Kathryn Kaufman, the managing director for Global Women’s Issues at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, recently wrote that as a Republican and a Christian woman, she supports abortion because it’s required for economic development.
Writing at the Washington Post, Kaufman says, “Full sexual and reproductive-health rights are a key factor in achieving women’s empowerment. We know that when women can choose whether to have children and how many children to have, their lives are improved. They are more likely to participate in the labor force and more likely to stay in school longer. They increase their earning potential.”
Interestingly, Kaufman only says the word “abortion” twice, as if she’s uncomfortable talking about what she really means. Her point is that we need abortion for poor people to have economic opportunity.
In her role, Kaufman is supposed to help women achieve economic success and parity with men. But how does abortion do this? A small business owner in a poor country isn’t suddenly wealthier or able to expand her business after having an abortion. After having an abortion, you’re just the mother of a dead baby, and you still have all the same issues you had before the abortion. You aren’t suddenly better off. You haven’t received more job training or better employment prospects.
Yes, kids can be expensive (I have four of mine own), but abortion doesn’t make anyone wealthier. Instead, what is proven to help move people out of poverty is strong families, education, and access to economic opportunity. Those are all great goals, and I’m sure something Ms. Kaufman works toward every day. But there’s no reason that we need heart attack abortions or toilet bowl abortions, for example, to help women succeed. As a Catholic, Republican, woman myself, I find it disturbing that someone who is supposed to be a champion for women’s rights thinks that women’s lives are made or broken by the abortions they have.
Kaufman’s experience includes time working in the U.S. Embassy in China. That country has long had a policy of forced abortions, but there’s no evidence that that this policy helped China succeed. In fact, its government is backpeddling because the policy has produced a dangerous gender imbalance. China has succeeded thanks to its abandonment of communist economic policy, improved education, capital investment, infrastructure improvements, and open trade.
China did not lift its citizens out of poverty by forcing poor women to have abortions.
In fact, abortion contributes to the degradation and poor treatment of women, by treating that which is most natural to women as something that must be controlled and “dealt” with through violent force. Instead of talking about how we can put more women into universities, provide a safe environment, and push back against extremist, patriarchal ideology, we’re left trying to say that it’s a woman’s reproduction and female biology that are the root cause of her poverty, that unless she abandons it and becomes functionally, biologically indistinguishable from men, she is worth less than a man.
It’s one thing to hear this notion that women need abortion to succeed from your average college student in their dorm room, writing nasty comments on videos of me speaking. It’s far different, and much more disappointing, to hear it from someone with experience in investment and foreign policy who is supposed to be leading the fight for women’s equality.
Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America, serving more than 1,200 SFLA chapters on college and university campuses in all 50 states. Follow her @KristanHawkins.
