A common argument among pro-abortion advocates who want to keep the practice legal and easily accessible is that it has made women’s lives better. What the word “better” means in this scenario, however, is difficult to determine.
A recent Washington Post
report,
for example, says that the legalization of abortion has benefited women in a number of ways. Women are much more likely to earn college degrees and hold management positions today than they were in 1970, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and they frequently earn more than their husbands, according to the report.
However, women after Roe are also less likely to be married and have children at a young age, often opting to delay having a family so that they can join the workforce instead.
Is this really the best-case scenario for women? Or, rather, is it the consequence of an intense cultural pressure that has convinced women to be more dominant and independent than they want and need to be?
My bet is on the latter. There’s a reason that even the most renowned feminists,
such as Harriet Beecher Stowe
, believed that women who prioritized family-making were the happiest. They believed this not because they were unable to envision a different future for women, or because they didn’t think women were capable of something else, but because they experienced the joys of motherhood themselves and the fulfillment that it provided.
The benefit of the modern era, of course, is that women can have both: They can have families and careers.
Abortion advocates would like you to believe otherwise. They claim children stunt women’s careers and make it impossible for them to climb the ladder. Hence, why the pro-choice movement places such an emphasis on abortion as a means to delay something for which a woman is not ready. But this is a lie. Women have never been better-equipped than they are right now to continue working while also raising children —
if that’s what they prefer.
To be sure, our government can and must do more to support working mothers. But we must also reject the idea that abortion is necessary for female achievement and that it has made our lives “better” rather than simply more convenient.
