The requirement to have an abortion to make it as an actress may not be explicit, but that doesn’t make it any less real – the stories of Milano, Jamil and Williams demonstrate as much. Hollywood is one of those industries where motherhood and pregnancy are poison to a woman’s career. The studios have ingeniously managed to hide their exploitation of women under the very mantle of women’s rights.
“Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2800 times a day? If women doing something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not liberation we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression.”
Ever wondered exactly how crisis pregnancy centres help women? Or what volunteers do? Check out this interview with Eve Tushnet to find out!
This is one example of what an intellectually honest defence of abortion looks like – and the problems it runs into.
Some of feminism’s most strident and influential voices have, reluctantly at times, admitted that abortion is not consistent with a truly feminist ideology. In 1976, for example, the American poet and radical feminist Adrienne Rich wrote, ‘No free woman, with 100 percent effective, non-harmful birth control readily available, would “choose” abortion … Abortion is violence: a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself’
‘We are a diverse group of students in Trinity College, Dublin, who believe in the equal right to life of mother and unborn child at all stages of
pregnancy, and support the protection and vindication of this right through the maintenance of Article 40.3.3º of the Irish Constitution. We are opposed to efforts to remove this protection from the Constitution, and believe that the protection afforded by Article 40.3.3º is best for women, children and Irish society as a whole.
