When I look out on the pro-choice landscape something about women’s behavior rings false.  It’s so… Butch!  It’s as if abortion is something to claim, plant a flag in and then raise your fist in victory.  Isn’t that a Guy Thing?  It seems the strategy of modern-day feminism is: If you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em – from adopting the sexual habits of carefree bachelors to demanding the right to serve in combat units.  It’s one thing to understand It’s A Man’s World, another to aim to live in it like one.

Speaking of combat units, a military like accepting of collateral damage is in pro-choice culture.  Last December, during the intense media coverage of the Trisomy 18 baby case, I came across an article with a disturbing angle.  It deplored all the attention being given Save the Mother type issues that the case generated, insisting that women who just don’t feel like being pregnant are just as deserving of sympathy and support as all this Save the Mother stuff, written in a hands-on hips, finger wagging style. The publication? A magazine for teen age girls. We’re talking fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds here. Maybe even younger. Worse, it wasn’t some free-lance submission, the author was one of the editors. The editor speaks for the brand. The editor says this is Who We Are and What We Stand For.

The saying: It’s Not About Abortion, It’s about Choice also rings false, but for a different reason. Whenever this was said to me, I noticed the woman saying it held my gaze a tad too long, as if she were trying to see if I was buying it, as if she weren’t totally convinced herself but hoping I’d let it slide and not call her out on this grasping at straws. The idea that the word choice cancels out abortion by dint of bumper sticker logic is chasing rainbows. That’s the bad news.  The good news is, it may be, however meek, a timid nod to conscience. A blink.

First Wave feminism came into being in the mid 1800’s with the goal of gaining the right to own property, the right to vote, and equality in education and divorce proceedings. Abortion was seen as a crime forced upon women by men unwilling to accept responsibility.

Second Wave feminism supposedly began in 1963 when Betty Friedan published the Feminine Mystique, her best-selling book in which she claimed many, if not most women were unfulfilled being only housewives and mothers.  She never mentioned abortion in the book.  Three years later, in 1966, a group of 28 women, including Friedan, started NOW – the National Organization for Women, focusing on women’s right to equal education and equal pay. It was two men, Journalist Laurence Lader and OB-GYN/abortion advocate Bernard Nathanson, who would add abortion to NOW’s must have list. They would go on to found the National Abortion Rights Action League, or NARAL. They concluded they would need feminists on board in their effort to get abortion legalized. One of their strategies was to assert publicly that between 5,000 and 10,000 women died each year from illegal abortions, a massive exaggeration, but one given credibility by reporters who didn’t do proper research and just ran with it.

In 1967, there was a NOW membership conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C., and besides women’s right to equal education and equal pay, proposals now included supporting the right to abortion. Because two men convinced Friedan and other influential women that legal abortion would assure female equality. What happened next is detailed in journalist Sue Ellen Browder’s book Subverted.  “Friedan has saved the vote over the abortion resolution for last. Without warning she suddenly shocks many delegates by belligerently pressing for full repeal of all abortion laws.”  One of these offended delegates was Marguerite Rawalt, a retired IRS attorney who served as a 1961 appointee to President Kennedy’s Commission on the status of women. Reasonable voices were drowned out by radicals who had shown up in unexpected numbers to cast their votes for abortion. In other words, they were bussed in and stuffed the ballot boxes. How did Friedan let things get away from her like this? She just trusted that two men knew what women really needed?  Who let those guys in?  Did she read her own book?

The events that day in 1967 at the Mayflower Hotel, and the harm done to the Women’s Movement, cannot be underestimated. That was the true beginning of so-called Second Wave feminism, and it wasn’t even women leading it. Many NOW members resigned after the abortion resolution was adopted. But the affair sure had all the spit and polish worthy of the launching of a National Organization. Delegates, voting, the adopting of by-laws to get a tax exemption.  It made things official. It identified the Brand. This Is Who We Are and This Is What We Stand For. And, at worst, pro-choice culture has been defending it with a militaristic zeal ever since, or at best with not very convincing, even to themselves, conscience workarounds like: It’s not about abortion you know – it’s about choice. Here’s the thing. I can empathize with what is at the heart of that timid morality.

I don’t think most women want all that butch power, really. For most, it’s not about abortion being a proud possession, about planting a flag in it. It’s living with the fear that she won’t be allowed to have a choice.

It’s been exploited. Women have become so defensive, that after getting unrestricted abortion up to birth enshrined in their state constitutions, they celebrate with wild abandon for the television cameras. After such a political victory, from this position of strength why not go to the microphone and urge everyone to always make abortion the very last resort, not their first choice.  What harm could it do?

Our national women’s movement was hi-jacked at the Mayflower Hotel in 1967, and we never got it back.  That’s the bad news. The good news – is the chance to break through to a different time and place.  What time, what place? The middle of the 1800’s, the day before the gathering at the Mayflower Hotel?  Or the present, that this Culture of Life in Arts and Entertainment Conference today might begin the imagining of a brand new women’s movement, one that redefines Who we are, What we stand for. That dares to ask What else, what’s next? By charging up the hill and breaking through enemy lines?  Or breaking through – like a chick pecking from inside the shell? Not knowing for sure what’s on the other side, but ready to get out.