Palin: "Pro-Life...is Pro-Woman"

Happy Birthday Roe v Wade! What better way to celebrate than have to listen to Sarah Palin say "the Pro-Life movement is Pro-Women."

In a recent facebook post, entitled "Marching for a Beautiful Life," Palin makes claims like the one I just mentioned, but also that overturning Roe will actually give women more options, and that CPCs are, in fact "helpful pregnancy resource centers." As interesting, upsetting, maddening, and sometimes hilarious some of her claims are, I would really like to comment on one of her facebook supporters comment, Sharla, who posted the following.

"The ironic thing about the pro-choice movement is that most women don't feel they have a choice. They are pressured into having an abortion by the boyfriend/husband, a parent or a friend. You are right when you say that pro-life is pro-woman!"

Obviously, women never make their own decisions, we must have our boyfriends and husbands do it for us; we are incapable of making a decision about our futures. This woman's claim that women have no agency is the most anti-woman accusation. Furthermore, by accusing the anti-choice movement of actually providing no choices at all is nothing short of ludicrous, which is probably why Palin agreed and posted something similar.

Palin urges us to not buy into the pro-choice rhetoric because, in fact, "the culture of life empowers women by offering them real choices."Apparently, women are offered more opportunities and choices for the future if they 'choose life.' So.....by offering women fewer options, you are in fact offering them more? That makes about as much sense and is about as correct as Palin's explanation of the Bush Doctrine. The reality is that the pro-choice movement gives women 100% control over their bodies; they can choose between life, abortion, adoption but more than that, they can make choices about their future, as a mother, as a student, as a worker.

As so off base as the majority of her post was, Sarah Palin was correct in saying that a woman who chooses life when her situation is less than ideal is strong; it absolutely takes a strong woman to do that. But it takes a strong woman to choose abortion too; pregnancy decisions are not for the weak. By taking the option of abortion away, it is taking away a personal strength that all women are capable of. It is taking away a right to OUR life. It forever implies that we lack agency and are incapable of making the right decision, and so the decision must be made for us.

Similarly, what the anti-choice movement fails to do, is recognize women as individuals rather than one large group that all want the same thing. Each and every one of us have different life experiences, different living situations, different dreams, and different aspirations. To overturn Roe would make the claim that despite all of these differences, all women are the same; all women want to be mothers, all women want the same future.

Losing the right to choose is losing the right and freedom to be a woman, to be an individual, to be a human being. Anti-choice is not pro-woman. Pro-woman means allowing women 100% control over her body, her life, her future. Not her husband or her boyfriend or her baby daddy, not her government, not her church and certainly not Sarah Palin, but her.

So here is to THIRTY SEVEN amazing years of pro-woman, pro-choice Roe v. Wade.

Check out Jezebel's open letter to Sarah Palin in response to her Facebook post!