The pro-life and pro-abortion movements view the female sex’s unique ability to bear children very differently, and a new study confirms it.
While most pro-lifers treat women’s ability to bear children as a strength, a power of the female sex, abortion activists often treat it as a weakness, a disease.
The new study from the University of New Zealand and University of British Columbia, Okanagan, claims that because pro-lifers view motherhood as a strength, we are sexist and hate women. It was published in May by the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The pro-abortion study twists words to argue that opposition to abortion is linked to sexist attitudes. The blog Cantech Letter reports the researchers polled more than 12,000 people over a one-year period and found a link between abortion views and “benevolent sexism.”
Here is more from the report:
Further, the study found that these sexist attitudes were based on a person’s idealization of motherhood as an essential element of womanhood. “The idealization of women – and motherhood, in particular – comes at a substantial cost, namely, the restriction of women’s reproductive rights,” say the study’s authors.
… Notably, the researchers distinguished between hostile and benevolent forms of sexism and found that the latter is also predictive of a negative stance on abortion. According to the terminology, hostile sexism involves behaviour that aims to criticize or punish women by appealing to perceptions of traditional gender roles whereas benevolent sexism involves praise for women through similar but often implicit appeal to the same traditional norms.
In this way, where hostile sexism might involve the belief that women are emotionally weak and “need a man’s help” to get by, benevolent sexism would include statements about how women are much more compassionate and giving than are men. …
“Although Benevolent Sexism -an ideology that highly reveres women who conform to traditional gender roles- is cloaked in a superficially positive tone, being placed upon a pedestal is inherently restrictive,” say the study’s authors.
The idealization of motherhood is thought to be a particularly damaging aspect of the benevolent sexism found in Western cultures.
In other words, people who believe a women’s ability to be a mother should be celebrated and supported are sexist. Certainly, women are more than their reproductive organs. Not all women are or can be mothers, and motherhood does not define them. But bearing children is a power of the female sex that abortion demeans and destroys just as it destroys their children’s lives.
