The women of #MeToo and pro-life women share a problem. How I wish we could work together toward a solution, and that we were walking arm in arm down Constitution Ave. in Washington on Jan. 22, the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Instead, we’re off in our separate corners working on allegedly separate issues.
Our common problem is this: whenever women object to anything to do with sex, we are labeled Puritans, sex-haters, or in the recent words of Catherine Deneuve and 100 of her friends, “enemies of sexual liberty.” And who can forget the immortal words of comedian George Carlin kicking off his epic rant against pro-lifers: “Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to f—k in the first place, man? There’s such balance in nature.”
But of course, neither #MeToo women nor pro-life women are consigning sex to the dustbin of history. Instead, and each in our own way, we are trying to restore something important to sex, and eradicate something harmful.
#MeToo women — a group undoubtedly including some pro-life women — are trying to eradicate violence, threats, and abuses of power. They are trying to restore true consent to sex. And pro-life women, whether or not part of #MeToo, want to eradicate the taking of the life that sex creates, and to restore respect for the links that sex naturally has with gorgeous things like love, commitment, marriage, kin, and future.
With these links restored, consent will almost never be a fraught question; it will be clear.
In other words, and from the lips of a woman running a website hosting hundreds of thousands more pro-life women, “You go #MeToo women!” But you need to go further.
Yes, you need to emphasize consent, but you should also demand that sex be as beautiful and affirming as women want and deserve. This would require you to acknowledge the intrinsic power of sex, a power due to its physical and psychological links to love and new life, which are quite frankly never realized better than in marriage. This isn’t my opinion, but the findings of the most comprehensive and respected survey of American sexual practices ever completed.
In a strong sense, an acknowledgment of the power of sex is implicit in your argument; it is the demand precisely for sex, accompanied by threats or violence or abuse of power, which is at the heart of your complaints. Were the men involved demanding that we clean their offices or walk a mile under duress, women could rightly complain, but the violation would be of a different order, less soul destroying.
And practically speaking, unless the whole reality of sex as nature made it – provoking feelings of bondedness and capable of making new life – is figured into the “consent” equation, women will never eradicate all the abuse and power-plays from sex.
In the time I have spent with grieving post-aborted women, how often did I hear the refrain: “He said if I didn’t have sex, we couldn’t date. He said if I had the abortion we could be together. I did. He left anyway.” Abuse? Check. Power play? Check.
It didn’t matter that the sex involved was consensual. The man’s lack of commitment to the woman, to any future together, and to any children their sex might create, started a chain of violence that ended with the death of an unborn child and a lasting wound for the woman.
If the pro-life and #MeToo movements could join forces and together decry not only nonconsensual sex, but sex unmoored from love and commitment between men and women, sex unmoored from respect for the new life it creates, we would be an even more powerful force to be reckoned with.
Helen Alvare is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential Blog. She is a professor of law at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School and founder and president of Reconnect Media/WomenSpeakforThemselves.com.
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