Addressing Texas Right to Life’s new Fellows this week, Rehumanize International director Aimee Murphy tackled the old stigma around feminism in her talk “Embracing the ‘F’ Word: Learning to Love Pro-Life Feminism.”
In her talk, Ms. Murphy reclaimed the “f-word” — that is, “feminism” — as a movement having roots in Pro-Life conviction. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Alice Paul, Ms. Murphy noted, are just a few of the many big-name foremothers of feminism who unabashedly stood for Life. These women recognized that to be Pro-Life and pro-woman was to be philosophically consistent.
Like early feminist philosophy, which rests on principles of equality, nondiscrimination, and non-violence, Pro-Life philosophy is founded on these core commitments. The Pro-Life stance recognizes that the preborn should not face violent discrimination. Rather, as the most vulnerable members of our society, they ought to be protected.
Although early feminism and the Pro-Life movement share a common philosophical foundation, so-called “modern feminism” has strayed from core principles, according to Ms. Murphy. Not only does modern feminism assume the womb-less male body as the norm to be achieved by women, and not only does this feminism erroneously imply that women need elective abortion in order to be empowered, but the modern feminist movement also strays by explicitly embracing violence against the vulnerable through elective abortion.
Elective abortion — by denying equality under the law for preborn children, discriminating against the unborn or other vulnerable groups, and inflicting the violence of elective abortion — is inherently contrary to the chief tenets of feminism, Ms. Murphy argued.
Modern feminism, embracing the horror of elective abortion, rejects feminism’s roots.
An anti-Life stance against the preborn is inconsistent with the feminist commitment to equality, non-violence, and protection of the disadvantaged.
