Freedom?

Cecile RichardsVerified account @CecileRichards Jan 26

Through generations of struggle and change, we’ve been driven by one simple, radical notion: No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.

Here’s the explicit claim that women are not free in the first world where abortion has been totally legal for 45 years.

Women in America are the most privileged persons in human history. We have more power, more opportunity to choose, and more freedom than any person before our time, anywhere in the world. At the present, we have more prerogative than men.

As to power, women as family-creators have always had the power to form and influence the future of their cultures to an astonishing degree. It is modern feminism which has convinced women to limit or dismiss that power and that influence. Who influences the future more: the parent of eight children or the parent of 1.2?  It’s hard to pass on a vision or a heritage when you’ve de-prioritized the raising of your progeny, or if you’ve had none and bypassed on the opportunity completely.

At work, we dominate in the fields which women self-select as their chosen professions, and evidence that we are suppressed in male-dominated fields is disappearing. Vastly more college students are women. There are more female doctors than male. More and more women are CEOs, vice presidents and other business leaders. The glass ceiling is largely an urban myth unless you believe that women should be spared the struggle of achieving that for which  men have always had to sacrifice and compete.

The mommy wars attest to the fact that women have a great deal of prerogative over their lives. Economic necessity, personal fulfillment and societal shift have created a reality in which women comprise about half of the work force. Still, the conversation over whether we pursue careers or stay at home full time to raise children remains a debate.

Where are the daddy wars? This is not a debate most men have the prerogative to have with themselves.

 And now, victimhood and freedom.

I do not know how any human being could be more privileged or more powerful than a first-world modern woman. We have bestowed upon every woman of childbearing age an unquestionable right to end the lives of her own unborn children totally without consequence.

We have won power, freedom and prerogative over the lives of the most innocent and defenseless of human beings. We have convinced our culture that we deserve the right to kill those whom our culture ought to expect us most fervently to defend. We have been given the power of life by God; we have chosen to struggle for the power of death.

We have created a context which says that a mother and her unborn child must struggle for supremacy. Then we prefer the most dire of the two outcomes: if mother wins, the child must die; if child wins, mother is condemned to inconvenience and the necessity to focus outside of herself. Ms. Richards calls that slavery:

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. – Cecile Richards

Feminism says a woman’s freedom depends on her right to deny life to another person. Without that right, she has no power, no choice, no freedom.

The implication is that a man does not need to kill to be free, but that a woman does. Sounds to me like it’s modern feminism denying women equality.

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