Combating Feminists for Life

"Is it usually this cold in here?" Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life asked me in the bathroom prior to giving her talk two Thursdays ago. I decided against responding with a spiteful answer ("no, it's only your cold heart") for two reasons: one, I'm not that ballsy, and two, it didn't seem fair to knock her before hearing what she had to say. I figured sitting through a Feminists for Life speech would be like attending a Jews for Jesus meeting or losing my virginity: initially painful, eventually humorous, possibly pleasurable. But after Foster finished her self-admitted "rambling" about restricting the rights of women, I only left feeling fucked.

The speech started out innocently enough: a history lesson on the women's movement and a shout-out to Susan B. Anthony, whose birthday fell on the night of the talk. Taking a few out-of-context quotes, Foster then used Anthony, who never stated her stance on abortion, to propel her pro-life cause. While Anthony is contestable, Betty Friedan surely rolled over in her grave when Foster hijacked her work to say that motherhood empowers women. Who's next-Andrea Dworkin as a defense for denying rape victims abortion?

Couching her pro-life stance in feminist rhetoric, Foster further tried to speak for all women: "If women knew what was going on inside their bodies ... this divine power to give life ... they would never think of getting abortions!" I'm pretty sure my friend, a pre-med student who recently had an abortion, knows how conception works. And I'm pretty sure she feels more empowered about getting into her dream medical school than she would be changing the diapers of the baby she never wanted. But then again, according to Foster, my friend should be depressed or dead. Foster told several stories of mourning women and, without any statistical source, declared that since Roe, the number of deaths from abortion has doubled. According to Planned Parenthood, death from abortion-1 out of 100,000-results from serious complications and "the risk of death from childbirth is eleven times greater than the risk of death from abortion up to twenty weeks of pregnancy ... after twenty weeks, the risk is about the same as the risk of death from childbirth." Moreover, more women experience postpartum depression than the fewer-than-10 percent who experience depression from abortion; 90 percent of women report feeling relieved about preventing an unintended pregnancy. The supposedly "feminist" Foster makes the age-old assumption that all women want to be mothers.

As Foster claimed to speak for all women, I couldn't help noticing who she was leaving behind. The majority of the "joy of choosing life" anecdotes applied only to upper-middle-class white women. What about women who don't have the option, like poor minorities? Though she referenced a Hispanic mother of four who had an abortion because she could not feed her kids and died, Foster didn't say how a life with five children to feed would have been the jollier choice.

While Foster spoke of providing women with resources, such as affordable day care and pregnancy-care programs, she graciously left out where this money would be coming from. Does she really think our administration, which is already in massive debt, would dish out dough to mothers? Or that pro-life advocates, the majority of whom are Republicans, would dig deeper into their tax-paying pockets to support welfare? As Ann Crittenden writes in The Price of Motherhood, since its inception in 1936, welfare has "never amounted to more than 5 percent of the GDP. In the memorable phrase of one feminist scholar, mothers could be 'pitied but not entitled.'" Abortion then isn't just about choice; reproductive rights grant women power in an unaccommodating world.

Throughout the evening, Foster played up this distorted version of reality, describing a woman's life as a "parfait ... she can have children, go back into the workplace and so on." If it were that easy, I wonder why NYC public advocate Betsey Gotbaum hosted the "A Better Balance: The Work/Family Dilemma" discussion three weeks ago. Women don't "opt out" of the workforce; they're pushed out because they have children. While Foster can dream about ridding gender discrimination from the workplace, the reality is that employers aren't opening their doors to mothers. When I mentioned this to Foster after the talk, she suggested women "start their own businesses." But even in 1997, when women were starting businesses at twice the rate of men, they received only two percent of the institutional venture capital-a quarter of female entrepreneurs had to take money out of their own pockets. Once again, Foster caters to an upper-middle-class white majority. Though poor minorities can get sponsoring from organizations, most are unaware that these exist and the money is limited. To this Foster replied, "We're working on it."

But how can FFL work together when members within the organization disagree on issues essential to their mission to rid "the root cause of what drives women to abortion"? In Foster's talk of "resources," there was not one mention of sex education or contraception-though she did provide more false statistics on the effectiveness of condoms. When questioned, Foster's nonsensical answer was that it was better for FFL to be divided than "redundant." As Foster quipped, "I talk too much." I couldn't agree more.