Communist author and scholar Sophie Lewis made waves recently with the argument that elective abortion is “acceptable violence” in her new book, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family.
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“Abortion is, in my opinion, and I recognize how controversial this is, a form of killing,” said Lewis, who teaches at the Brookly Institute for Social Research, “It is a form of killing that we need to be able to defend.”
To understand how Lewis arrived at this truly shocking conclusion, one must understand her philosophical system. Lewis is an outspoken communist and has linked feminist studies to the destruction of capitalism through the abolition of the family.
“Capitalism and capitalist states rely heavily on the family as a unit of social discipline, social order, austerity, and a source of huge amounts of unpaid labor,” Lewis says, “In the history of feminism, abolishing the family was very well known as a demand, particularly in the ‘60s and ‘70s amongst certain strands of women’s liberation… Family abolition means we deserve more than the sort of blackmail that tells us that we must be content with relationships defined as blood or as nature, the relationships we find given to us.”
Lewis says pregnancy should be regarded as “gestational labor,” forced upon a woman (“gestator”) by the preborn child, who is really an aggressor. Therefore, a woman has the right to use violence to kill the child, as she has the right to go on strike or quit a job.
“But looking at the biology of the hemochorial placentation helps me think about the violence that, innocently, a fetus metes out vis-a-vis a gestator,” Lewis says, “That violence is an unacceptable violence for someone who doesn’t want to do gestational work. The violence that that gestator metes out to essentially go on strike or exit that workplace is an acceptable violence.”
Lewis’ views are similar to those of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger believed that no woman should have the right to have a child without a license from the government, whether married or not. Sanger was a brutal eugenicist whose philosophy of controlling women and eliminating those she deemed “unfit” (including minorities and people with mental and physical disabilities) aligns well with Lewis’ hatred for family and motherhood.
By contrast, many early feminists were Pro-Life, from Louisa May Alcott to Susan B. Anthony. They knew that women’s rights and human rights go hand in hand — beginning at conception and lasting until natural death — and were not afraid to stand for Life. They fought for freedom and equality, while Sanger and Lewis fight for oppression and death.
Underneath the jargon and fake intellectualism lies a fundamentally evil worldview — one that characterizes families as oppressive and babies as guilty of the crime of existing. Under such a worldview, the killing of unborn children is an acceptable way to destroy the family and overturn society. Undoubtedly, this is the culture of death.
