The Real War on Women: Attacking Pro-Life Women

Opinion   |   Kristen Walker Hatten   |   Nov 9, 2012   |   3:53PM   |   Washington, DC

The numbers are in, and they are grim. TIME Magazine has given us “Four Ways Women Won the 2012 Election.” They begin by exulting that Obama got 55% of the female vote; 67% of single women voted for him.

Number four on TIME‘s list is this: “Republican men with extreme views on abortion lost their elections.”

After – of course – using Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin and Richard “God Intended” Mourdock as representative examples of pro-life candidates, they went on to add:

In rebuking such candidates, “voters sent a clear message last night that they’re tired of a backwards-looking agenda that hurts women and families,” EMILY’s List president Stephanie Schriock said in a statement. The political-action committee, which supports pro-choice female candidates, reported more donors and members during the 2011-12 election cycle than at any other period in its 27-year history.

The sad, scary truth is that the majority of women – and an authoritative majority of single women – voted for Obama. Without women, he would not have been elected.

You and I know that abortion is misogyny in action. You and I know that women are not freed from oppression by simply passing on the oppression to their children. You and I know that forcing other people to buy our birth control pills is not a victory for liberty, but the opposite of that. You and I know that the abortion industry cares not about women, but about their bottom line.

Apparently, 55% of women don’t know that.

More than half of voting women in America believed the rhetoric: that the Republican party is waging a “war on women.” That they want to take away your birth control pills and send you back to the 1950s, where you will be forced to wear a brightly-colored A-line dress and an adorable half-apron all day and greet your husband at the door with a highball for your compulsory rump-slap. In fact, a headline from the satirical news site The Onion said this the day after the election: “Nation’s Women Wake Up Relieved To Find Selves Still In 2012.”

Haha, I get it. Democrats want women to continue to be valued and respected, unlike Republicans, who want them to shut up and be pregnant. That’s funny.

Despite an abysmal economy which is affecting everyone – male and female – women voted for the status quo, based on a well-executed fantasy put forth by the Obama campaign. According to the fantasy, everyone is out to get women except the Democrats. It doesn’t matter how many successful Republican women you show them. In fact, there is no one more loathed by the women of the left than the women of the right. (If you don’t believe me, read the comments.)

Ask Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Ann Romney, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and Laura Ingraham if they get a lot of “you go, girl!” from pro-choice women. You can’t even mention most of those women without eye-rolls and hearing words like “crazy” and “b**ch” – from other women. Don’t even get me started on Alveda King, Mia Love, and Condoleezza Rice – they’re black and female and conservative! Blasphemy! Condoleezza barely gets any points for being pro-choice.

The funny thing is, most people who hate, for example, Sarah Palin don’t even know why. Her voice gets on their nerves. She sounds “dumb.” She’s obviously a big liar! This is a woman who raised several children and helped her husband run a successful small business while rising from the PTA to governorship of a state. This is a woman who fought corruption in the oil and gas industry in Alaska, saving the taxpayers of her state a lot of money and busting up a deeply entrenched “good ol’ boys” club, even while she was a private citizen. Fiercely independent Alaskans of all political stripes loved her – she was a good governor, and her approval rating was in the 80s when she was tapped to run for vice president in 2008.

She became the object of immense scorn and despicable harassment: a slew of phony ethics complaints; a stalker who moved in next-door and watched her family from his balcony while he wrote a “tell-all” book about her that ended up being full of bull corn; a probe into her marriage alleging an affair which never happened; and, of course, the “lipstick on a pig” remark from the president himself.

But the most hate was a result of her very vocal pro-life position. When her teenage daughter Bristol became pregnant out of wedlock, the spittle flew as fauxminists denounced her as a “hypocrite” for promoting abstinence education when her own daughter was not abstinent. Never mind Palin’s admission that her daughter made a mistake but was going to handle it the right way: by being a good mother to her son.

There was even weird speculation that Palin’s young son, Trig, was actually her daughter’s, with people analyzing photos of her on websites to see if she was “really” pregnant. And of course there were the disgusting jokes about her son with Down Syndrome, such as Louis C.K.’s reference to her “retard-making c**t.”

This is just one example of the scorn heaped on pro-life women. Being a woman – a successful woman, a good mother, a shining example of what a woman can achieve – is not enough. You have to be pro-choice, too. If we stand up for life, we are not feminists; we are misogynists. We are a disgrace to womankind because we want to “repress” other women.

CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!

 

I don’t know if there is a way to explain to women that abortion is not their friend. I read RH Reality Check and Jezebel, and I feel a bit lost. I feel like these people are beyond approaching with reason, science, and logic. Sometimes I think our only choice is overturning Roe or somehow changing the law. I understand the argument that we need to end abortion one person at a time, by changing hearts and minds, but sometimes I think: no. It’s impossible.

But then I think of Christianity. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not. Whatever your beliefs, you must admit that the story is remarkable: against all odds, this bizarre little Eastern region that started with twelve people spread all over the world to become the most common religion on earth. You can debate whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but there’s no denying that it happened.

As pro-life women, we have to accept that we’ll be the object of lies, disgust, and harassment. All we can do is face the lions, like the early Christians did, bravely and without apology. We can’t ever stop peacefully, lovingly declaring what we believe: all human life is precious and must be protected.

LifeNews.com Note: Kristen Walker is Vice President of New Wave Feminists.This post originally appeared at the Live Action blog and is reprinted with permission.