Friday, October 8, 2010
Who gets to be a feminist?
Slate has asked their favorite "lady luminaries" the provocative question, "Who gets to be a feminist?" You probably can guess where this is going, and Nora Ephron cuts right to it:
"I know that I'm supposed to write 500 words on this subject, but it seems much simpler: You can't call yourself a feminist if you don't believe in the right to abortion."
Thankfully, most of the views offered are more nuanced than Ephron's, but the nuance is more along the lines of "Who am I to judge?" rather than any deliberate recognition of feminism's potential harmony with a belief in the sanctity of life.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/10/who-gets-to-be-a-feminist.html
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This is very sad and almost sick. (And I say this as someone who has been accused of being an anonymous paid agent of NARAL whose mission is to undermine Catholic doctrine on Catholic blogs.)
One of the elements of being a true feminist, it seems to me, would not be to believe in the right to an abortion, but to believe in the right for society to reform itself so that no woman would ever feel the best option was to have an abortion, either because women would not have unwanted pregnancies, or if they did, they would always feel they had "a concrete, honorable and possible alternative to abortion," as it says in the "Declaration on Procured Abortion."
Christopher Lasch wrote a book book about family titled "Haven in a Heartless World." I remember almost nothing about it, but I do remember being impressed by him saying that feminists were asking too little. Instead of asking to be treated the same as men (in the workplace), they should be asking for work to be restructured so they did not have to sacrifice any of their role of being a mother to fulfill their role in their profession, and did not have to sacrifice anything in their professional life to act as a mother. I think that would be a worthier goal for feminists than a right to abortion.