Women Don’t Need Abortion to Be Equal and Empowered, Authors Say
Bernadette Hassan /
“How tragic it is, for the past 49-and-a-half years, [Roe v. Wade] has built up an entire unjust social structure in which women’s equality means access to abortion,” says Ryan T. Anderson, co-author of a new book published just four days after the Supreme Court overturned its 1973 ruling legalizing abortion nationwide.
Regnery Publishing released “Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing” by Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis on June 28.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24. Three days later, on June 27, Anderson and DeSanctis took part in a discussion at The Heritage Foundation of their book in the new post-Roe America. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Anderson, president of the nonprofit Ethics and Public Policy Center, suggests that besides the physical, emotional, and mental harm done to women by abortion, great harm is done as a result of the worldview suggesting abortion is necessary for equality.
That view “has allowed us to sustain a culture in which the male way of being human, the male way of embodiment, is taken as the norm, and my wife’s way of being human is somehow a defective version of my way of being human,” he said.
Therefore, Anderson explained, “We structure our higher education system, our employment system, our economy, our entire culture around my body being normal, and her body being somehow dysfunctional. For her to be equal to me, she needs to sterilize her body. If the sterilization fails, she needs to kill her child, who is viewed as a threat to her equality.”
DeSanctis, a writer for the Ethics and Public Policy Center and for National Review, said many seem to think abortion is empowering, and she thinks that’s “fueled by this underlying assumption that freedom is just participation in sex at any point with anybody with no consequences.” A man can walk away without physically bearing a child, but a woman cannot without committing a violent act against her own child, she said.
DeSanctis challenged those who are pro-abortion by saying, “What kind of society are we if the best solution we have to any set of problems is to kill the most vulnerable people among us?”
She added, “If you believe abortion is necessary, think about why, and think about: ‘Are the problems that you identify that make you think abortion is the solution really solved by perpetrating violence against innocent, vulnerable human beings?’ How are any of us really better off?”
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