender can be detected, there is the possibility of sex selection. “I want a boy. I don’t want a girl.” And this can be carried further to other kinds of selection. “I don’t want a gay child. I don’t want a disabled child. I want a designer baby.” It is horrific that more black babies than white babies are aborted. What lie have the Democrats sold to women in order to bring this about? That it’s about empowerment. But is this really empowerment? No. This is eugenics. And this is reprehensible.
According to Crisis Magazine, Hillary Clinton invited Mother Teresa to have lunch with her at the White House while she was First Lady. Long before she ran for president herself, Hillary asked Mother Teresa why she thought there had not yet been a female president of the United States. The nun, of diminutive stature but more courageous than anyone, did not hesitate in her response and said, “Because she has probably been aborted.”186
If we genuinely want to see women’s empowerment, we need to put a stop to aborting baby girls who will be our future leaders. Truly strong women fight for the rights of the next generation of women.
If we are going to consider empowerment in a completely transparent way, most people would agree that empowerment is facing your situation and being stronger because of it. If you want to be a stronger person and really be empowered, take the high road and have your baby. You don’t have to raise it, but if you can, do so. Many women can attest to the fact that motherhood has made them a stronger person, as it has presented challenges that they never would have faced otherwise, but it also presents them with empowering rewards and a remaking of their inner life that they never might have expected. Life is full of challenges, and it is how we meet them, respond, and rise to the occasion that defines us. When we choose to bestow death on another, it may feel powerful, but this feeling is empty and is not rooted in true empowerment that is life-giving to the soul.
In 2018, Kylie Jenner uploaded a YouTube video titled “To Our Daughter” that got eighty-nine million views. Kylie, the youngest of the infamous Kardashian siblings, got pregnant when she was twenty years old with the child of rapper Travis Scott. The video is beautifully done and is narrated by Kylie’s friends and family speaking to Stormi, Kylie’s daughter, almost as a love letter to her. We see Kylie go in for her ultrasound with her mom, and she hears the heartbeat. Her friend says, “When you’re twenty years old, you’re just figuring out your life. You don’t know what you want. You’re an indecisive teenager, you’re just becoming a young adult. But there was one thing your mom knew for sure, and that was you.”187 The end of the video is when Kylie gives birth, and you can hear baby Stormi’s cry and see her pudgy arm moving while in Kylie’s arms. I found the video to be a beautiful testament to the fact that Kylie chose life for her daughter. While we aren’t all celebrities and Kylie isn’t perfect, we can all look at the choice that Kylie made versus the choice to abort and see the beauty in it.188 She told Vogue Australia in 2019, “I feel like having a daughter has made me love myself more.… I want to be an example for her.”189 The pro-life author Randy Alcorn said, “Whenever I see an unmarried woman carrying a child, my first response is one of respect. I know she could have taken the quick fix without anyone knowing, but she chose to let an innocent child live.”190 I couldn’t agree more.
I often think about women’s empowerment, precisely because the Left uses this phrase so frequently to advocate for abortion. Though they are poisoning the term, we must take it back because true women’s empowerment is so important. Many people say that women’s empowerment means more women being in positions of power, and that is something we should strive for, but I also think it matters how we get there. We cannot justify killing others in order to get there, literally destroying babies’ physical bodies and placing them at the altar of a fake version of empowerment.
I will be a successful woman, more successful than my great-grandmother would have ever dreamed, and I sure as heck will not kill my baby in the process. If the Left thinks that I need to do so, they are wrong. If killing my baby is what is required of me to be “empowered” in this day and age, then I want nothing to do with the word. Because taking innocent life is not empowerment. It’s a charade. It’s a farce. Seneca, the great philosopher, said, “All cruelty springs from weakness.” This is true.
We gain power by being academically, politically, and economically successful. We also gain moral power by our strength of character. And one way we achieve that kind of power is to speak up and stand up for what is right. I have no doubt that we will face the cost of our decisions, when the radical Left beats up on us, denounces us, even tries to hinder us from success because of our pro-life views. But we can be empowered by knowing we’re speaking up for those who have no voice, and we can be empowered by knowing that we are doing the right thing behind closed doors. The right thing is often the most difficult decision to make. It’s clearly the harder path. But many times, in taking that path, we find ourselves becoming internally stronger. We find ourselves discovering true women’s empowerment. From my own personal experience, I can say that defending the weak actually makes you strong. I am stronger than ever.