Gloria Steinem, the rabidly pro-abortion feminist activist, was interviewed last week by Starshine Roshell for “The Santa Barbara Independent” to discuss feminism in Donald Trump’s America. She spoke about the presidential election, feminism, and the Women’s March on Washington, but unsurprisingly, a large part of the conversation revolved around abortion.
When asked what the biggest threat to feminism today is, Steinem answered, “It’s always been the same thing: The one thing we have uniquely is wombs, so it’s all the systems that try to control reproduction in order to decide how many workers, soldiers, heirs to a wealthy family….” This is a typical pro-abortion argument — that simple biology is some kind of anti-woman conspiracy meant to punish women and keep them in line. Pregnancy and fertility are not threats to feminism, and women are not held back because they possess wombs. It is an insult to women to insinuate that abortion is necessary for women to be successful or equal to men. But then, the abortion industry is inherently misogynistic, so this line of thinking isn’t really surprising.
What is surprising is that Steinem argued against Trump’s pro-life policies, and his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, by saying that to oppose abortion is to be “pro-death.” Yes, really.
“He’s [Neil Gorsuch] sane but against reproductive freedom. To be right-to-life for the fetus is to be dangerous for women’s lives,” she said. “And Trump reinstated the global gag rule, which in the past has meant a woman dies every minute internationally because of the denial of safe and legal abortion services — and often other services, too, because it means closing down clinics. That’s not pro-life for women, it’s pro-death.”
Claiming that women will die without access to abortion is ludicrous and immediately shows that Steinem isn’t interested in making a fact-based argument; abortion is never, in fact, medically necessary.
Pro-abortion activists also like to claim that before abortion was legal, women died frequently in dangerous back-alley abortions. The reality is that this claim has been wildly exaggerated, as pointed out by NARAL co-founder and former abortionist Bernard Nathanson, who explained that they simply made the statistics up:
We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000, but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public. The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200 – 250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000.
In fact, the year before Roe v. Wade, the CDC reported only 65 deaths from abortion. And quite frankly, abortion activists don’t need to worry about back-alley abortions maiming women. The butchers have just moved out of the shadows into “respectable” abortion facilities, where women get maimed and killed while abortion advocates look the other way. Time after time, the conditions of abortion clinics are not safe for women. Shoddy abortionists continue to practice all over the country while authorities look the other way, often in conditions that would shut down any other medical facility.
Tattoo parlors, fast food restaurants, tanning salons… all are often held to higher standards than abortion facilities are, and yet abortion businesses fight common-sense regulations, even things that abortion advocates used to fight for. Now, they spout empty platitudes about wanting to prevent back-alley abortions so that women won’t be maimed, but ignore the unsafe conditions that so many abortion facilities operate under.
And it may not be something that an abortion activist like Steinem will ever acknowledge, but every single abortion does take a life. Preborn babies are living human beings; this is a scientific fact. Abortion isn’t pro-life for anyone — not for women, and not for their babies.
