Much of the backlash to today’s ruling overturning Roe and Casey has been entirely predictable. Progressives are angry that the Court is no longer enforcing a regime of abortion on demand across the entire country, and abortion supporters appear unwilling or unprepared to make the case for laws that effect their preferred status quo.
But the overwhelming theme of the outrage thus far has centered around one theme: What will become of women? Many say it cynically, others say it sincerely. It’s the foremost argument for abortion, an argument that the Court itself made in Casey: Women need this. Women can’t be free, women can’t be equal to men, women can’t be fully human without abortion.
There is much to be said about how deeply flawed this view is, but on a day like today, I return to the wisdom of an essay by Frederica Mathewes-Green published here at NR in 2016. Mathewes-Green was an avowed pro-abortion feminist who became a passionate pro-life activist, and the way she explains her conversion is instructive. I encourage you to read the entire essay, but here’s a crucial passage that gets to the heart of why abortion is deeply anti-feminist and anti-woman:
This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war. We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued her from the clutches of her child.
If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.
That image has always haunted me. Surely every one of us, even those who support abortion, would recognize the horror of such a situation if we witnessed it in the animal kingdom. Why have we decided as a society to celebrate the fact that women feel compelled to kill their own children in order to save themselves? How could we believe this is any sort of solution? It isn’t. And in the debates that are sure to come in a post-Roe America, pro-lifers should be ready to say so.