Posted on 04/07/2012 6:33:21 AM PDT by rhema
In the ongoing debate over women’s health care, one voice has been mostly absent: that of the anti-abortion feminist.
Most cultural conservatives have correctly focused their attention on the constitutional issues at stake, in particular the threat to religious liberty posed by the Obama administration’s mandate that religious employers underwrite their employees’ abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives and sterilization procedures.
Many liberal women, meanwhile, have eagerly embraced the role of victim, advancing the idea that women are casualties of a “war on women.” Women are now, as various cultural liberals have put it, “facing sexual McCarthyism” from “conservative cavemen” who want to return to the “Dark Ages.”
But women are not a monolith. And there is a growing group of passionate young women who are transforming what it means to be a woman. Allow me to introduce them to you. We are women who reject both the anti-male feminism of the 1960s and the “girls gone wild” mentality that’s pervasive today.
We are women for whom the idea of artificial birth control as “preventive care” is deeply insulting.
We are women who view the intentional killing of children not as a constitutional right, a matter of privacy or a necessary evil but, rather, as profoundly anti-woman and the antithesis of love.
We are women whose lives contradict the idea of an inevitable clash between religious liberty and women’s health. We are women who believe that something precious is lost when fertility is intentionally excluded from marriage, a sacred bond and a total giving of each spouse to the other.
We are women who believe that sex and pregnancy aren’t just health issues; they are also inextricably linked with family, morals, faith and values. And we are women who love everything about being a woman, including being mothers. We have noticed that the rise in the availability and use of cheap birth control coincided with increases in the rates of sex addiction, divorce, unmarried childbearing and abortion.
We have also noticed that while contraceptives and legal abortion promised to eliminate the exploitative attitude of men toward women, they have had the opposite effect.
We shook our heads when we learned of law student/activist Sandra Fluke’s implausible assertion that contraceptives are too expensive for her friends to purchase and that, therefore, her Roman Catholic school should be forced to pay for them. We continued shaking our heads when we heard Rush Limbaugh’s misogynistic remarks about Fluke. Perhaps most revealing was his suggestion that she be required to perform in sex videos in return for free contraceptives.
Said in jest? Probably. But it was a telling reminder that the surest way for a young woman to attain stardom is by performing in and releasing pornography. We are depicted as statistical outliers, modern-day counterculturalists. But our numbers are rising. You can find us at your job and in your school, behind you in the school pickup line, ahead of you at the voting station and beside you in church.
You can also find us advocating for our values at places like the March for Life in Washington, D.C. As NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan remarked after seeing the hundreds of thousands who march annually, “My gosh … there are so many of them, and they are so young.”
Many of us — 25,000 and counting — have signed onto the Women Speak for Themselves campaign, “a group of women who support the competing voice offered by Catholic institutions on matters of sex, marriage and family life.”
This year, as POLITICO has reported, many of us supported Rick Santorum. Despite the media’s narrative of a Santorum “women problem,” a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Republican women had a favorable opinion of the devoted husband and father of eight, versus 18 percent who had an unfavorable opinion of him.
Revealingly, the positive feelings female Republicans had for Santorum jumped 50 percent between January and last week — as his statements about faith, sexuality and contraception were making headlines.
We are engaged with the culture but not controlled by it — in the world but not of the world. Studies show pregnancy, birth and abortion rates among young women have decreased lately.
According to the National Survey of Family Growth, abstinence among 15-to-24-year-old females has increased by nearly one-third, to 29 percent, over the past decade.
Numerous polls find that 18-to-34-year-olds are the generation most likely to consider abortion “morally wrong.”
We don’t wish to take the country back in time; rather, we aspire to move it forward, beyond a time when women are treated as objects and pitted against their children and their religious institutions — and toward a time when truly emancipated women embrace their intrinsic dignity and, with it, their authentic womanhood.
Lila Rose is the founder and president of Live Action, an anti-abortion organization that uses new media and investigative journalism to expose attacks on human life.
Is that Lila Rose??
WOOFWOOFWOOF!
Conservative women really do ROCK! Make an old dog like me proud to be a right winger.
I was out walking yesterday and stopped to talk to a young woman who was laying out wet diapers on the bushes in her front yard to catch as much sun as possible while her baby crawled around on the grass. 1. She was using clothe diapers and not disposables; 2. Gasp, she was letting her baby come in contact with dirt; 3. She told me she was a stay at home mom. I wanted to hug her. I was all three although I did go back to work after each of my babies. Sort of wish now I had not and I didn’t work full time. They’re in their 30s now.
For those who don’t know - sun drying clothe diapers is the only way to get the stains out. You don’t want to use harsh bleaches. Sun is God’s way of bleaching out the yellow and brown stains. Also, if you use clothe diapers and drop them in a diaper pail and wash them daily, it’s no big deal. And no solid waste.
What my two boys and one girl were told all their lives, now in their mid 20's was "abstinence works every time". I especially drove home to my boys that if they have sex before marriage and get pregnant they are obligated to marry and raise the child. Just remember I would say, if a child is born to one of your out of marriage relationships you will be linked to that "girl" for the rest of your life, due to the child.
My 27 year old daughter recently told me that she would never have an abortion even if she was raped.
Well, kudos to you ma’am.
I’m one of the young men looking for one of these lovely ladies. I just have to get enough work so that I can support one so she can stay at home. :D
And folks who tell you otherwise - we ARE winning, and we WILL win.
My daughter, registered here as LionsDaughter, is an anti-abortion feminist. She is active in her Speer of influence against this this barbarous practice and has even been quoted on Jill Stanek’s website.
Speer = sphere
I’ll have to ask my daughter if I can introduce you two. She’s quit looking.
Feminism is innately pro-abortion.
There is no goods reason for pro-lifers to call themselves feminist.
Many women don't want to marry the father of the baby, because they can get money from him without marrying him.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
My daughter, Gunner Anoreth, is an anti-abortion gun-totin’, whiskey-drinkin’, saga-singin’ warrior goddess. Real women kill our nation’s enemies, not their own babies.
Once the baby is conceived, the woman has all the legal and social power. (The man is still bigger, probably, and can kill her.) Men who don't want to spend two decades paying off a woman they didn't even like very much have got to act in their own self-interest and not screw her, even if she's easy.
That is extremely unhealthy for families and needs to change.
Men who don't want to spend two decades paying off a woman they didn't even like very much
That also need to change: the cost of raising a child should be borne by the person raising the child unless a parent refuses to raise their child. In other words, fathers - married or not - should have every legal opportunity to have custody and raise their own children, instead of being forced to pay the mother to.
Regarding the final comment, if there is no procreation, the human race dies out, so faulting men for procreating is counterproductive.
I agree.
In other words, fathers - married or not - should have every legal opportunity to have custody and raise their own children, instead of being forced to pay the mother to.
I agree.
... faulting men for procreating is counterproductive.
In many cases, neither party has any interest in procreating. They just want a little dingdong, so he believes her when she says she's on the pill, or that "her doctor told her she couldn't have children," and she believes it can't happen if she wishes hard enough. Anyone who engages in sex without the understanding that a child is a probable outcome, and is an absolute reponsibility, is acting wrongly and thoughtlessly.
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