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

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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

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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