A recent opinion piece has prompted me to think over campus attitudes about feminism, abortion and education. I think there's a great deal of mass media confusion out there about what feminism is and what it isn't; the biggest problems come in how people perceive what a feminist is, in mental visualization primarily.
You want to see what a feminist looks like? Come find me, right on campus, any day. Look me up and down, and size me up. I could have you meet some of my feminist friends, or show you some feminist websites where other feminists gather together to discuss feminism, and you can see what it's all about.
What is feminism all about? Well, there's an expansive definition out there for the academically inclined, but we can save that for Women's Studies minors and those who have the time. The best definition is extremely simple: A feminist makes a bold declaration, that a woman is a person, that her experiences are relevant to understanding the human condition, and that she has rights as a person.
When it comes to debates of reproductive rights, this question of who is a person is the most basic. The anti-choice/anti-life side of the debate would have us just take for granted the concept of a zygote as a fully independent person, and that the woman is purely incidental to the process; they argue from this perspective without establishing facts and then are shocked when it's discovered not everyone shares this viewpoint, as if one denied gravity.
The pro-choice/pro-woman side of the debate declares that the woman comes first. We know for a fact that she is a person, and so we know she matters. The question of whether a blastocyst counts as a person isn't settled, so we can't curtail the freedoms of known persons on behalf of every multi-celled entity that comes along. As well, we cannot accept that women exist purely to be fetal carrying tanks, without any control of their body or health.
I use the terminology of anti-choice and anti-life versus pro-choice and pro-woman very deliberately. It seems that one side of the debate is constantly locked in protest against people exercising morphological freedom, while the other is constantly struggling to ensure that freedom.
I call the side against women's reproductive freedom anti-choice and anti-life because clearly, they oppose a woman's right to choose; indeed, they are rather proud of this. As well, they know that as they work to slowly kill reproductive freedom through death by a thousand cuts legislation, women will still exercise their human rights, and as they restrict those rights, the risk of death increases exponentially.
The greatest hypocrisy of the anti-choice/anti-life side is not the abortion clinic bombings, or their cruel harassment and stalking of women who have gone to clinics seeking information. Those women are only rarely looking to get an abortion, but are there to get a full range of medical advice critical to women needing to make informed choices.
The greatest hypocrisy isn't even in the deceptive practices of so-called Christians who run "Crisis Pregnancy" centers that are designed to deprive women of reproductive choice through innovative means of misrepresentation, distraction, disinformation, and outright lies to women who have to deal with a difficult situation.
The greatest hypocrisy surfaces when these same people call themselves pro-life and then try with all efforts to suppress the life-saving HPV Vaccine, because they claim it will turn young women into promiscuous tartlets because there's one less health risk out there; these so-called pro-life activists would rather a woman die than be sexually active.
Such hypocrisy shows whenever these same people fight tooth and nail to keep Emergency Contraception from going over-the-counter, because they claim it will also turn young women into insatiable sex-crazed trollops because they have a way to back up their existing birth control methods, which can and do fail at times. They would rather shame women for being sexually active than to provide women a way to prevent unplanned pregnancy (and thus prevent abortions).
These self-proclaimed vanguards of faith lie unrelentingly, spreading disinformation and confusing people; they have even gotten many women to confuse Emergency Contraception (morning-after pill) with RU-486/Mifeprex. This opposition to a medication that prevents conception and implantation shows they care less about life than their ability to participate in 'slut-shaming.'
The reality is that the anti-choice/anti-life activist side is committed to fighting against any technology that gives women reproductive freedom. They have fought against HPV Vaccines, Birth Control, Emergency Contraception, and Comprehensive Sexual Education; these are all life saving.
They are against abortion at all points, and for all reasons, for the same reason as above: This is not about the life of fetuses; it's all about some bizarre urge to control women's bodies. The final word on this is simple: If you don't trust a woman to have control over her own body, both in health care and in sexuality, why would you trust that woman with raising a child?
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