This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

Emily Buchanan for Time magazine: Pro-Life and Feminism Aren't Mutually Exclusive.

Ha ha okay player.

It is my estimation that anything which fundamentally robs any woman of her bodily agency is incompatible with feminism, of which legal and accessible abortion is but one prominent example. So I disagree with Buchanan's premise right from the start.

But her facts, ahem, are also wrong.
From its early beginnings, feminism was a young women's movement. Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Charlotte Lozier and so many others began their suffragist work in their 20s. These women — the original feminists — understood that the rights of women cannot be built on the broken backs of unborn children. Anthony called abortion "child murder." Paul, author of the original 1923 Equal Rights Amendment, said that "abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women."
Paul did say that—although the specific context of the quote was her belief that abortion singularly left women with the consequences of "casual sex," allowing men to more easily use women. At a time when contraception was not easily accessible (and what contraception was available was in some places illegal), men had even less cultural responsibility in pregnancy prevention than they do now, abortion was illegal and frequently unsafe, women could be forcibly sterilized, and reproductive coercion was a concept that did not even exist, no man would be held accountable for forcing a woman to get an abortion and no woman had anything resembling meaningful reproductive choice.

It's possible, in today's world, Paul would find denying abortion to be the ultimate exploitation of women, because the balance of choice has fundamentally changed.
So the pro-life movement hasn't changed the meaning of feminism, as has been suggested. It was the neo-feminists of the 1960s and '70s who asked women to prize abortion as the pathway to equality.
No. To prize choice. That is not a semantic difference.

[H/T to Shaker Jennifer.]

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