Yes, you read that headline correctly. But before a raging mob of anti-Trump protesters shows up on my lawn to beat me up in the name of love, please let me tell you why. When disappointed voters wave placards reading “Love Trumps Hate,” I agree with their words, but not with their rage. Certainly, love is better than hate. But as a pro-life family feminist, I’d like to add a corollary to that statement: Life Is Better Than Death. And that’s why I voted for Trump.
Some college students feel so traumatized over the election results, they’ve been given “safe places” supplied with coloring books and Play-Doh to calm them. To such sad, troubled children, I long to say, “Be not afraid.” Pro-life family feminists like me (the silently majority of mothers who chose to give you birth) won this election. If President Trump is as pro-life as he claimed during his campaign—if he works to defund Planned Parenthood, undo the HHS Mandate, and appoint pro-life judges to the U.S. Supreme Court—all women (black, Hispanic, white, Asian and more) will win a huge victory, not just in this nation, but around the globe.
We Need A Pro-Life Supreme Court Judge
When Planned Parenthood CEO President Cecile Richards recently said she thought “Roe v. Wade was on the ballot in this election,” I hope she was right. As Hobby Lobby CEO David Green observed, “Make no mistake, the vacancy left by Justice Scalia and the subsequent appointment to fill his seat makes this presidential election one of the most significant in modern times.”
Because the HHS Mandate requires employers to provide abortion coverage, Green has worried that faithful Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others who oppose abortion are just one judge away from losing their religious liberty.
But pro-life family feminists are also concerned we’re just one judge away from making our anti-human, slice-and-dice abortion laws even more deadly. If Hillary had won this election, she would have appointed pro-abortion Supreme Court justices. They likely would have favored Planned Parenthood in any abortion case that came before the Court, and would no doubt have kept Roe on the books for many decades to come.
Abortion On Demand Has Hurt Women
Abortion on demand has not freed women. On the contrary, abortion enhances men’s sense of sexual entitlement. The abortion “right” encourages predatory men (and marketers) to turn women’s bodies into commodities, to be displayed in public to sell products, and to be “used” publicly and privately for men’s sexual pleasure. If a woman accidentally becomes pregnant—if overnight she turns from being a sexy, autonomous woman, into a pregnant mother interconnected with others—no problem. She can simply dispose of the baby. Then she can once again become a hot, sexy woman to “used” in the marketplace or bedroom.
In a Medical Science Monitor study (the entire study can be downloaded for free here), 64 percent of post-abortive American mothers said they “felt pressured by others” to have the abortion. Additionally, 77.9 percent struggled with post-abortion guilt, and 59.5 percent felt “a part of me died.”
And this is what privileged pro-abortion feminists like Hillary proclaim to be an empowering choice?
Early Feminists Weren’t Pro-Abortion
This is the first time in history that so many expectant mothers of all races have been hard-sold on the misleading idea that killing their preborn babies will somehow set them “free.” Suffragist Susan B. Anthony called abortion a “crying evil” that could begin to be remedied only when women were completely enfranchised and elevated. Nineteenth-century feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote “the degradation of women” was caused by the “murder of children, either before or after birth.” Quaker Alice Paul, the author of the original Equal Rights Amendment, called abortion “the ultimate exploitation of women.”
Even Betty Friedan, who launched the 1960s women’s movement in 1963 with her book “The Feminine Mystique,” strongly renounced sexual politics and seemed ambivalent about the pro-abortion crusade. Late one Saturday night in November of 1967, in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., Friedan helped ram the abortion plank into the National Organization for Women’s political “Bill of Rights.” The vote was 57 to 14.
Yet in the year 2000, in her book “Life So Far,” Betty (who’d once been fired for being pregnant) wrote, “Ideologically, I was never for abortion. Motherhood is a value to me, and even today, abortion is not … For me the matter of choice has never been primarily the choice of abortion, but that you can choose to be a mother. That is as important as any right written into the Constitution.”
Feminist Pro-Lifers Have Always Been Strong
Just six years after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in all 50 states, anti-abortion family feminists were already well organized at the grassroots level. The revolution had begun. In September 1979, socialist author Michael Harrington drew a gasp from a crowd of well-heeled Planned Parenthood supporters when he called the right-to-life women’s movement “one of the few genuine social movements of the 1970s.” By 1979, NOW boasted a national membership of 100,000, and the National Right to Life Committee had 11 million members.
Although for most of my life I was on the pro-abortion side of the fence, I’m now a pro-life family feminist. I consistently vote for pro-life candidates who advocate authentic freedom for women and children. Pro-life family feminists like me support equal pay for equal work, and equal educational opportunities regardless of whether a woman has children. We want mothers who choose to stay home with their children to be as honored for their achievements as career women are. We know that women (in fact, all humans) flourish best not when we stand isolated and alone, but when we’re interconnected in a strong, respectful bond with others. We love and work well with good, kind, responsible men (the type we seek out to marry and with whom we hope to have children). We reject sexual predators. We reject the illusion that a woman’s value is measured solely by her worldly power and the size of her paycheck. We especially reject the diabolic claim that it’s essential for a mother to be able to kill her own preborn baby in order for her to be a full and valued participant in society.
Life Is the Great Civil Rights Issue Of Our Age
Some people (self-styled “talk radio philosopher” Andy Schmookler, for one) like to sneer at “single-issue voters” like me. Schmookler claims that single-issue voters’ “understanding of the workings of the larger systems in their world (e.g., the U.S. government and the American and world economies) is limited.” Single-issue voters, he opines, have “neither the time nor the interest nor the background to develop a complex picture of American politics,” and so “they welcome a simple way to exercise their duties as citizens.” And that’s why he presumes women like me vote for life.
I don’t know Schmookler. Nor do I personally know his views on abortion. But I would suggest it’s time for privileged, Harvard-educated men like him (who’ve always been at the forefront of abortion advocacy) to look beyond their intellectual prisons and to try to think with their hearts. Life is the essential civil rights issue of our times. If you’re dead at the hands of another—whether you’re black, brown, white, young, or old—all your human rights have been stolen from you. Doing whatever one can do within reason to help a living person stay alive is a simple matter of compassion and justice.
Fortunately, in a democracy (at least in one that’s still alive and kicking), power doesn’t come from the top down. It grows from the ground up. Pro-life family feminists had grassroots power in 1979, and we still have that power today. Yes, we’re the underdogs. Yes, the elite media scorn us. Yet despite the high odds against us, we just won an election. And this Thanksgiving, that gives many feminists I know a lot to be thankful for.
