Children, Not Choices?

Oh, Phyllis Schlafly.

Writing at The Moral Liberal, she tells us how she really feels about family and children:

"The trouble with many younger women is that they’ve been falsely taught by feminism to plan their life career in the workplace without any space or time for marriage, husband or children. They have a total lack of understanding of how demanding a new baby is, and also of the way their own attitudes can change in regard to how they really want to spend their time after a baby arrives.

When Mother Nature asserts herself and babies appear, the women who have been misled by feminist ideology expect their employers and, indeed, the rest of the world, to accommodate their change of schedule. The feminists expect their employer to assume the costs of the priorities and the interruptions that once were easily absorbed in the traditional lifestyle of husband-provider and fulltime homemaker."

In the context of abortion debates, many anti-choicers refer to fetuses as "children not choices," "babies," and (my personal fave) "our littlest Americans." In the context of helping parents care for the fetuses that have actually been born, notice how Schlafly now frames babies as a woman's "change of schedule" and a woman's "priorities and...interruptions."

Similar to how some people entirely eradicate the pregnant person's perspective in their Very Important Conversations about whether abortion should be legal, notice how Schlafly entirely eradicates the father's responsibility to make similar work-life choices that a woman is expected to make. When it is a given that the female parent is the Real or Primary Parent, Schlafly's position seems to assume that the father didn't make a conscious choice to become a parent or engage in behavior knowing that a child might result. Indeed, according to Schlafly, "Mother Nature assert[ed] herself and babies appear[ed]."

Phyllis Schlafly's advocacy serves as a constant reminder of the extreme anti-choice position:

Other people get to be all up in a woman's business when it's her body on the line and the contents of her uterus at issue. But once the fetus leaves a woman's body, you're on your own, girl.