If you want to see the weakest and most subservient women in America, just look at the faces of those entering an abortion clinic.  What you will see is sadness, desperation, fear, and resignation.  What you will not see is women who feel empowered or in control. 

These faces make it clear that, like suicide, abortion is a choice made by tragic people who have been convinced they have no choice.  Better than anyone else, women who submit to abortion understand why no woman was ever admired for having an abortion, and why no woman ever bragged about her abortion, and why no woman ever climbed off an abortionist’s table with a higher opinion of herself than she had when she climbed onto it. 

This nonsense that women must have the right to kill their children in order to be equal to men is an invention of the abortion industry.  With almost no exceptions, pioneers of the women’s movement like Susan B. Anthony, Mattie Brinkerhoff, Sarah Norton, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were outspoken opponents of legal abortion.  Alice Paul, who wrote the original Equal Rights Amendment, called abortion the ultimate exploitation of women.  Even suffragist newspapers such as Woodhull’s and Claflin’s Weekly, had editorial policies which openly attacked both abortion and abortionists.

These early feminists saw that abortion is  patronizing and paternalistic and that a woman’s willingness to submit to it doesn’t free her, it devalues her.  They understood that legalized abortion is nothing more than a safety net for sexually predatory and sexually irresponsible men.  Today, after over 30 years of legalized abortion, that view has been so thoroughly proven true that some abortion advocates no longer even bother to deny it.  In fact, some say it should be celebrated. 

On May 11, 1990, the PBS radio program Spectrum featured the staunchly pro-choice Ann Taylor-Flemming saying, “I came of age with the women’s movement.  It has given license to my ambitions and dreams, and filled me with the fervor for equality that permeates all that I do.  But this time, I want to turn the tables a bit.  Take an issue that always seems like a women’s issue and pitch it directly towards the men out there.  And that issue is abortion... it’s time now to invite the men of America back in, to ask them to raise their voices for choice... I dare say that many of them have impregnated women along the way, and then let off the hook in a big, big way – emotionally, economically and every other way – when the women went ahead and had abortions... the sense of relief for themselves was mixed with sympathy for and gratitude towards those women whose ultimate responsibility it was to relieve them of responsibility by having abortions... it would sure be nice to hear from all those men out there whose lives have been changed, bettered, and substantially eased because they were not forced into unwanted fatherhood.” 

It is hard to imagine that even the most bigoted male chauvinist would suggest that women have a responsibility to let men who impregnate them “off the hook” by submitting to abortion.  Yet here is that very argument being espoused by someone who claims to be an advocate for women.

Today, abortion apologists continue to push the idea that having a clean place to kill their babies is the cornerstone of women’s equality.  That lie is a self-serving perversion of the basic values of legitimate feminism.  As pro-life feminist Melissa Simmons-Tulin once said, “Women will never climb to equality over the dead bodies of their children.”