The Abolition of Woman

How Radical Feminism Is Betraying Women

By Fiorella Nash

Ignatius Press, 2018

234 pages, $17.95

To order: ignatius.com or (800) 651-1531

 

She exposes the paradox of pro-abortion feminists, whom she first encountered among staff in a Catholic convent’s school in England. She found them to be petty and self-pitying and ultimately at odds with pro-life feminists, who elevate women in their entirety without treating the miracle of new life as a hostile takeover.

Nash presents the dichotomy of being pro-abortion and a feminist by showing how that combination undermines women and “paralyzes any significant resistance to injustices facing women that involve abortion.”

For the sake of this review, pro-abortion feminists are referred to as “feminists,” since it’s a title they claim as their exclusive right despite being contrary to the dignity of true feminism.

 

Bullying Behavior

Women are bullied and vilified if they don’t toe the liberal line, according to Nash, thereby going against the notion that women have a right to freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. She points to examples such as the hateful behavior shown to post-abortive women, which is virtually identical to the way abusers treat their victims, blaming and ridiculing them.

Researchers with evidence of the abortion/breast cancer link meet with personal attacks, which have no place in an honest scientific discourse. Although the reputable The British Medical Journal found a link, the radical feminist PR machine discredited that comprehensive study and others.

The abortion machine is very adept at shutting people up. For instance, David Daleiden’s undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood illegally selling aborted baby parts were met with a smear campaign against him as a fraud while claiming those involved were innocent victims.

“In a Kafkaesque turn of events, the same court that acquitted Planned Parenthood of selling baby parts charged Daleiden with attempting to buy them, a charge that surely only holds water if there were a seller involved,” Nash writes.

Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee, was taken to court in a failed attempt to silence her after she became pro-life, too.

 

Apathy Toward Victims

Radical feminists are not shy about speaking out, yet Nash notes that there hasn’t been a peep about China’s policy of forced sterilization and abortion of women.

When women are hurt or die as a result of deplorable, unregulated abortion facilities, feminists ignore the facts and cover up the crimes. Why weren’t they outraged over the filthy and unsafe conditions at places like Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s unregulated house of horrors?

As Nash writes: “The appalling treatment of a woman by an abortion facility should have been met with vocal condemnation by women’s groups, but instead it was met with the silence of collusion.”

Gendercide is ignored, too, she reports. Due to sex-selective abortion, an estimated 25 million women are missing in India, and in China, there are 40 million more men than women.

“According to the U.N. Population Fund, in Armenia, the sex ratio for a first and second child is more or less normal; the sex ratio for a third child is 175 [boys]:100 girls,”  Nash noted.

It’s happening in developed countries, too. She referred to studies such as in England, where abortion among some immigrant groups led to a reduction of as many as 4,700 females from the 2011 national census records of England and Wales. In addition to the numbers, The Daily Telegraph carried out an investigation in 2012 and secretly filmed doctors at British clinics agreeing to sex-selective abortions, even though it is illegal there.

And yet there is no outcry among the feminists, Nash notes.

She questioned why so much Western money is used to stop pregnancies in some countries rather than toward caring for pregnant women, who often suffer high mortality rates due to inadequate health care. In Ireland, the mortality rate is 8 deaths per 100,000 live births. In Sierra Leone, it’s 1,360 deaths per 100,000 live births. “In cultures around the world, the mother is the invisible, irreplaceable lynchpin of the family; and if she goes, the entire family is shattered,” Nash writes.

Neither is help offered to girls and abused women who show up under duress for abortions, she explains.

In the case of one trafficked woman, according to Nash, the abortion doctor also paid her pimp for her sexual services. In the U.S. study “Health Consequences of Sex Trafficking,” more than half of the women surveyed said they had been forced to have abortions.

Feminists treat prostitution as a choice, Nash contends: “They ignore that the industry is exploitive and dangerous, rendering women vulnerable to injury, disease and violent death.” Amnesty International has promoted accepting prostitution as a legitimate job choice, although an “imperfect” one.

“Imperfect is one way of describing a trade built on physical abuse, rape, child sex abuse, sadism and greed,” Nash writes.

 

Childish Arguments

Nash describes the “my body, my choice” argument as childish. To counter the feminists’ claim of absolute sovereignty over their bodies, Nash refers to John Stuart Mills’ essay “On Liberty.” He explained that having sovereignty over one’s own body is not a right to do anything without regard to others. Simply put, harming another is not a human right.

Abortion advocates hate ultrasounds and treat them as a pro-life conspiracy, Nash says. “It is difficult to defend why women should be protected from the reality of their own choices in the name of empowerment.”

With advances in science and 4-D images inside the womb that highlight the dignity of the tiniest human lives, pro-abortion women have to harden their hearts further to reject little lives.

“This is not the language of feminism, nor is it in any sense the language of social justice,” Nash writes. “The argument that the vulnerable should be sacrificed as an act of undeniable violence for the sake of maintaining control is misogynist, not feminine or feminist in any sense of the word.”

At the end of her book, Nash challenges two pro-abortion authors by dissecting their books, revealing the shallowness and illogic of their best arguments.

In its entirety, The Abolition of Woman is not merely an attack on anti-abortion feminism; it offers intellectual support for women who desire equality without going against their own consciences. Because “pro-life feminism should be a powerful movement at the forefront of the battle to defend the youngest and most vulnerable lives,” she writes. “The alternative is the abolition of woman.”

Patti Armstrong writes

from North Dakota.