Pro-Life Women Seek to Change Terms of Abortion Debate
ABC News
January 15, 2003

Washington, DC -- Michaelene Jenkins has always considered herself a feminist, but 18 years ago she stopped believing that abortion should be legal -- after she had one herself.

Nothing prepared her for the emotional devastation she felt after she had the abortion, she said, but equally shocking to her was what she encountered as she was trying to decide what she wanted to do. It was that experience -- one that she said is all too common for women who find themselves with unexpected or unwanted pregnancies -- that led Jenkins, now executive director of the Life Resource Network, to support a new campaign spearheaded by Feminists for Life to make a case about "the failure of abortion to meet the needs of women."

The Women Deserve Better campaign, led by several national pro-life groups, is an attempt to change the terms of the abortion debate on the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision, which cleared the way for the legalization of abortion.

That debate, Serrin Foster, the president of Feminists for Life, admitted, has reached a stalemate "with one side chanting, 'What about the baby?' and the other chanting 'What about the mother?'"

The thrust of the campaign is that legalized abortion is not only bad for unborn children, it's been bad for women and for all of society, because it has allowed employers, lawmakers, colleges and even health care providers to treat pregnancy as an easily avoidable condition.

"Babies don't ruin people's lives," Foster said. "Poverty ruins people's lives. Unemployment ruins people's lives. A lack of education ruins people's lives. Violence ruins people's lives."

Pregnant women grappling with the decision of what to do too often find themselves pressured by economics, by their employers or by their families or boyfriends to get an abortion, the campaign's backers say.

"Women say to me they don't feel like it's much of a free choice," Foster said. "I know women who have had arguments being pressured by their university health clinics to have an abortion. We believe that abortion is a reflection of how we have failed women."

That could change if there were social programs and laws to support mothers, and in its support for those issues the campaign may share common ground with pro-abortion groups such as NARAL Pro-Choice America and the National Organization for Women.

Those issues have been at the heart of the feminist movement since its inception in the 19th century, but according to Foster, they have gotten lost as the groups currently identified as feminist have focused on keeping abortion legal.

That's not the case, NARAL legal director Elizabeth Cavendish claims.

"I'd say, 'Welcome to the club,'" Cavendish said when asked about the Women Deserve Better campaign. "NARAL has long been fighting for measures supporting women to make informed, reasoned choices and helping them bear healthy children should they decide to."

"To the extent that it's about giving women more options, we say, 'Go for it, great, get it done,'" she added.

But if there is agreement between abortion foes and supporters that women are still shortchanged, there is no common ground on what role the Roe vs. Wade decision played.

"We agree in some areas and part company in others," Cavendish said. "We support giving women access to all their options."

Options are what Jenkins said she did not feel she had 18 years ago, when she found herself unmarried and pregnant. Abortion was not her first choice. She said she initially wanted to have the child and give it up for adoption, but found no support for that decision.

"At the time, I was pro-choice," she said. "I felt abortion was very necessary for women to be able to advance their education and career goals."

Not only was her boyfriend adamantly against her tentative decision to carry the child and give it up for adoption, but her employer all but told her she would lose her job if she did not have an abortion, she said.

"I was young, I was living in a new state with a new job," she said. "All I could think was that I would have no place to live and have no job if I went through with the pregnancy."

She decided to have an abortion, but even then, she said, she wound up feeling shortchanged.

"It was even obvious going through the procedure that I wasn't being told everything," she said. "It didn't seem very pro-woman to me. I wasn't thinking in terms of ending the life of my child or facing the grieving process, and yet after it was over, that was what I went through."

She said it changed her entire view of the world.

"Something that I imagined would be empowering and necessary certainly wasn't," she said. "I felt violated. It made me rethink what it meant to be a feminist. It created a revolution for me."

Abortion has played such a central role in the feminist movement over the last 50 years that the two have become wedded in most people's minds, though Feminists for Life's Foster said that the earliest American feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believed that abortion was degrading to women.

In the 1960s, though, abortion became a major part of the feminist platform.

Foster says the rationale for supporting abortion was that women could not gain equality in the workplace with men as long as employers had to worry about female workers getting pregnant and missing extended periods of time or leaving work altogether to care for their children.

Modern feminists, though, have never spoken in those terms. Abortion has been called a fundamental right because it concerns a woman's right to control her own body.

"I think it's an oxymoron to say Feminists for Life," Cavendish said. "You can't be a feminist and be anti-choice, or a feminist as I understand it, meaning that women are trusted to make their own decisions."

Members of the campaign say "women deserve better than abortion."

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