A 21-year-old girl just found out she’s pregnant.
She knows she can’t raise a child on her own, and her friends agree, urging her to come up with a rape story so she can get an exception for abortion. Unfortunately for her, police don’t have enough evidence of rape, so she carries the child to term. She’s referred to a couple attorneys looking for pregnant women seeking abortions, and her name gets attached to a case challenging Texas abortion law, during which time she gives birth and puts the child up for adoption. It takes three years of trials, but her case finally makes it to the Supreme Court. The year is 1973, and the case: Roe v. Wade.
Fast forward to 1998. “Jane Roe,” whose real name is Norma McCorvey, has undergone a profound transformation, ideologically and spiritually. After years of pro-abortion activism culminating in a 7-2 abortion “victory” in a landmark Supreme Court case and then a biography, Roe converts to Christianity, abandoning her old ideas.
“I’m 100 percent pro-life,” she told the Associated Press. “I don’t believe in abortion even in an extreme situation. If the woman is impregnated by a rapist, it’s still a child. You’re not to act as your own God.”
Jane Roe wasn’t the only woman to see through the “pro-choice” lies. Add millions more people to that list — several hundred thousand of which gathered on the National Mall over the weekend to celebrate all human beings, including women, at the 47th annual March for Life.
The March for Life comes on the heels of another annual march in our nation’s capital, one marketed by the left to women. Particularly, empowered women. The Women’s March, however, is dwindling. Compared to the hundreds of thousands of reported attendees in 2017, this year, organizers expected only 10,000. Why?
The Women’s March Isn’t About Women
I approached the Starbucks counter for my second cup of coffee when I ran into a group of half a dozen or so high school girls the day before the March for Life. Their innocent chatter and pleasant demeanor gave me the impression they were in town for the pro-life demonstration, but the “March for Life” drawstring bag slung over one girl’s shoulder confirmed my hunch. They told me they had caravanned in a group of 13 busses all the way from the Diocese of Wichita in Kansas. I asked if they had also attended the Women’s March, and when they said they hadn’t, I asked why not.
“I think the Women’s March is important,” a young woman named Lainie told me. “But the March for Life is … more important because it’s about a loss of life. I would rather speak for those who can’t.”
“We’re not even just marching for the babies. We’re marching for the women,” another student, Madeline, chimed in. “Because [abortion is] something no women should have to go through because that’s just an awful thing for women.”
Are women’s rights compatible with being pro-life? I asked. Can people be pro-women and against abortion?
“People see a conflict with women’s rights and pro-life,” Lainie said. “But those two don’t inherently contradict each other.”
They think we don’t care about women, Madeline added, sounding a little defeated from the unrelenting and untrue assumption about pro-lifers. “Obviously, we’re young women,” she said.
Indeed they are. But to today’s left, that doesn’t matter, for the Women’s March isn’t really about women at all. According to NPR, the 2020 Women’s March highlighted three primary issues — climate change, immigration, and reproductive rights — two of which aren’t unique to women at all, and one which is a manufactured entitlement that ultimately harms women. As my colleague Erielle Davidson highlighted, the only true unifying doctrine of the Women’s March is a seething hatred for President Donald Trump and consequently an interminable desire to undo the 2016 election.
Where does this leave the millions of women who don’t vote with their ovaries? Who care about life inside the womb? Who don’t despise the president? Simple. There’s no place for them on the left.
The Left Doesn’t Care About Women or Choice
The party of pro-choice wants women to believe they don’t have a choice. For all their talk of reproductive “freedom,” the left wants women to be constrained by their anatomy to cast a vote for any “D”-delineated candidate. The left doesn’t want women to be empowered, to make the decisions that are truly best for them. For the left, only a monolithic mindset is acceptable: Women are oppressed, both by their babies and men, and can only find liberation in shaking off the patriarchal shackles that keep them from true happiness. Oh, and those patriarchal fetters come only from Republicans, who are all old, white males who don’t care about women’s health. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“Pro-life is pro-woman,” Denise Harle, legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Federalist in an interview. “It’s just wrong to pit a woman against her own child and act like a woman can’t succeed and be a mom. It’s a lie. And it’s really cruel. Any pregnancy, whether planned or unplanned, involves an innocent human being.”
Harle opened her coat, flashing her baby bump and a smile, herself living proof of the right’s true empowerment. “My first pregnancy was unplanned, and I have a 1 and a half year-old now, and I’ve got another one on the way,” the successful attorney said. “It’s a blessing.”
She continued, “These are the most vulnerable among us, and so women should be the first ones out there saying these are our babies, and we can be successful in the workplace and the home and be mothers too.”
What The March for Life Offers That the Women’s March Doesn’t
To anyone who has witnessed both the Women’s March and the March for Life, they can’t help but notice a few differences — in mission, in messaging, and in spirit. At the risk of sounding like Marianne Williamson, the two events exude entirely different auras. The March for Life offers something to women that the march specifically proffered to that feminine demographic simply doesn’t.
“Well, I hate to be sappy, but the truth is [the March for Life] offers rights based on love and inclusion rather than anger and exclusion,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, told The Federalist of the difference between the back-to-back marches. “And to answer the question, why is the Women’s March dwindling as the pro-life march grows? I think it’s because of that.”
She’s right; think of the contrast. “My body! My choice!” or “Love them both.” Denying that even imperfect circumstances can still afford quality of life, or embracing disorder-defying joy. Human rights violation or human dignity. A woman’s right to choose, or a woman’s right to fulfill her extraordinary destiny.
The March for Life Seeks to Liberate Women
If liberation is what women seek, they should abandon the progressive hive mind and stop consuming the lie that to be an empowered woman is to take up the feminist banner, screaming pro-choice mantras and loathing the man in the White House. If the Women’s March and the March for Life are any indicators, women are ditching conformity, opting instead for ideological diversity and the beauty and love the pro-life message affords. It’s the “winning message,” Dannenfelser said.
“I think women’s experience has really shown that the promises of the old-guard feminist movement were a lie,” Dannenfelser added. “They were wrong, because they were not the great liberator. Abortion has not proved to be the great liberator. The pro-life message is a far more liberating message.”
It’s amazing how much more powerful a movement can be when it’s grounded not on self, but on others. Not on hatred of an election result or a president, but on love for womankind and compassion for the life they carry inside them.
The Women’s March isn’t about women. It never has been. The March for Life emphatically is.
