The issue of abortion is not a mere legal issue as they would have us believe. We are facing an anthropological question and deeply contrary to feminism, understood as a movement in defense of women.
Accepting abortion, regardless of the gestation period, the situation of the mother and the health of the fetus, is to accept irreversible damage to those who experience it, an inescapable fracture in the heart of femininity, which never leaves any woman who has suffered it indifferently, as scientists of different tendencies and ideologies have expressed.
The consequences of abortion are never psychologically neutral, it generates a feeling of unconscious guilt that is a true delayed-effect psychic bomb. In this regard, says Dr. Aldo Naouri: «I can attest that I have never found a woman who has undergone an abortion, whatever the circumstances or its justification, who does not keep a deep and indelible mark.» Abortion has nothing to do with reproductive health, but with psychological health, which is affected for life.
No one warned us that women’s liberation would mean our own destruction. But feminism has never dealt with motherhood. The tyranny of procreation, so advocated since the 1970s, has made us believe that children are a burden, a burden, a disease, an obstacle to our personal fulfillment, a problem that we must solve. And we must do it alone. Loneliness is the worst enemy of motherhood. It is no coincidence that RedMadre’s motto is: “You will never be alone”. Nor is it true that eight out of ten women who come to this institution do not end up having an abortion, because there they find recognition, company, appreciation, understanding and, above all, dignity.
The most obscene thing is that women who are subjected to the physical and mental torture of abortion are made to believe that they have been the object of some kind of privilege. The fact that women are forced to have an abortion due to multiple circumstances —social pressure, legal permissiveness, fear, abuse, lack of economic resources…— is undoubtedly a failure of feminism and equality. There is no equality for women who are going to be mothers, whose social value seems to be less than that of those who choose to renounce motherhood as if it were something intrinsically progressive. Offering, urging, putting pressure on women to bring death into the world, when by nature it is oriented in a special way towards life, is physical and psychological violence against women.
Women are made, but we are also born. We are made of culture, but despite Beauvoir’s admirers, we are also made of nature. And this she has designed us to bring life to the world, whether we do it in action or not, whether we materialize it or not, we have an indelible maternal psychological imprint; that potentiality is implicit in each of the cells of our body. And it is a magnificent power, the ability to transform the earth. As Recalcati affirms, «the miracle of the generation of a new life is the transformation of the face of the world without return.» Every time a new being is born, the world is never the same again, it progresses, advances, renews itself, we have the opportunity to start from scratch and make this a better place.
But, furthermore, favoring abortion is clumsy from a practical, strategic or even social engineering point of view, at a time when our countries are dying of old age without a generational replacement. We need children. But society also needs mothers, because the woman who has experienced motherhood also experiences a change in her brain neurochemistry that provides her with a series of essential and highly valuable skills in the workplace, professional and social spheres: the ability to combine tasks and thoughts, discernment between what is important and what is urgent, almost unlimited patience, empathy, communication, understanding, peaceful conflict resolution, creativity in the face of unexpected situations: humanity. The woman who has been a mother is freed from all traces of mediocrity and becomes exceptional.