The Pro-Life Feminist

Pro-life working mothers represent a subversive and dangerous threat to the fragile feminist glass ceiling on abortion. Over the years, abortion has successfully developed into an inextricable principle of modern feminism. No other cause commands the same commitment from the modern feminist establishment than abortion nor is there a more unforgiving litmus test for men and women seeking public office than a record of support for this newfound women’s right.

The pro-life working mother is thus a logical contradiction in the current and dominant feminist logic. She is a radical evolution representing a major shift from both traditional motherhood and modern feminism. Conceived in feminism, the working mother is an outward extension of old motherhood into the labor market once previously closed. But the pro-life feminist is also feminism’s unwanted and unintended child, the kind that should have been aborted long ago, but survived into a rebellious black sheep undermining the single, most defining doctrine in modern women's liberation theory.

The success of the women’s movement to remake abortion as a fundamental woman right was accompanied by the marginalization and eventual ouster of pro-life feminists from the movement. Consequently, no pro-life woman has risen from modern feminist ranks because abortion – now redefined and so central to female power - is only central because of the forced absence of the competing power of pro-life women. The established sisterhood has been the most committed and effective obstacle for the achievements of pro-life women in politics particularly because the logical contradiction of female power despite and because of motherhood is a direct and profound invalidation of a crucial and defining interest in the modern strand of feminism.

Pro-life feminism then seems at once an incoherent step, taken simultaneously towards women's future and past as well as the graduation of feminism to a much larger humanism. It is an incoherent step only in so much as this new pro-life feminism is a return to classical feminism that resurrects older insights into human equality that once provided the philosophical inspiration for the early feminists. In so far as the corollary of the abandonment of the newfound woman right to abortion is the introduction of the unborn into the community of persons, pro-life feminism far from restricting women’s freedom, is the expansion of freedom into those previously not free.

Potential is only meaningful within personhood. Women cannot reach their full potential, however great it may be, unless women are first fully recognized as persons. But for the pro-abortion feminist, the denial of abortion rights is a limitation on the personhood of women, as affirmed in the Planned Parenthood v Casey decision stating that " the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives." Thus, women can only be fully persons if the unborn may not be, and the unborn may not be only when women have choice over the personhood of the unborn.

On the other hand, for the pro-life feminist the denial of the personhood of women is merely a different manifestation of the same injustice that denies the personhood of the unborn. Thus, women can only be fully persons if the unborn can be too - when the injustice that enslaves them both, enslaves no one anymore . It was this conviction raging in Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that insipired their fight for women's birth into the world ruled by men declaring, "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." The early pro-life feminists like Alice Paul, Victoria Woodhull, and Mary Wollestonecraft, who fought and paved the way for women in politics, ironically, will find no place in politics under the new feminist autocracy.