freedom is a mindset which radiates beauty from within the soul.

I like these women. And I like what they’re doing, which is to approach from a non-religious, pluralistic basis–the mainstream basis of Canadian society–and question the assumption that abortion is a right. You see, I grew up on that terminology, and never thought to challenge the high-handed dictum of what rights a woman should be able to claim.

Being Told What One’s Rights Are

As a social tool, abortion is used to marginalize and objectify women, to deny and control feminine power, to force a masculine mask on women’s interaction with society. But wait, there’s more — that same mask is forced on men, leaving us to wonder what healthy masculinity even is.

Women’s sexuality is an incomplete study without considering pregnancy and birth. The deliberate negation of the unique child-bearing and birthing capacity — something very different than involuntary infertility — reduces a woman’s sexuality to a function that’s ideologically servile to male sexual mythology.

Isn’t that what we were trying to break free of?

Now this is what I mean by mythology: Childbearing and birthing are observably also the natural completion of the male sexual cycle; not just pleasure and DNA-strewing. As all natural-birth families know, men have bonding and parenting instincts that are a part of the spectrum of their sexual makeup, and the whole suffers when deliberately negated. But just because men can physically walk away from a pregnancy? No, feminism failed women by saying, “Let’s advocate for copying the men who are living a psychologically stunted, self-negating paradigm.”

Abortion advocacy stems from the mythological divorce of reproduction from sexual behaviour.

Um, duh.

Pro-Woman. Like, Real Women.

Finally, the right words to express how the half-grown, still-young feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, which was in the air I breathed growing up (and I have no shame in that at all), left me feeling somehow unwilling to be the female kind of different:

While Teresa cannot recall a particular moment when she decided she is pro-life, she does remember that she was not always pro-woman. She distinctively remembers struggling with her identification as a woman. “I remember feeling that to be feminine was to be weak,” she says. “I really believed that the differences between the sexes were purely a social construction and that gender differences were something to overcome.” She now sees these differences as something to celebrate and feels it is important to understand what makes women different…

Pro-Life. Like, Really Living.

And an ongoing issue for real women’s rights: Dealing with societal values that negate the unique strengths of womanhood and insist on measuring women by lack of childbearing.

“In the end, I pulled the trigger on my professional life by staying home with my children for 10 years,” says Bergeron. “That’s when I realized that women may have been liberated but liberation was achieved by excluding their reproductive abilities. I advocate for a complete liberation of women that includes the fact that they bear and deliver children.” Bergeron believes that if abortion is indeed an equality issue and if women need to undergo such an invasive and damaging procedure to gain equal footing with men, there’s a word for that: Misogyny.

~prowomanprolife.org

I want my reproductive rights. The ones that acknowledge female organs in full, instead of cutting me off at the cervix.

——————-

Footnote: Having some experience dealing with this issue, and recognizing that it’s a sensitive topic, I’ve added an email contact top right in the sidebar. Feel free to be in touch that way if desired.