The question that divides us is how we ought to respond to reproductive asymmetry: the reality that women carry disproportionate burdens due to our special role in human reproduction. What makes one a feminist is the view that this basic inequality at the heart of reproduction is one that deserves, in justice, an affirmative cultural response. We wish not only for maternity to be celebrated for the true privilege it most certainly is, but also for women to be encouraged and supported in other contributions they make. This requires that the burdens of childbearing ought to be shared not only within the family, but also across the wider society too.
Author: Erika Bachiochi (Erika Bachiochi)
Can Contemporary Feminism Come to Grips with Reality? Four Responses to Abigail Favale
Today at Public Discourse, we are featuring brief responses to Abigail Favale’s essay, "Feminism's Last Battle," by four writers: Erika Bachiochi, Margaret Harper McCarthy, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and Angela Franks.
To Find Your Life’s Mission, Follow Your Questions
What are the small and humble questions that should animate all human lives, that work to reveal to us little by little our unique mission? Questions like these: “Who or what am I responsible for today? How can I use my time well? What ought I do in this situation? How do I treat this person with the love and dignity she deserves?” We find our life’s mission not by seeking after some “castle in the air,” but by fulfilling the very concrete duty of each moment, one moment at a time.
Erika Bachiochi on the Future of Pro-Life Feminism
The question that divides us is how we ought to respond to reproductive asymmetry: the reality that women carry disproportionate burdens due to our special role in human reproduction. What makes one a feminist is the view that this basic inequality at the heart of reproduction is one that deserves, in justice, an affirmative cultural response. We wish not only for maternity to be celebrated for the true privilege it most certainly is, but also for women to be encouraged and supported in other contributions they make. This requires that the burdens of childbearing ought to be shared not only within the family, but also across the wider society too.
What Does Justice Roberts’s Ruling Mean for the Pro-Life Cause?
Pro-lifers have waited nearly a half century for the Court to repudiate its entire ill-founded abortion jurisprudence. The state’s interest is not in protecting some esoteric “potentiality of human life,” but in protecting the lives of actual vulnerable, unique, and utterly dependent human children. More still, women’s liberty is not best described by Casey’s paean to nihilism; rather, properly understood, women’s liberty is not in conflict with their unborn children at all.
Families, Schools, and Churches: The Building Blocks of a Healthy Social Ecology
To create a society in which human beings can flourish, we must support child-raising families, schools that intentionally cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues, and local church communities. The second of a two-part series.
Safeguarding the Conditions for an Authentic Human Ecology
If we are to safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic human ecology we must take far more seriously the care, nurture, and cultivation of children and young people in virtue. The first in a two-part series.
Rendering the Sexed Body Legally Invisible: How Transgender Law Hurts Women
The gross misappropriation of executive power to utterly remake the meaning of very basic legal terms threatens not only the structure of our government. It threatens the rule of law itself. This distortion of legal language is a particular threat to laws concerning women.
Why U.N. Feminists Should Want to Partner with the Holy See
Both sociological evidence and the teachings of Christianity show that religion is a powerful ally for promoting the equality and dignity of women. Adapted from remarks delivered at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
40 Years Later: How to Undo the Autonomy Argument for Abortion Rights
In response to pro-choice appeals to autonomy in support of abortion, we feminists should advocate that parents—both mothers and fathers—have binding duties to their unborn child as the product of their life-giving sexual act.