0
0
Dr. Naomi Wolf writes a very compelling piece on abortion, and how the left, as they always seem to do, pushed the “right” to levels that alienated just about everyone. Yes, even many pro-choice Americans Read the entire piece at Naomi Wolf Substack
I am pro-choice, in the sense that in no way, hard as I have tried, can I see how women can have basic equality or self-determination in any society if they cannot choose to terminate a pregnancy within the first trimester. I’ve explained my tortured feelings about this issue in a 1995 essay that has been widely reproduced over the years, Our Bodies, Our Souls: Rethinking Pro-Choice Rhetoric. [This essay is elsewhere in this Substack, and also here].
In this essay, I warned that while I was pro-choice, I also recognized that the death of a fetus is a real death, and that an abortion always represents a loss’; that we as feminists risked becoming increasingly hard-hearted and soulless if we continued to embrace a discourse in which a fetus was merely “a clump of cells”, if we persisted in pretending that abortion was spiritually meaningless, and if we continued to posit that a second- or even third trimester abortions were nothing more bloody or catastrophic than “personal choices”.
I also warned that such mechanistic, amoral language and such increasingly monstrous policies would eventually also create a political scenario that in time was certain to lose: these policies would eventually lose us the reasonable middle: the majority of the country that supports abortion rights in the first trimester but that withdraws its support progressively as pregnancies progress.
Please do read it all. Wolf points out how, I would use the word radical the “Pro-Choice” has become. The words they use are increasingly angry, bitter, and, frankly, barbaric at times. The left has pushed so hard, and for so long, that they now hold a position that is simply out of touch with most Americans. It is no longer about women or their bodies, it is about control, and power. Not for the women, but for those who are so radical and, given their language, potentially dangerous. Go read it folks
