Many people (sadly, including many pro-Life people) simply ACCEPT the premise of diminshed social/educational/economic prospects for women if they are parents (relative to men who are parents) without question! Even our SC Justices accepted this as their basic premise for upholing Roe v. Wade! So in a sense, many pro-Life persons operate on the same basic premis as the SC Justice who upheld abortion!
I submit the following very enlightening article for proof of this premise:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/scotus/art icles/061693ginsburg-roe.html
Judge Ginsburg's critique of Roe v. Wade is twofold. First, she said in the New York University lecture, as she has written for years, the right to abortion might have been more secure had it been grounded in the concept of women's right to equality rather than in the right to privacy. "The Roe decision might have been less of a storm center," she said, had it "homed in more precisely on the women's-equality dimension of the issue."
..... the equality argument for abortion rights -- essentially the notion that women cannot participate in society equally with men without the ability to control their reproductive lives -- was in fact part of the abortion-rights movement from its earliest years. An equality argument was among the arguments presented to the Court in Roe v. Wade.
It was the Supreme Court itself that revived the equality basis for abortion rights in its ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Pennsylvania case in which the Court reaffirmed the right to abortion.
Among the reasons that Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter gave in their opinion for adhering to the "core" of Roe v. Wade was a sentence that could have been written by Judge Ginsburg:
"The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives."
So there you have it! The Justices themselves have said that abortion is crucial to women being treated equally in society. And many women have bought into this deception. We COULD as a society instead demand that women who procreate are treated the same as men who procreate. But we don't choose to do so. Instead we sweep equal treatment under the rug and tell women that their ability to particpate equally is dependent on abortion. Our own SC Justice have declared it! In other words, equality for women who procreate is CONDITIONAL on them un-procreating after the fact. This is a fundemental inequality which is NEVER adressed. Men's equality in society is not conditional on their parental status. But women's is virtually decreed conditional by the US Supreme Court!
Men are not asked by society to choose between equal treatment and their child's existence. Women are.
I blame pro-Choicers for enthusiastically accepting this Faustian deal in the first place and for allowing it to continue. I especially blame pro-choice feminists who won't even consider the larger ramifications of women for continueing to take this 'deal' over demanding true equality instead. And I blame all of us (including many pro-Lifers) for continueing to uphold this double standard in so many large and small ways. Pro-Lifers are not guiltless in accepting the fundemental premise of women's inequal opportunities if they are parents.
To put it another way, can you imagine that black people would have taken a deal to end inequity and discrimination against them in exchange for the "right" to kill their children? Yet this is essentially the deal that has been offered and accepted by pro-Choicers! They ACCEPT inequality of women parents as an immutable fact!