Lucy Ceballos, center, and Isabella Soto, left, members of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, celebrate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against Texas’ abortion restrictions in front of Whole Woman’s Health Monday, June 27, 2016, in McAllen, Texas. (Nathan Lambrecht/The Monitor via AP)
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision that struck down abortion clinic regulations in Texas in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, pro-choice activists all over the country are ecstatic. The law that obligated abortion clinics to ensure proper medical care to women in case of complications arising from an abortion, such as access to a hospital, was construed as hostile to women. The Texas regulations required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and forced clinics to meet hospital-like standards for outpatient surgery. Its opponents carried the day – while pretending to care for women.
There is much wrong with this logic, but public discourse these days seems devoid of reason altogether. It seems that the louder the screamers, the more people will agree. But, women, wake up! Indeed, this fight is about you and your position in the world. We are talking here about an issue that is much greater than you getting exactly what you want, exactly when you want it. This is about you recognizing the true power that lies within you. It’s about mom power.
What is being celebrated as a triumph for women’s liberation is no less than another nail in the coffin of women’s true ascendancy. Access to all forms of education and professional fulfillment is a shallow victory when women’s deeper desires of motherhood and nurture are dismissed as mere obstacles to female parity with men. In this scenario, women have, in fact, betrayed themselves.
Women have been conned by pro-choice feminist vernacular into believing that ending a pregnancy is an act of freedom worth of celebration, that, somehow, ending an unplanned pregnancy is about caring for women and protecting their health. But what about a woman’s capacity to triumph over adversity, to rise to the occasion and, despite it all, love and protect her child?
Every mother knows that having children emboldens and empowers. While a sense of vulnerability sets in with pregnancy and can creep up at any time, it is the love of one’s child that sets free new energy and determination, the tigress within. Ask mothers who have been through the equivalent of hell on earth and they will insist that it was because of their children that they found the strength to endure and survive. You will never find a mother who will describe her children as a burden, but, rather, as a blessing to see her through – the reason to carry on. Mothers endure not despite but because of their children.
It saddens me that so many women, and especially the young and vulnerable, are being sold the cheap bill of goods that makes the ending of a pregnancy appear as the most sensible choice. Perhaps they will never discover that glorious feeling of invincibility that comes from the choice to live for one’s children. With the life they terminate, they give up on the chance of ever being able to say “these are my children, and I will go through fire for them.” With abortion, they surrender the power of being a mom. Any child that follows will be marked by her guilt for he or she was simply the lucky one, less inconvenient than the child that could have come before. Never can that mother feel that, no matter what and at any stage, she would have held on to that child and given it her all.
Much needs to be done to assist frightened and overwhelmed women with an unplanned pregnancy and society is failing them in many ways. Nonetheless, women who buy into the pro-choice/pro-woman propaganda are being short-changed. The price they pay for a quick solution is the dignity of their own strength as they acquiesce to the notion of personal victimhood and separate their own life from what may give it ultimate meaning – their one and unique child. Women can do better and have for thousands of years – long before abortion became culturally accepted. In fact, the most worrisome effect of abortion is how it undermines the idea of motherhood as something empowering, while it generates the idea of any child being dispensable. It is the separation of women from motherhood, of mother from child, of woman from the greatest source of her power.
In effect, feminism’s great achievements of enabling women to become educated and bring their many talents to the workplace and public life ring hollow when women surrender their greatest strength to illusory equality. We have let ourselves be made less, not more. Fellow women, I beseech you, stand tall, stand firm, stand by your children and conquer the world! You are invincible!
