While Feminists for Life is an organization that supports some feminist causes, it would outlaw a woman's right to make her own decisions about her own body. Of course, the group's stand on this one issue negatively affects the ability of women to access some of the rights that the group does support.
On a related note, I met (virtually) a woman recently who calls herself "pro-life". After questioning her, I discovered that unbeknownst to her she is pro-choice. She said that she would never have an abortion, but she would not deny other women the right to make their own decisions. Her "pro-life" position is merely personal.
That did it for me. From now on, when I encounter a "pro-life" woman, I'm asking questions.
Katha Pollitt terms genuinely anti-choice women, such as Feminists for Life, as merely "pro fetal life." There are worse things they could be called.
Feminists for (Fetal) Life
The problem is that FFL doesn't just oppose abortion. FFL wants abortion to be illegal. All abortions, period, including those for rape, incest, health, major fetal defects and, although Foster resisted admitting this, even some abortions most doctors would say were necessary to save the woman's life. (Although FFL is not a Catholic organization, its rejection of therapeutic abortion follows Catholic doctrine.) FFL wants doctors who perform abortions to be punished, possibly with prison terms.
For FFL there's only one right decision: Have that baby. And since women's moral judgment cannot be trusted, abortion must be outlawed, whatever the consequences for women's lives and health--for rape victims and 12-year-olds and 50-year-olds, women carrying Tay-Sachs fetuses and women at risk of heart attack or stroke, women who have all the children they can handle and women who don't want children at all.
That's because they aren't really feminists--a feminist could not force another woman to bear a child, any more than she could turn a pregnant teenager out into a snowstorm. They are fetalists.
See: Jane Roberts Involvement With Anti-Choice Org
feminism supreme court john roberts reproductive rights
