In the world today the question of being pro-life or pro-choice is associated with a lot of conflict and antagonism directed at both sides.
As a strong supporter of the pro-life stance I have encountered a lot of people who criticize pro-lifers for "hating women" and "restricting women's rights." This is anything but the truth. For the first thing, as a woman myself, it would be completely counterproductive for me to be anti-women's rights. I 100% support things like equal pay for women and women's equality of opportunity in the workforce. These are good things that showcase women's strengths and I consider myself supporting feminism in my advocacy of these basic rights.
Abortion is something completely different. I absolutely cannot condone a woman's "freedom" or "right" to kill her own child.
I will repeat, a woman's right to have a say concerning her own body does not mean a woman has the right to kill her child. If a woman has breast cancer, she absolutely has the right to get treatment to heal her body. If a woman has a broken bone or some other ailment, by all means she must go to the hospital to receive the treatment she needs to make herself well and healthy again. When a woman is pregnant and is seeking an abortion, she is not trying to heal her body from an illness or from something that is broken. In a normal pregnancy, removing the baby from the mother's womb does the opposite of healing, it ends a life.
The baby's life is completely separate from its mother. It has separate DNA from the moment of conception. It has a separate heartbeat from around week four or five. Having an abortion means so much more than letting a woman have control over her body. Her "choice" that supposedly only affects her own body really dramatically affects the life of the baby that needs his or her mother to survive.
Would you still hold this "feminist" view of woman's rights to be true given another situation? Let us imagine a strong feminist career woman who had a child in her early 20s. However, after the child is born the woman's career takes off. She starts to lack the time needed to care for her child. Caring for her child has become a financial burden as well as a burden on her time as she is finding that she cannot devote the time needed to advance her career when she has to return home to take care of her child. Would this woman be justified in "humanely" ending her child's life?
I hope that everyone would say no to that question. Very few would condone the killing of a child. The exact same thing should be true for a woman who is pregnant.
The issue here is that most pro-choicers don't believe that life begins at conception. Yet, my goal with this article is not to prove that point. If you would like to explore that concept more, I suggest you check some of these sources compiled by a scholar from Princeton University.
Instead, I hope to show how women can be both pro-life AND pro-women's rights. Women absolutely have the right to equality. Women DO have the right to control their own bodies. But they do not have the right to control their own body in ways that end the life of another human, especially when that other human is their own child.
