The Rights of Unborn Women

I saw this bumper sticker the other day on an old beat-up van that read, “Fight to Protect the Rights of Unborn Women.” It hit me so powerfully. I’m pretty involved with the pro-life movement, and while the idea of the bumper sticker seems so basic and fundamental, I’ve never connected the idea of women’s rights and the rights of the unborn in that way before. The way the pro-life vs. pro-choice debate is generally structured is with territorial, exclusive claims on the rights of the unborn and the rights of women, respectively. In actuality, the pro-choice movement seeks to eliminate the rights of the unborn entirely while the pro-life movement fights to support women along with the unborn.

It’s always been a sticky issue with the pro-life movement to combat the foundational slogan of the pro-choice movement: women deserve the right to control their own bodies. Feminists for Life have a wonderful motto that best defeats the principles of the pro-choice movement, I think: women deserve better than abortion.

The idea that women have the right to control their own bodies is extremely superficial, in my opinion. The pro-choice movement offers a convenient, instant-gratification solution to a woman who cannot afford her child or does not want the responsibility of caring for her child. It fails to support women who make the choice to not have an abortion, and it fails to support women with post-abortive healing. Having an abortion has lasting, profound consequences. It is one of the biggest decisions that absolutely cannot be taken back, undone, reversed. Women who choose to have an abortion risk higher chances of depression, abusing their other children, infertility, and life-long regret.

It seems so wrong to me to try to base an ethical decision on convenience. Since it would be really difficult to have a child, let’s just get rid of the child. It’s not really a human being yet anyway (see any similarity with “A Jew isn’t human, it should be exterminated”?). Ethics should be based on principles that hold true even in the most trying of circumstances. The pro-life movement sets out to fight for the children that are being lost in a holocaust of convenience. A country based on liberty and the rights of each human being should not legalize the sacrifice of its most vulnerable citizens.

I love the pro-life movement for its ethical integrity in supporting the unborn, its support of women who have chosen to have an abortion and need post-abortive healing, and its support of women who choose to keep their children alive. The pro-life movement doesn’t say, “Keep the baby. I know you’re poor, struggling, desperate, just make it happen.” I worked with a shelter in DC that counsels women who are pregnant, helps them find jobs, and provides them with diapers and baby formula and also shelter if they are abused or homeless. At school, we worked to meet the needs of student mothers, including free babysitting so they could remain in school, counseling, and the support of health, housing, financial, administration, and spiritual departments. Feminists for Life also asserts that abortion is a clear result of the needs of women not being met. America should increase its aid to pregnant, struggling women. We should not support a system that claims to ameliorate the problem of unwanted pregnancy while really it augments the problem by compromising the identity of America herself, who sacrifices caring for the helpless for the sake of convenience.

I love this movement which doesn’t lure women in with a quick fix and dooms them to life-long negative consequences. The pro-life movement doesn’t promote men not bearing the responsibilities of their choices and does not deprive them of being involved in the choice to kill their own children. Additionally, the pro-life movement does not inconsistently promote the rights of women by first victimizing women who choose to be sexually active (“that’s a shame that happened to you.”...as though the woman caught an illness rather than chose to have sex), then saying women suddenly have the power to control their own bodies when it comes to purging their wombs of the life they have created. So, essentially, the pro-choice philosophy takes away the cause (women choosing to have sex) and then must get rid of the result (the child isn't actually a life).

Women are made to be empowered if they liken their bodies to those of men: unable to bear children. Where is the feminism in that? It is a difficult, wonderful, complex power that women alone possess in being able to bear and nurture children in the womb. Feminism should support the whole woman, rather than reducing women to a body; it should recognize the implications in making a responsible choice with regards to sexual partners and spouses, the deep emotion that comes with finding out one is a mother, and the responsibility in providing for a child that one has created (even if it means giving up the child to a family that can better provide for him/her). I am proud to fight to protect the rights of women—the unborn, the struggling, and the lost.