Abortion advocates have been angrily disputing the recent claim that millennials do not care about abortion. One activist in particular felt the need to defend millennials as adamantly pro-abortion – and in the process, she insulted women of all generations.
My name is Carly Manes, and I am a nineteen-year-old abortion-rights activist. In other words, I am a Millennial who is fully committed to ensuring safe and affordable abortion access for women all over the United States. Although I hold this title in the highest esteem, it is not the only title which I champion. When I am not planning my next visit to Lansing to express my opposition to anti-choice legislation (such as HB 5711), I am busy being a student, a progressive activist on all fronts, an athlete, an environmentalist, a vegetarian, and simply, a teenager.
It is only because of the generation of abortion activists before me that I can claim each and every one of these roles, all at the same time. If it were not for the generations of women who tirelessly fought to establish the legal right to abortion, then I would not be able to hold any of these titles without significant sacrifice. This is the case for most Millennial abortion-rights activists. It is because of the courageous work by our predecessors that Millennials no longer have to focus all of their energy and efforts solely on establishing the legality of abortion.
And, isn’t this what our mothers and grandmothers worked for all those years; so that one day women could take for granted the right to decide when and if to have children. Didn’t they want us to live in a country where women (and men) had access to and could afford contraception and, when needed, be assured that safe and affordable abortion would be available?
While it’s a fact that the original feminists were most definitely not working to assure that abortion would be legal and freely available, that’s not what stood out in this piece. What stands out is Manes’s claim that she would not be able to do any of the things she can do now without abortion.
Get that, ladies? Without the ability to kill your children, you couldn’t be students, activists, athletes, or environmentalists, or even make your own dietary choices. If women didn’t have legal abortion, why, they couldn’t do anything!
When pro-aborts say things like this, do they honestly not realize how condescending and insulting that is to women? They’re basically telling women that we are too weak to handle having a job, getting an education, participating in athletics, or anything else, really, if we bear our children. We don’t even have to keep them – adoption is the alternative that is never mentioned – so apparently, just getting pregnant can ruin a woman’s life. Without abortion, women could accomplish nothing. We are nothing more than our reproductive organs.
Meanwhile, pro-lifers believe that women are strong enough to handle pregnancy, a career, getting an education, and anything else they might put her minds to. We understand that abortion is not the magic key that unlocks a glorious future for women. We know not only that women are more than that; they deserve better than that.
