I’m aware that secular and atheist anti-choicers exist, of course, especially among younger people. I had a lively phone chat with Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder and president of New Wave Feminists, who has a different view than Enriquez about who needs whom: “The pro-life movement needs feminism,” she told me. “Stop just focusing on the fetus! Focus on the woman! Freaking bloody photos and a guy with a bullhorn are not going to help!” Still, even when it’s made by hipsters, the anti-choice argument inevitably demands that a woman drop everything to incubate that egg, so how would that work out? The last time abortions were illegal, women risked life and limb to have them anyway. Even back in the heyday of housewifery, the 1950s, managing one’s childbearing was that important.
My own view is that people are complicated and mix up their politics in all kinds of ways. A woman can believe that women are equal to men and also that a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus is a human life and that, if pregnant, a woman should protect and nurture it. She can be anti-abortion for herself, in other words, and many pro-choice women are. But rights and personal ethics are not the same. I just don’t see how restricting and criminalizing abortion, bullying women on their way into the clinic, and pushing lies—that abortion will give you breast cancer, make you infertile, or lead to a life’s worth of misery—are compatible with respecting other women’s right to make their own moral decisions in an area where people disagree strongly and probably always will.
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