First Feminists were Pro-Life
This is an excerpt from Women
Who Make the World Worse by Kate O’Beirne.
Today's feminists attempt to ennoble
their demands by wrapping themselves in the suffragettes' principled
campaign for the right to vote. They argue that you can't be
pro-women without being pro-choice. But the radical abortion
views of today's feminists like Kate Michelman, Faye Wattleton,
Gloria Steinem, Gloria Feldt and Eleanor Smeal betray the staunchly
pro-life views of America's earliest feminists. In fact, those
pioneering activists were uniformly opposed to abortion.
Alice Paul founded the National
Women's Party in 1915 and authored the Equal Rights Amendment.
Her fight for the franchise was depicted in the HBO movie Iron
Jawed Angels, with Hilary Swank portraying her defiance
after being arrested at a protest outside the White House in
1917. Paul believed, "Abortion is the ultimate exploitation
of women." There was no disagreement among her fellow suffragettes.
The Revolution, a women's
paper published by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
referred to abortion as "child murder" and "infanticide."
In 1869, the weekly declared, "No matter what the motive,
love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn
innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed.
It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul
in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation
which impelled her to the crime." In a letter to Julia
Ward Howe in 1873, Stanton wrote, "When we consider that
women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that
we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as
we see fit." These committed women put their money where
their pens were by refusing ads for abortifacients.
The modern-day successors to Anthony
and Stanton are Feminists
for Life, an organization determined to reclaim the legacy
of America's earliest women's-rights activists, but "Debunking
the myth that 19th century women's rights supported abortion
is a constant challenge, especially for historians faced with
prejudice and political correctness."
These pro-life women celebrate
the early feminists' delight in motherhood.
Kate O’Beirne
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/kob/obeirne200601230842.asp
--
When Society Celebrates Suicide
"Assisted suicide" is
both oxymoron and euphemism. Suicide is an intensely personal,
individual and solitary act. The "assistant" does
not put his life at stake. It more accurately ought
to be called "state-sanctioned murder." That's where
last week's Supreme Court decision puts it (stripped of euphemism).
Just as there are doctors who won't
perform abortions, there are doctors who won't "assist"
in suicide. The Supreme Court majority said, with a certain
delicacy, their decision was "a very narrow one" based
on the right of Oregon to decide that doctors may write prescriptions
for lethal pills for patients reckoned to be dying, and the
federal government cannot deprive such "assistants"
from writing prescriptions under the Controlled Substances Act.
The dissenters — Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices
Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — said such lethal "medicine"
in their view does not serve a "legitimate medical purpose."
The narrow technicality of the
decision, however, does not go to the authentic heart(less)
issue. The morality of care for the sick and aging in our society
bears witness to how we see ourselves and the world we want
our children to inhabit. How we answer this question tells us
more about how we live than how we die, and tells us, literally,
who cares.
Suzanne Fields
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/suzannefields
/2006/01/23/183355.html
--
The Real Pocahontas Story
Whenever history is adapted for
film, there are certain elements that are unknowable.
We may know what Lincoln revealed in his correspondence, but
we don’t know what he said in conversations or what feelings
he may have found too personal to record on paper. Therefore,
filmmakers invent and interpret as they see fit to create a
story. When they are in doubt, it is fashionable for them
to assume the worst of any traditional American hero and any
traditional American religion.
In this regard, writer/director
Terrence Malick’s latest release, The New World, is
nothing if not fashionable.
The film retells the tale of Pocahontas,
the Indian princess who as legend has it, saved John Smith from
being murdered and as history has it, converted to Christianity
and married tobacco farmer John Rolfe. Because Pocahontas was
not disposed to diary-keeping or letter-writing, almost everything
we know about her comes from her actions and other people’s
descriptions of her.
We know, for example, that she
was the daughter of a Powhatan Indian chief. We know that she
warned John Smith and the Jamestown settlers of her tribe’s
plans to attack their fort. We know that later in her life,
she willingly converted to Christianity and then willingly wed
an Englishman.
What we cannot know is how she
felt, within the quiet of her mind, about these decisions. But
since never was she coerced, it seems reasonable to assume that
she was genuinely enamored by the English and genuinely dedicated
to her Christian faith.
Unfortunately, this kind of reasoning
isn’t too popular in the movie industry today, and that’s where
a little creative revisionism comes in…
Fifteen-year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher,
who plays Pocahontas, interprets (we can assume at Malick’s
direction) her character’s embrace of all things Anglo as yet
another imposition of our darn Western culture. Describing her
feelings at her character’s becoming more English, Kilcher reveals,
“[I] felt like a caged bird, like freedom was torn away from
[me].”
She holds similar suspicions (we
can assume, again, at the direction of Malick — the girl is
15, after all) over Pocahontas’ change of religion:
“When Pocahontas was converted
to Christianity and she lives with English it was kind of sad
for me [sic]… It was kind of an instinct for survival, and it
was sad… She was trying to forget who she was in a way and she
left her entire life that she knew before behind…”
Why, if it made her happy (and afforded her countless new luxuries
to boot), should Pocahontas’ second life be cause for sorrow,
Kilcher didn’t say.
Producer Sarah Green echoes by
more diplomatic means Kilcher’s contention that Pocahontas’
conversion was more pragmatic tragedy than heartfelt acceptance
of redemption. Asked why, after her profession of faith and
baptism, the film still shows Pocahontas praying to native spirits,
Green replies, “We didn’t have time to go into her choice to
convert but I imagine that she melded those two [her native
religion and Christianity].
It’s a strange defense for a movie
that spends a good 40 minutes focused on waving grass and watery
sunsets to claim there wasn’t enough time to explore documented
background about its central character. Perhaps it was a marketing
decision, since a noble savage clad in buckskin is much more
likely to draw that lucrative teen male demographic than a Christian
lady in starched collars.
Megan Basham
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/books_entertainment/be_columns
/MeganBasham/2006/01/20/183228.html
