Women Deserve Better Than Abortion
A few years ago, I attended a retreat for homeschooling moms where an amazing woman shared the story of welcoming two young high school dropouts into her inner city home when they were kicked out of school. She told us that, as the school year progressed, a theme of injustice began to emerge in their readings, culminating in a study of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus. She encouraged us to read and learn from this profound and timeless book.
First published in 1818, Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen years of age. Her understanding of the dangers of technology and modern man, along with a passion for caring for the unlovely and most burdensome of society, produced one of the greatest novels of all time, one that still causes students to ponder the same questions of Shelley’s day. But what many people do not know about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is that her mother, also named Mary and who died shortly after she was born, was her greatest inspiration for Frankenstein.
An Advocate for Women
Author of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and The Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft was an early advocate for the education of women. She saw young women as valuable in their own right, not merely as being marketable to “suitable young men.” She decried what was passed off as the education of women of that day as teaching “artificial manners, card-playing, theatre-going, and an emphasis on fashion.” She was saddened by the amount of time and energy placed on superficial things that “if saved for charitable purposes, might alleviate the distress of many poor families, and soften the heart of a girl who entered into scenes of woe.” She placed a high value on motherhood and the home and was tenacious in addressing the inequality and abuses of her day, one of the greatest of these being abortion.
Her unfinished novel, Mary and the Wrongs of Woman, tells the story of a young maid who is brutally and sexually assaulted by her master, in part because she is sentenced to a life of servitude because of her own illegitimate birth. At finding out that she is now pregnant as a result of the rape, the character says, “I know not why I felt a mixed sensation of despair and tenderness, excepting that, ever called a bastard, a bastard appeared to me an object of the greatest compassion in creation.” The master, concerned only to avoid his wife’s and the public’s disapproval, gives her an abortifacient. She refuses the “infernal potion,” as she calls it. But when the master’s wife discovers him raping her again, the woman beats and verbally abuses her, throwing her out into the street. The servant girl finally obeys her master and swallows the potion “with a wish that it might destroy me, at the same time that is stopped the sensations of new-born life, which I felt with indescribable emotion.”
Calling on her own experiences as a young woman who experienced a crisis pregnancy, Wollstonecraft observed that male sexual exploitation renders women of all social classes “weaker in mind and body than they ought to be,” thus women “have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother and “either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born. Nature in everything demands respect.”
Suffrage and Anti-Abortion
Some fifty years later when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began the women’s suffrage movement, which had been born out of the abolition movement, they called upon the writings of Wollstonecraft for inspiration and echoed her call for an end to abortion.
During that time, women were not allowed to vote or own property or inherit anything if they were married. They could not have their own money, testify on their own behalf in court, sit on a jury, keep their children if they divorced, assemble, or speak freely. A woman who was visibly pregnant was not even allowed to be seen in public! Stanton and Anthony rightly saw abortion for the evil that it is and the scourge it is upon women, noting “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.”
Examining this great social evil of the day in their newspaper, The Revolution, Stanton and Anthony observed: “Guilty? Yes, no matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”
The Cost of Ignoring History
This year, we observe the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling known as Roe v. Wade. That one decision set into motion a series of rulings that have culminated in the unbridled “right to choose” that is really abortion on demand during all nine months of pregnancy for any and every reason and, in many instances, at tax-payer expense.
But it has brought with it other costs. Every single one of us today is touched by the life of someone who suffers from the pain of “choice”—whether it is a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, a family member, a classmate, a mother, a father, a husband, or a wife. Abortion kills children, and it causes life-long grief and suffering for their mothers.
I would encourage you today to take a few minutes and examine the history of the pro-life movement with your children. It did not begin that fateful day in 1973 when America “celebrated” a new right. Rather, it began with courageous women like Mary Wollstonecraft, Elisabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony who recognized that before we can value unborn children, we first must value their mothers, because women deserve better than abortion.
Sources:
Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Women and The Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Quotes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton are from the newspaper she published with Susan B. Anthony called The Revolution, which ran from 1868-1872. Interestingly, the modern-day feminists always omit the suffragettes’ pro-life apologetic and the fact that they were so driven by what abortion did to both babies and their mothers.
This article originally appeared in Family Magazine, 2012, Issue 4. Click here to request a free sample issue!
The post A Pro-Life History Lesson appeared first on HEDUA.