The Moral Blind Spot in Gloria Steinem’s Feminism

The revered American feminist Gloria Steinem died on 2 September at the age of 92. Steinem was among the most prominent second-wave feminists, and in recognition of her decades of public advocacy, Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.

As the obituaries and tributes are published, it becomes increasingly clear that Steinem’s most celebrated – and perhaps most disastrous – contribution to American culture was her support for abortion under the guise of women’s liberation and reproductive freedom, which reflects her distorted views of agency, moral responsibility and human dignity.

The Decision Behind the Doctrine

A defining moment in Steinem's life was when she underwent an illegal abortion in London in 1957 at age 22. She dedicated her 2015 memoir to John Sharpe, who referred her for the procedure and took a professional risk in doing so. “You must promise me two things”, Steinem recalled him saying. “First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.” Steinem explained in her book that she had “done the best [she] could with [her] life”.

Gloria Steinem receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama at the White House on 20 November 2013. Photo: Leigh Vogel/WireImage

The dedication in her memoir has been cited recently as if it is a case study in why expansive abortion access is crucially important, the implication being that Steinem might never have become an influential public figure – and by extension, would never have facilitated the policy developments that feminists value today – if she had carried the pregnancy to term.

Freedom Without Accountability

Steinem again expressed this theme in a 2008 interview with the New York Times, which was only recently shared with the public: “I feel deeply that my decision to have an abortion was an ethical and moral decision because it was, for me, the first time in my life I refused to be passive and I took responsibility for my own life.”

Notably, she did not describe that pregnancy as the result of abuse or coercion, which suggests it instead resulted from consensual sex. And that conclusion prompts us to reconsider the legitimacy of framing an abortion itself as an act of “responsibility”.

Undergoing an abortion – particularly when it is not medically necessary to save the life of the mother – is an attempt to eliminate the predictable outcome of sex and ultimately results in the death of an innocent human being. Truly responsible behavior, by contrast, would be to approach intimacy more judiciously and refrain from intercourse during fertile windows if pregnancy is an outcome that the woman is not prepared to welcome.

From Individual Act to Social Norm

Steinem’s activism engendered a culture where an unplanned pregnancy is deemed an obstacle to be managed rather than a vulnerable life to be protected. Unfortunately, Steinem and her intellectual descendants supported enhanced bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom while rejecting the notion that women should be considered responsible for their decisions.

While feminists who aggressively defend abortions often vaguely gesture toward the idea of women making decisions about their own bodies, they very rarely – if ever – encourage women to practice more discipline in their intimate lives, which would prevent unwanted pregnancies and therefore preclude the supposed need for an expansive abortion industry.

The activists sometimes frame abortion access as a fight against intrusive government power that compels women to birth children, yet they are failing to remember that the government did not force women to become pregnant.

The Other Life in the Equation

But most crucially, feminists like Steinem who characterize an abortion as a woman’s private decision about her own body are attempting to deny the obvious fact that an abortion necessarily involves two people, the mother and her child. Accordingly, the deadly procedure cannot be simply reduced to a matter of a woman’s private healthcare decision.

In fact, an abortion should not be considered healthcare because it subverts the very purpose of medicine by turning healers into killers.

Many of the reflections on Steinem’s life that will be published in the near future will hail her as a pioneer for women’s rights without acknowledging that the implementation of her ideas and popularization of her rhetoric had a great human cost.

But as we continue to read articles about Steinem’s colorful life, we should remember that the flowery and misleading slogans about autonomy and choice aim to obscure the real aim of the feminist movement, specifically the liberation of women from the consequences of their decisions.