Oh hey! Looks like the anti-choice folks found a new way to come up with their own set of “facts”!
Many scholars and activists argue that women’s liberation rests on a foundation of full reproductive options. Feminists For Life believes the opposite, arguing that being “prolife” (that is, anti-abortion) is inextricably linked to female empowerment.
Who do you find “teaching” feminist history on a campus like the University of Toronto? None other than Feminists for Life.
It’s the Year of the Woman! And that means it’s time to examine how support for or opposition to legal abortion access does or doesn’t signal a “real feminist.”
Under the banner of feminism, Feminists for Life tries to deceive women into letting go of the very things feminists fought for women to have.
Feminism is about women being seen as competent moral agents, not restricting the options and conditions women have to make the choice that is best for them. Feminists for Life and the policies of Sarah Palin miss the mark.
Despite the new wave of "feminist" anti-abortion crusaders like Feminists for Life that spin legal abortion in this country as unsafe or harmful to women, the facts tell a very different story. As Tyler LePard and Katie Porter blogged last month, The British Journal, The Lancet, released a series of articles on sexual and reproductive health, coordinated by the World Health Organization. The study on unsafe abortion in developing nations called it a "silent pandemic" that is an "urgent public health and human rights imperative." Those are some pretty strong words – as well they should be.
Almost 70,000 women die every year (97% of them in developing nations) from unsafe and illegal abortion but millions more suffer complications such as hemorrhaging and infection. Many of those complications result in permanent damage for the women.
When are we, as a global community, going to treat this as a burning human rights issue and not just a political one?
