Planned Parenthood Director Cecile Richards made a list of things women need for Valentine's Day. Among them was this:
And I don't even really want to talk about the babies here. I want to talk about what this does to women, because I have three beautiful, smart, independent little girls and I want them to grow up knowing the truth about their bodies and their choices.
Their bodies are beautiful, and amazing, and miraculous. They are strong. They are powerful. Their bodies can climb mountains and play football and swim oceans and run Fortune 500 companies and rock tiny babies to sleep at night. Their bodies are sacred.
But their worth has nothing to do with their ability to do any of these things. That's something they won't be taught in school - there they'll be tested, held up against their friends to see who's smarter, faster, prettier. Their worth will be determined by what they do. And I don't want them to learn that message, because it's simply not true. Their worth comes from God, and is embodied in the simple fact of their existence.
Everywhere young women turn these days, they are told that they need to be smarter, stronger, sexier, tougher. That being "equal" and "modern" means denying the very gift of their femininity - and that embracing the life-giving potential of being a woman is a choice born of oppression by a male hierarchy.
I call bullshit. For women to be truly valued equally, they need to stop subjugating their bodies. They cannot expect respect from men and from their fellow women as long as they continue to take pills and have procedures that deny the femininity of their bodies. Newsflash: sex makes babies, people. Not every time, and not for every woman, but that's the point of the act. When you decide to remove the natural consequences from sex and treat them like a punishment, you're dehumanizing women. When sex becomes solely a way to have fun or a way to "build a relationship," you're creating a culture of transience. When women treat the creative potential of their bodies as something to be feared and avoided, they're subjugating themselves. And when women suppress the way their bodies work, when they minimize the consequences of sex, when that act becomes purely about pleasure - then women are not creating a culture where they require respect from men, either.
I know my girls will hear all these things. It's not my job to shelter them from that - I couldn't if I tried. But I can work to instill in them a strong sense of themselves and their worth so that when they go out into the world - whether that's as adults or in college or heading off to public school at some point - they can think critically about the assertion that they need birth control in order to be valued equally to a man.
I've heard women say "my body, my choice." And that's true. Women need to own their bodies and all that they can do; that's a basic premise of women's liberty and equality. But I want my girls to know the very simple fact that at conception there is their amazing wonderful body, with its right to live and love and be loved and choose - and there is another amazing beautiful body, a tiny one, with those same rights. The fact that it resides, temporarily, inside it's mother's body does not strip it of those rights.
What women need is to realize that they are perfect and beautiful - just the way God made them. What women need is to start demanding commitment and respect from the men in their lives. What women need is to realize that being a mother is a gift, always - even when it is an unplanned gift, or a gift that requires a change of plans. What women need is to be supported by other women through pregnancy and childrearing. What women need is to respect the awesome power of their bodies and that an act that creates life is a gift and a grave responsibility.
And I realize that everything I've just written probably sounds off-the-wall, or crazy, or backwards to many people. But our faith - and our country, too! - resides on the belief that every body, large or small, possesses inalienable rights endowed upon it by its Creator. Those rights aren't contingent upon anything but mere existence. And that existence is beautiful, just as it is. I will teach my girls that it is important to be educated and independent and strong. But at the same time, I will teach them that changing who they are - whether that's through weight loss pills or birth control pills, abortion or plastic surgery - is not being independent or strong, it's internalizing the message that in order to be beautiful and successful, women can't be women.
