Twenty nine years ago nine black-robed men handed feminists a
triumph that would try our souls, and I have come to believe,
find them wanting.
On January 22, 1973, when the Sisterhood is Powerful crowd
rejoiced at the outcome of Roe v. Wade, I was one of them, a
Washington, D.C. radical feminist scholar/abortion rights
advocate, much in demand as a spokeswoman by virtue of my
motherhood. After all, who better to illustrate the righteous
need for abortion than a young woman with a future, already
encumbered by a three-year-old in daycare?
Five years later in San Francisco, that same little girl
clutched my hand as we struggled against the chilly Van Ness
Avenue wind on our way to some euphemistically-styled "women's
health clinic."
"Samantha," I explained, ever the politically-vigilant
parent, "Mommy is pregnant. But since Jasmine's only 2 and I'm
not married anymore, this just isn't a good time to have a baby.
We're lucky women to have a choice."
I was proud of the legacy we would leave my daughter's
generation. Thanks to the Second Wave of Feminism, abortion was
now available, accessible and not much worse than a trip to the
dentist. Paid for by the state of California, to boot! And on
the morning of my own abortion, I was feeling a little extra
righteous. After years of posturing and sloganeering, I finally
had an opportunity to demonstrate my core beliefs like a rite of
passage.
Or a sacrament.
And in the twenty-nine years since Roe v. Wade, isn't that
what it's now become? Consider the sacred ground around abortion
temples, free speech suspended so as not to hinder partaking of
the ritual within, abortion providers occupying pedestals for
their noble efforts. Heretics dare not blaspheme by calling a
fetus a baby nor what happens to it murder. And as though in the
grip of a state religion, the media use only sanctioned terms:
pro-choice, reproductive rights, products of conception.
Consider: While every other political group is permitted to
baptize itself and demonstrate publicly, those who call
themselves pro-life are branded by the media "anti-abortion
extremists" and charged with racketeering.
But who's extreme? For all the left's vaunted respect for
multiculturalism, pro-abortion evangelists like missionaries of old
spend vast amounts of time, energy, and taxpayer money crusading
into the Third World to bring the "good news" of "family
planning" to primitives whose backward belief systems stand in
the way of their salvation. Like religious zealots arriving on
your doorstep when what you really need is an ambulance, they
rush to ravaged lands like Kosovo with abortion kits aplenty for
those in dire need of more life-sustaining commodities like
medicine, food, and water.
And what about here at home, where they rushed like priests
to Ground Zero, offering free abortions in place of absolution?
In the United States, according to the very pro-abortion Alan
Guttmacher Institute, 34 million abortions took place from 1973
to 1996. That's a million and a half per year. Who knows what
genius men and women were whooshed away from our midst and with
them what art, what music, what inventions, what cures?
And so I'd like to ask feminists today:
How about it, Sisters? Especially those of you who rode the
crest of the Second Wave with me: Did you ever dream that this
was where we were headed? Did you ever dream we would call any
politician a friend to women no matter how flagrantly he
exploited them as long as he continued to back abortion on
demand? Did you ever dream we would enter the realms of denial
required to condone a procedure in which a perfectly viable
infant is pulled feet first through the birth canal until all
but her head is exposed, stabbed in the skull to suck out her
brains, delivered dead and sold to the highest bidder for body
parts?
"A certain type of late-term procedure," so-called by modern
feminists, who've twisted themselves like pretzels to pretend the
dream did not turn into a nightmare.
And here is what I'd like to tell them now:
Perhaps its time to wake up and slap some cold water on our
faces. Time to stop the hypocrisy, to sever the ideals of
feminism -- dignity for women, equal status, equal opportunity,
equal pay -- from what has become a religious devotion to death.
We should have listened to our mothers -- the feminist ones,
that is.
Susan B. Anthony, now featured on our currency, wasn't
thinking of political correctness when she referred to abortion
as "child murder." Nor when she wrote, "No matter what the
motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the
unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the
deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her
soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the
desperation which impelled her to the crime!"
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with her anti-slavery perspective,
wrote, "When we consider that women are treated as property, it
is degrading to women that we should treat our children as
property to be disposed of as we see fit."
Mattie Brinkerhoff weighed in thus: "When a man steals to
satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something
wrong in society so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn
child, it is an evidence that either by education or
circumstances she has been greatly wronged."
Think that one over next time you're standing in line at the
grocery store, as I was recently, and overhear a teenage girl
nonchalantly discussing with a friend the abortion she's having
tomorrow.
Some legacy.
Barbara Curtis is an author, freelance writer, and now mother
of many including three through adoption. She lives in northern
California. Visit her at
www.barbaracurtis.com
