Issues

Are pro-choice feminists really feminist at all?

It isn’t every day that a self-proclaimed pro-choicer makes a valid argument against abortion. Yet that’s just what Jay Sun did in his essay posted on ThoughtCatalog.com.

The essay, “The Disconnect Between Feminists and Abortion,” was inspired by Jimmy Carter’s appearance on Bill Maher’s show in order to promote former president Carter’s new book. In the interview, Carter mentioned a shocking statistic – that more girls have been killed because of the fact that they are girls in the past hundred years than the combined deaths of all the wars of the 20th century.

These killings are due to sex-selective abortion and infanticide.

While sex-selective infanticide occurs mainly in countries like China, which has a one-child policy, sex-selective abortion occurs throughout the world, even in the United States. It’s something the abortion industry doesn’t want to admit, and therein lies the problem that Sun lays out. He writes:

I don’t presume to speak for feminism, but I would imagine that anybody who considers themselves a feminist would speak out harshly against sex selective infanticide and abortion. And yet, I can’t help but think that abortion really isn’t that much different from infanticide. They’re both conscious, premeditated decisions to terminate human life in its earliest stages.

Sun mentions the case of a teen girl in Florida who, after hiding her pregnancy, gave birth and choked her baby to death.  He points out that just a day earlier, this mother could have gotten an abortion and we never would have heard a word about it.

Despite the fact that he’s pro-choice, Sun says he’s finding it much harder to hold that opinion because, while we can revile sex-selective abortion and infanticide, we are supposed to support a woman’s decision to abort for the reason of timing or advancing her career or education.

Is convenience a valid reason for abortion? Is anything a valid reason for ending an innocent life? And if the abortion industry doesn’t condemn sex-selective abortions against girls, are they truly feminists at all?

Sun states that if feminism is “supposed to address the ideal that society should value females just as much as males, we’ve still got a long way to go.”

And he’s right about that. Until females and their ability to nurture a human life inside their womb and give birth are truly respected and fertility is seen once again as a gift instead of a side effect, women will never truly be viewed as valuable.

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