The feminist case against abortion

Dec 24, 2021 by

by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:

This year, Erika Bachiochi won the dubious honour of being perhaps the first feminist to have been threatened with no-platforming by a conservative association — for being too conservative. In late November, the female board members of New York University’s conservative law association, the Federalist Society, resigned over its decision to invite the feminist legal scholar to speak. In their view, Bachiochi’s campaigning work against abortion renders her beyond the pale.

America’s abortion debate has always been fraught, but this past year it has been particularly eventful. Whether the introduction of “heartbeat rule” restrictions in Texas, a challenge to those restrictions by The Satanic Temple, or the recent Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health case challenging the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, it’s been a bumper time for heated debates about the morality, legality and broader social implications of allowing women to terminate pregnancy

Bachiochi and her opponents are speaking from either side of what is perhaps feminism’s central question: how to balance individual freedom against our human obligation to dependents. It’s a debate Bachiochi traces back to the very dawn of modernity, in The Rights Of Woman: Reclaiming A Lost Vision. Her title is a homage to her subject Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) is widely viewed as the first proto-feminist text of the modern age.

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