It’s safe to say that at one point or another, every woman in America has been somewhere on the range of disappointed to disgusted with President-Elect Donald Trump. The catalyst for many was the release of the Access Hollywood tapes with Billy Bush. Women like myself who were completely turned off by Hillary Clinton, as I’ve written before, were thinking about voting for a third-party candidate. Some of us were even thinking about going against everything we stood for, and vote for her. While some women were able to look past his statements, the rest joined an unprecedented coalition of “anti-Trumpers.”
In the past two months “Stronger Together” became more than just Clinton’s campaign slogan, it materialized into a movement. The Women’s March on Washington came together because women from all walks of life want to, according to their website, “ send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women’s rights are human rights. We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us.”
Sounds like something we can all get behind, especially if you’re talking about the termination of a life (the ultimate marginalization to me) before its birth.
Millennials like myself are too young to have experienced the rapid growth of the feminist movement and the growing pains that came with it. What we do know from our college courses in women’s issues is that the subject of abortion is a point of division, albeit a fairly new one. For the first time, it started to look like in the face of adversity, feminists were going to be bigger than one issue. It made me believe that women were becoming a force to be reckoned with, stronger together.
That is, until the organizer’s of the Women’s March on Washington decided to disinvite a group of women. Feminists, telling women, they couldn’t be apart of their cause. Why? Because they’re pro-life.
Imagine how trailblazers of the women’s movement like Jeanette Rankin, Rosa Parks, and Susan B. Anthony would respond if they could see that abortion alone is the reason women are silencing a rather large minority. According to a Gallup poll, 47% of women in America are pro-choice, and 46% consider themselves pro-life. Essentially, the Women’s March on Washington just disinvited half the women in America to the feminist movement. While this shunning by left-wing feminists may have been trending on Facebook just this week, it’s nothing new.
Pro-life women are often labeled as conservative despite where they find themselves on other issues, and are consistently shunned by feminist organizations. For example, Emily’s List (no affiliation) is a partner of the Women’s March on Washington. They are also an organization with the sole cause of electing pro-choice democratic women to public office. Their mission statement reads “so that our families can benefit from the open-minded, productive contributions that women have consistently made in office.” The last time I checked, democrats don’t have the market cornered on positive policy changes, and your gender doesn’t decide how you think. If women are truly equal to men, it is because our sex doesn’t offer a superior or inferior rationale. Electing a woman like me, by their standard, means you’re electing a close minded candidate who will affect negative change and cause harm to our families. All because I consider myself to be pro-life.
To the left, women like myself are the enemy. While it was nice to see that the banishment of pro-life feminists by “feminists” was trending on Facebook this week, I’m here to tell you it’s nothing new.
Suddenly “Stronger Together” is just a nice idea.