It’s an often repeated, tired line: opponents of abortion are waging a war on women. The statement, based on the mythology of the abortion industry and its campaign of misinformation, however, contradicts the very ideals of feminism and the personhood of the woman.
The fact is, the abortion industry has been long involved in waging a war against women and motherhood. Although abortion advocates claim they serve the interests of women, Planned Parenthood profits from the manipulation, coercion, and abuse of mothers and young girls, and advocates for the very violence that keeps them powerless.
Investigations by Live Action reveal that Planned Parenthood has covered up child sexual abuse and sex-trafficking, ignored mandatory reporting laws, and sent victims back to rapists and pimps. Instead of helping vulnerable women, Planned Parenthood helps sexual abusers obtain secret abortions for the sake of profit, enabling them to continue their crimes.
Planned Parenthood also consistently lobbies against legislation to ban sex-selective abortions, supporting discrimination against the littlest and the most defenseless women in the womb.
In fact, Planned Parenthood is willing to commit abortions based solely on the sex of the child, as investigated by Live Action in 2012. India, a country that has experienced the devastating effects of gender imbalance due to sex-selection and gendercide, is working to end the practice; yet taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood willingly targets women for elimination in the womb.
Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist who encouraged forced sterilization and birth control, supported these practices as a means of producing what she believed to be a cleaner race. Sanger’s methods for population control, which are antithetical to the empowerment of women, sought to eliminate the weak, the disabled, and those she deemed unfit for society.
When countries, such as China and India, enforce methods of population control, women suffer as a result.
The United Nations reports that over 100 million girls — victims of female gendercide —are missing today because they have been killed in the womb or abandoned. These tiny women, who have been silently discarded based on the notion that they are less valuable, are the victims of societies that have abandoned human rights and human dignity.
It is undoubtedly clear that abortion industry is profoundly anti-woman. However, media and lobbyists have packaged abortion in euphemisms to disguise how abortion is destroying society and the dignity of women.
While women, for decades, have overcome incredible odds, defied challenges, and rose above oppressive societal structures, they are now being sold the lie that their empowerment comes through the destruction of another.
In the book Subverted, author Sue Ellen Browder describes how the women’s movement, which once joined human rights in demanding equal opportunity, became a product of the sexual revolution. Motherhood and women’s fertility became inconveniences, and a woman’s ability to “control her own body” became —in violation of human rights — a constitutional right.
However, the redefinition of women’s empowerment is in sharp contrast to true feminism. Many of the early feminists who fought for women’s suffrage were pro-life, and recognized the harm that abortion inflicts upon women. Alice Paul called abortion “the ultimate exploitation of women,” while suffragettes Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Victoria Woodhull affirmed the preciousness of every human life.
Instead of empowering women to achieve against all odds — the very heartbeat of feminism — the abortion lobby has made mothers the enemies of their own children.
Mother Teresa, who often spoke against abortion, said the right to abortion has “pitted mothers against their children,” portraying ones who should be celebrated and welcomed as threats and an “inconvenience.”
The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.
It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society.
It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered domination over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters.
It is only through upholding the dignity of women and preborn children that the human rights of both can be protected. Societies ought to celebrate and cherish motherhood, and welcome her child with open arms.
