| Pro-life
Feminism and Saintliness
There are those who fully endorse the sanctity of the connection
of natural and human creativity and are at the same time passionately
against abortion. “Pro-life feminism” has been one label
used to refer to the view that a stand against abortion is a stand
for respecting women. As the pro-life feminist Sidney Callahan put
it, “I can’t see separating fetal liberation from women’s
liberation. Ultimately, I think the feminist movement made a serious
mistake — politically, morally, and psychologically —
by committing itself to a pro-choice stance, a stance which in effect
pits women against their children.”
Almost everyone can agree that as a society we devalue caring for
children. We can also acknowledge that pro-choice rhetoric has by
and large avoided dealing with the common intuition that there is
a sacred dimension of conception and fetal life. We can even concede
that there is a spiritual opportunity posed by an unplanned pregnancy,
and it is possible to respect the spiritual state of women who are
able truly to put the life of a potential baby on par with their
own. This admiration is not far removed from how we feel about James
McBride’s mother in his memoir, The Color of Water,
who overcame the trauma of her early life and her own loss and depression
and was able, through faith and love, to raise eight children. Likewise,
we tend to regard as enlightened and almost saintly those people
who adopt troubled or disabled children, sometimes many of them.
Pro-life feminists legitimately question whether a permissive and
even cavalier approach to abortion works to the detriment of women’s
interests. Their concern derives from a belief in the immense value
of women’s reproductive capacity and extends to a vision of
society organized around true recognition of that value. In that
sense, their view converges with that of some ardently pro-choice
feminists. Both consider what society might look like if our goal
was to give women’s concerns the same centrality and respect
that men’s have traditionally enjoyed. Both find fault with
a society that condemns abortion but does little to make the health
and welfare of children a primary goal.
However, I find it problematic when pro-life feminists argue backward
from the sanctity (and the rights) of fetal life to a prescriptive,
utopian view of women’s lives. They don’t always acknowledge
that the key intermediary step must always be women’s ultimate
responsibility to make their own abortion decisions. We cannot go
directly from an opposition to abortion to a certain vision —
even if a freer, more respectful vision, according to its advocates
— of women’s lives. We can only proceed through a respect
for women’s personhood. It is not enough to insist that women
will find their sense of greatest meaning and value in a society
that opposes abortion; it is necessary to create a society where
women are free to discover that, or not, for themselves.
Recognizing women’s right to self-determination entails accepting
that society cannot compel saintliness. It is fundamentally unfair
to oblige women to be good Samaritans with respect to their pregnancies.
Throughout history, women often have not been free to make and take
responsibility for their own decisions about sexuality and motherhood,
and it has been easy enough to create identities for them, to make
them stand for good or evil. When we finally accept that women must
be their own mediators of their conscience or God’s
word, we lose a fantasy about the purity of women and a clarity
about their rightful destiny. But we gain a fairer, more truthful,
more complex view of each other.
mmo : february 2005
From
MATERNAL DESIRE by Daphne de Marneffe. Copyright (c) 2004 by Daphne
de Marneffe. By permission of Little, Brown and Company, Inc. All
rights reserved. To purchase copies of this book, please call 1.800.759.0190.
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