A panel of scholars from various professions warned during a conference held earlier this month that contraception and abortion are actually "desexing" women.
The Catholic News Agency highlighted via a tweet on Wednesday, Nov. 24, that contraception and abortion are "dangerous compromises" affecting the identity of women, based on author Leah Libresco Sargeant's statement during the "The Dignity of the Sexed Body: Asymmetry, Equality, and Real Reproductive Justice" held at the University of Notre Dame De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture held on Nov. 13.
"[C]ontraception and abortion are the most dangerous compromises that women are asked to make in order to make up for not being as good at being men, as it would be convenient for others if we were," author Leah Libresco Sargeant argues. https://t.co/GGKQE1Gd1O
"” Catholic News Agency (@cnalive) November 23, 2021
Sargeant is one of the members of the panel of the said conference, which happens to be on its 21st year. She is joined by legal scholar Erika Bachiochi and George Fox University College of Humanities Dean and English Professor Abigail Favale.
During the conference, Favale highlighted the dangers of separating the words "woman" from "female" that the LGBT community and its advocates had been doing.
"Defining a woman as an adult human female is considered 'hate speech' by some, and use of the terms 'pregnant woman' or 'breastfeeding' can be labeled discriminatory. Yet 'appropriating the identity of a woman is considered laudatory, liberating, the next frontier of civil rights," Favale said.
"(I)f woman no longer names the billions of persons who are female, how do we speak about them?" she raised.
Favale then identified proofs that failed in defining what a woman is. She cited the definitions of the Australian Academy of Science, of British philosopher Katherine Jenkins, and of the "trans-identified person" Susan Striker. The Australian Academy of Science defines a woman as "anyone who identifies as a woman." While Jenkins defines a woman as one who "experiences the norms that are associated with women in her social context as relevant to her."
Striker, on the other hand, finds the word "woman" as a "useful shorthand for the entanglement of femininity and social status regardless of biology - not as an identity, but as the name for an imagined community that honors the female, enacts the feminine and exceeds the limitations of a sexist society."
However, Favale rebuked all three definitions for it unseats "the dignity of women in a deeply disquieting manner."
"The most stunning aspect of this linguistic insurrection is the unnaming of female humans. To quote Helen Joyce: The quest for the liberation of people with female bodies has arrived at an extraordinary position: that they do not even constitute a group that merits a name," Favale underscored.
Such definitions of woman, Bachiochi disclosed, endangers women physically for it subjects them to compete with men due to the ideologies brought by the feminism agenda into using contraceptives and engaging in abortion as means of empowerment and equality. Bachiochi, who is The Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute and Ethics and Public Policy Center Fellow, pointed to feminism that "demands the affirmative right to engage in the killing of one's own vulnerable and dependent child" and the right to engage in "putatively consequence-free sex just like a man."
"It is the government, then, in seeking to restrict abortion, that would force (a woman in this position) to be a mother. And so equality demands, from this perspective, that women enjoy the right to engage in a life-destroying, child-destroying act," Bachioci said.
Sargeant seconded Bachiochi's statement citing the false thinking of 1993 United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg on equality that has already become structured in today's current society.
"Ruth Bader Ginsberg thought...that women cannot have equal protection under the law, cannot be equal as citizens, without having the ability to pay the entrance price to society, which is the ability to abandon somebody who is vulnerable and depends on you," Sargeant said.
"Abortion is one more example where we say to a woman, 'The problem is that you are a woman. It's your responsibility to find a way for us all not to have to deal with that unpleasant reality, and whatever compromise, whatever sacrifice, whatever suffering you have to cause...worth it because we don't have room for women here,'" she added.
A counter culture approach would address this systematized perception on women and on their identity, which is the recognition of their humanity, vulnerability, dependence, and dignity of love against a masculine autonomy.
