Erika Bachiochi

As parents have responsibilities to care for, nurture, and educate their children, a just and humane economy and politics ought to help parents carry out those duties of care.

Constitutional protection of unborn children as equal “persons” under the law remains the movement’s ultimate — if elusive — goal.

As pro-life advocates and legislators consider how they ought to proceed in the post-Roe era, they should heed the wisdom of the early feminists who, as champions of both women and their dependent children, understood the power – and limits – of the law to effect real change.

Weil desired not only to understand the sufferings of the dispossessed but to suffer alongside them.

In Roe’s absence, concerns about women’s economic welfare would have to be addressed as they should: by ending poverty, not unborn lives.

If Roe goes, the pro-life movement can begin where it left off in 1973, working to convince fellow citizens (especially in blue states like mine) that we owe dependent and vulnerable unborn children what every human being is due: hospitality, respect and care.

At the heart of Erika Bachiochi’s The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision is the assertion that human beings are not defined by autonomy but rather by relations of dependency and obligation.

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey hang by the thin thread of “reliance.” Chip away at Casey’s assertion that women rely on abortion for their participation in economic and social life, and there is not much left of the cases that have distorted constitutional interpretation and held U.S. politics hostage for nearly 50 years.

If the “gender revolution” has stalled—elevating women in the workplace without a concomitant elevation for the work mothers and fathers do in the home—constitutionalizing the right to abortion shares a good deal of the blame.

In this excerpt adapted from her book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, EPPC Fellow Erika Bachiochi writes about women’s early joint property rights claims and the value of the work of the home, tracing Mary Wollstonecraft’s argument that such work affords the character development men, women, and children need for true success in the public sphere, which provides a renewed rationale for family policy today.

The time has come instead to discard the male-normative theories of equality on which the putative right to abortion is constructed today. Instead, let’s make room, as earlier generations of women’s rights advocates did, for vulnerable and dependent children, and for the women—and men—responsible for their care.

Women and men ought to enjoy political rights by virtue of their common human nature, but such rights are not individualistic means for self-actualization.