Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa doesn’t see it that way. Leader of New Wave Feminists, a pro-life feminist group, she became both pregnant and pro-life at age 16. She stars in a new documentary, Pro-Life Feminist, along with two other feminist women active in the pro-life movement. Pro-life feminists, says Hernon-De La Rosa, don’t see only the woman or only the child: “We want to support and protect two people.”
“When they [women in crisis pregnancy situations] look for help they see Planned Parenthood, not the pro-life community. …Our whole society, including the pro-life movement, needs to do much, more more to support pregnancy women in distress.”
For a longer discussion and the negative role men display in advocating for abortion rights, you can read the full article here.
Destiny Herndon De La Rosa standing up for life: photo via New Wave Feminists website.
The CBC highlighted this event recently, drawing a comparison between it and the May 25 vote in Ireland that saw the 8th amendment, and the protection of pre-born children it codified, fall to cries for the decriminalization of abortion. Abortion advocates in Ireland celebrated, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau congratulated Ireland on the results of the referendum. A memo from the Prime Minister’s Office states, “The leaders agreed that this was a critical step forward in the rights of women.”
But as we have written in the past, there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim. The Abortion Caravan achieved its goal and abortion is decriminalized in Canada, yet women are not happier, wealthier, or feeling more respected and valued than they were 30 years ago when abortion was highly regulated.
Women’s rights are simply not advanced by the right to terminate their pregnancies prematurely.
CBC reports that the Abortion Caravan travelled with “a coffin strapped to one of the cars, to symbolize all the women who had died in unsafe abortions.” How ironic to use this symbol of death while campaigning for death. What about the hundreds of thousands of little coffins we now need to represent the little ones who have died in these quick, accessible abortions?
Abortion advocates are so close to the truth. They want women to be safe, respected, and free – so do we. They want children to be loved and wanted – so do we. They want to be heard by their government and their peers – so do we.
But alongside these good desires stands the wrong idea that abortion will achieve these goals. This ignores real underlying issues and allows those issues to continue to be ignored by policy-makers, yes, but also by ourselves. If we can point to an abortion clinic, we can claim to have offered help and a solution, when in fact no woman wants that to be the solution. We want financially stable households, physically safe households, top notch prenatal and postnatal medical treatment for all kinds of prenatally-diagnosed diseases, and social support for parenthood.
We live in community, and in community there must be a willingness to live our lives in such a way that the rights of all human beings are advanced. We cannot insist on our rights above others – that is not equality. Easy solutions are usually not the best solutions and are often not at all easy on the people directly involved.
We cannot tread on the vulnerable and voiceless, despite how much easier it may be. Reproductive rights will not be the answer to our happiness, success, or development as a society, and reproductive rights do not define women’s rights.
New York Post journalist Nicole Russell rightly feels disappointed at what “feminism” accomplished last year, and concludes this:
“Now modern feminists wield their gender like a weapon not to create equality but to demand entitlement, not to improve or increase all women’s rights, but only the rights of women with whom they align politically.”
In America, the Women’s March organizers refused to welcome pro-life groups as sponsors after online backlash labelled pro-life groups as anti-women. We saw the political pressure a feminist claim can bring in Canada as well. MP Rachael Harder was held back from a position as Head of the Status of Women Committee when Liberal and NDP MPs – fellow women – judged her unable to adequately represent women since she does not advocate for abortion. Our tax dollars were spent liberally in a “feminist international assistance policy” that focused on access to abortion as a crucial change to be brought to nations who do not even want abortion.
Feminism, as Russell keenly pointed out, is no longer a movement by women for the empowerment of women. It has become a movement of women with a particular, dogged focus on abortion access. Women themselves are told they do not qualify as representatives of their sex, and that they are unwelcome at “feminist” events. Meanwhile, men who toe the line of reproductive freedom at the great cost of pre-born human life are called feminists instead.
When women are no longer willing to consider other women’s voices as valid, they add, whether they want to or not, to a culture that needed #MeToo. The #MeToo movement is rightly about speaking up and eliminating shame, or at least placing that shame squarely where it belongs. Yet the “feminist” term attached to the movement is the same one from the Women’s March that tells other women that their voices are not valid, that they should be quiet and take orders.
Women claiming the banner of feminism are creating a space where political, ideological and star power are used to trample, shame and devalue those who disagree.
Serrin Foster, President of Feminists for Life, writes, “Properly defined, feminism is a philosophy that embraces basic rights for all human beings without exception…. Feminism rejects the use of force to dominate, control or destroy anyone.”
Moving forward into 2018, let’s hold on to this feminism, a feminism that does not need to tear down or destroy in order to feel built up. Let’s advocate for a feminism that doesn’t dominate, but cooperates. This feminism values life in all its stages, even at great personal inconvenience.
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While the videos were filmed, released, and directed at the United States, there are some valuable lessons in there for Canadians too. How did videos showing people talking casually about dismembering babies, dropping eyeballs, and selling fetal body parts for profit fail to convince people to take action?
It’s not that people don’t care. We saw in the recent case of Charlie Gard just how much people can care. And what they care about, in both cases, is choice. The public got up in arms when it appeared the parents did not have control over choices relating to Charlie’s care. Whether they cared about Charlie himself is another question. Similarly, in the abortion debate, the discussion is focused firmly on parental (in this case maternal) rights. The language is one of choice and control, and it seems we’ve sometimes forgotten the subject: a child whose life hangs in the balance.
The resolute grip on personal choice frames many of our cultural debates. When it comes to the Planned Parenthood videos released by CMP, we shouldn’t have expected a public who seems immune to the injustice of abortion to have cared particularly much about what happens to the remains of those unwanted children.
Facts are not what ultimately changes people’s minds. In this social media world, it is easy to share things, but it is just as easy for others to ignore those things. Abortion, legal or not, still comes down to a question of the heart and, often, to personal experience.
In discussing the case of Charlie Gard, Professor Uta Frith from the University College London pointed out the need for a balance between science and emotion. When it comes to hot button issues like whether to remove your child from life support after birth or whether to cut off their life support before birth, emotion always wins over reason. Emotion, Frith said, “is utterly certain.” It follows, then, that “[r]easoned evidence needs champions to engage the hearts of people.”
What we need are not more facts or exposé videos. We need one-on-one conversations, small group discussion, school presentations, and any other form of personal interaction and engagement.
Within the pro-life movement, we need collaboration and mutual support. The job of the pro-life movement is simply to exist and never, ever give up. One person at a time, one heart at a time, progress will be made.
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