, 5 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
If this were definitionally the case you would expect the spread of mild pro-life legislation and the steep fall of the abortion rate since the 1980s to produce declines in female education, workforce participation, etc. They do not.
You would also expect developed-world countries that kept pro-life laws on the books long after Roe, like Ireland and Chile, to show dramatic impediments to female educational + economic advancement relative to countries that fully legalized. They do not.
There is without question a link between pro-life views and support for traditional gender roles. However pro-life views on gender roles have become substantially more liberal since the 1970s without altering the movement's overall resilience:
jstor.org/stable/2321200…
The assumption that it is impossible to have female advancement *and* legal protections for the unborn is best understood as contingent artifact of a particular correlation of forces in cultural history, not some iron law that requires abortions as the price of liberty.
Feminism poses a strong challenge to culturally-conservative habits ingrained in or intertwined with pro-life thinking. But there are ways to meet that challenge that don't require accepting the current status quo as the only way to secure the equality of the sexes.
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