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Sarah Palin pleased fans and angered foes with her speech to the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, calling herself a "frontier feminist" and saying, "choosing life may not be the easiest path, but it's always the right path . . . God sees a way where we cannot, and He doesn't make mistakes."
Meanwhile, an Arizona nun was "automatically excommunicated" for agreeing with a Catholic hospital's ethics committee's decision to allow an abortion to save a mother's life. "While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child," Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix said in a statement.
Can you be a feminist and oppose abortion in all circumstances? Can you be a person of faith and support abortion in some circumstances?
A woman's sacred right to choose
The core issue, for me for the pro-choice movement, is this: Who gets to decide what goes on inside a woman's body?
Abortion is a moral decision
It is precisely because life and parenthood are so precious that no woman should be coerced to carry a pregnancy to term. That is why many religious leaders support responsible procreation, prenatal care and intentional parenting.
Wicked faith
An aborted female baby is the victim of a false faith or of faithlessness to the truth. A feminism that rejects the rights of unborn woman is a false and wicked faith and discounts at least some women.
Abortion absolutes don't work
How is it that a fetus is more important than the woman who is giving it birth, who might be a mother of other children, or who does not want to die for the sake of honoring church doctrine?
Faith, feminism, and fundamentalism
What was once used in reference to women's rights and efforts toward equality has become an ideological label with increasingly narrow parameters. It has become a form of secular fundamentalism.
Pro-life feminism is the future
Pro-life feminists believe that the best way for a woman to defend her own dignity is to defend the dignity of each and every human person, including the one that grows within her womb. And they reject the false dichotomy of abortion-centric feminism that says respect for human dignity is a zero-sum game in which a woman can win only if her unborn child loses.
Abortion and Islamic thought
Individuals involved in the situation about abortion must be allowed to make their own moral choices. That position is, ultimately, a feminist position -- one that respects women's agency and their ability to make moral decisions. It is also, ultimately, a position that is comfortable within my faith tradition.
Choice and Karma
In the context of abortion, what is important to me is the intent, the motivation, behind the decision. The Hindu scriptures do not take an explicit position on abortion. Our ancient texts show considerable liberalism for women. Constraint, over the centuries, came primarily from the society.
A mother's life comes first
Jewish law says that the pregnant mother's life takes precedence since her soul has already entered the world but once the baby begins to emerge there are two equal souls neither of which can supersede the other.
When Jewish law and Christian doctrine collide
Christian doctrine usually insists upon saving the life of the unborn child, even if that means sacrificing the life of the mother. By contrast, Jewish law argues that the mother's life takes precedence in such cases, since the unborn child represents potential life, while the Mother is alive.
Abortion a product of loose morals
Abortion is a natural outcome of such loose moral values.
A womanist culture of life
When we consider abortion within the context of a culture of life, it is important to understand that a culture of life ought to be a culture of whole life. It is a holistic spiritual morality. It is a culture of care for the lives of women, for children outside of the womb.
A woman's life is a human life
Those who would deny women the right to moral autonomy, the ability to engage in moral reasoning about whether to continue a pregnancy to term or to have an abortion, develop their arguments based on assumptions of women's moral ineptitude.
Palin's feminist right to choose
We are all inconsistent; we all "fall short of the glory of G-d." Sarah Palin is "pro-life" yet supports capital punishment, blowing the dickens out of our "enemies," and sending any human being that G-d didn't create with a U.S. passport packing back to their g-dawful situation. What's so "pro-life" about that?
Palin: a Pat Robertson feminist
Palin calls herself a "frontier feminist," but she sounds more like a "Pat Robertson feminist." The two of them are guided solely by their unshakeable certainty about what God wants. The good news, in this regard, is an equality of the sexes; the bad news is that both sexes can be sadly and dangerously mistaken.
Faith, feminism and abortion: an individual's business, period
The issue here is not the morality of abortion. As it happens, I agree with the religious right that abortion is a moral issue. I simply do not agree that one faction's wickedly rigid definition of immorality should be translated into illegality.
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cecil4: The Questions:
Can you be a feminist and oppose abortion in all circumstances? Can you be a person of faith and support abortion in some ci...
timmy2: The question of when life begins is a complicated one. Therefore the question of wether or not to have an abortion is a complicated one. But...
PSolus: "The abortion issue keeps coming up. It is a legitimate issue because a group of people have to make decisions..."
Wrong - only one person ...
