Feminism's sacrament: Abortion

Think about it for a moment.  Just think about feminism's aims and goals for women and what is required for women to reach those goals.

Have you gotten there yet?

Amazingly, many people haven't.  It's not a slippery slope, but it is a logical consequence of feminism.  Ready access to abortion is required for the feminist agenda.  Birth control isn't good enough.  More than 50% of the women walking through the doors of your local "women's health" clinic seeking an abortion were already using  birth control in the month they got pregnant.  And that's according to Planned Parenthood's own reckoning.  Even SCOTUS recognized the societal dependence on the availability of abortion in its decision in the case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

It's really quite simple.  For a woman to have a career equivalent to a man's, she can't behave much like a normally healthy woman.  Controversial, but true. A normally healthy woman gets pregnant when she has sexual intercourse.  It even happens with a certain frequency when she or her partner are using contraception/birth control.  That's what is supposed to happen for a normally healthy woman who has sex.  But a woman pursuing a career like a man can't be taking maternity leave every couple of years.  She has to be on the job like a man, without leave and without time out for sick kids, daycare failures, etc.

So she can't be a normally healthy woman.  If she is, she is patently not equal to a man in terms of career commitment.

In short, abortion is an absolute requirement as a back-up to failed birth control.  We could always pretend career women are celibate.  Uhm, no we can't.  As Frederica Mathewes-Green points out in her Touchstone article, feminism's twin goals were:

1. Greater access to public life (careers, politics)
2. Increased sexual freedom

Those are the major tenets of the religion (relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity) of feminism.  It's sacrament is abortion.  Now some will quibble about the language, but one definition of sacrament is:

something regarded as possessing a sacred character or mysterious significance

It's hard to see how anyone can argue that abortion has anything but a sacred character or mysterious significance when we see organizations such as NOW use efforts to stop the Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act (which outlaws sex-selection abortions) in their fundraising literature.  Abortion is such an integral part of the feminist agenda that they will not countenance any restriction on access to abortion -- even those abortions which target girls specifically.

What is most disheartening about all of this is that feminism has become so deeply ingrained in our society, that even conservative/orthodox Christian believers cower at the merest possibility that women and men are not equivalent actors in all three spheres of life - home, church and society. It's the reason Complementarians hide behind the "Equal but Different" mantra.  It's also the reason even the supposedly sexist ESV is under near-constant revision (four times in ten years).

The truth is, that if you want to talk about ontological reality, human dignity and worth - yes, there we are equal.  And the Church has always taught this - across all three branches of historic Christianity for two millennia.  But what the church has also recognized is the paradox at the heart of Christian anthropology - that while we are equal, we are also different, made for different purposes, teleologically distinct.  

And therein lies the problem.  As long as the feminists, religious and secular, are allowed to define the terms of discussion, paradox will always be denied.  They will reduce it to contradiction.  And Complementarians will be caught in a defensive, "Yes, but . . ." posture.

I happen to know it is a great privilege to be a woman.  To be numbered among the keepers of society's emotional resources (see Goldberg, Why Men Rule) and to share a tiny bit of something with the Theotokos which no man will ever share.  The saddest realization of all is that feminists reveal their contempt for their own sex when they attempt to compete in a "man's world" for a man's position on men's terms.

Thanks to Denny Burk  for the "heads up" on Frederica's excellent article.