Can a feminist be pro-life?

[Silent3]

54. If that's how you're going to use the word "agency"

Last edited Mon Feb 20, 2012, 11:14 AM - Edit history (1)

...then the law routinely reduces "agency" to prevent or reduce the occurrence of unsanctioned activities. A person who considers abortion to be murder isn't and shouldn't (not if that's what they really believe, as a separate issue from whether they should believe that in the first place) care that laws against abortion disproportionately effect women any more than they're going to worry that laws against rape disproportionately affect men.

As for the current law and what we can and can't make laws about: While religion is the most common reason for believing that life begins at conception, it's not the only conceivable (pardon the pun) reason. Second, if you truly believe an act is murder, but the law doesn't call it murder, you're going to think that the problem is the way the law works, not your moral sense about murder.

If you lived in a society where it was deeply embedded in the legal framework that children were legally treated as property of their parents, with no rights, and parents could kill their children at will, would your quest to protect children from murder be at all stymied by someone telling you that current law doesn't accept your reasons for wanting to protect the children?

As for both of us being men, and that somehow disqualifying us (or somehow, just me) from engaging in a hypothetical discussion: There are all sorts of topics that none of us will ever have direct personal experience with, or have as much at stake with as other people, but that doesn't mean we can't have valid opinions on those subjects, just that we need to make our best effort to consider the experiences of those who are more involved that ourselves.

What's typically true anyway is that people with more at stake also have the same range of opinions as the people who don't, perhaps in different proportions. There are actual real-life non-hypothetical women who call themselves "pro-life feminists". If you're going to play the "you're a man, you can't understand" gambit with me, doesn't that apply to you just as much if you deny such women their understanding of abortion and feminism?