After forty years of protest and debate, we all know one thing for certain about abortion: it’s a women’s issue, right?
Wrong, says Brian Fisher in his groundbreaking book
Abortion: The Ultimate Exploitation of Women
. In it he reveals long-forgotten or never-known facts to show that abortion is very much a man’s concern—and it’s part of a long and tragic pattern of men oppressing women. Which is why the original author of the Equal Rights Amendment, feminist Alice Paul, called abortion the “ultimate exploitation of women.”
Fisher shows that a select group of compassionate men led the way in the nineteenth century to pass laws strengthening the criminalization of abortion—and worked with feminists of that era to do so. But it was men, not women, who drove the campaign that led to the 1973 Supreme Court ruling giving women an unqualified right to end the lives of their unborn children.
So what’s in it for men? As feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon observes, abortion “does not liberate women; it frees male sexual aggression.” Abortion is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for men with non-committal sex lives. Another agenda is at work as well. Men use abortion to advance their racist, eugenic, and population control dreams and schemes, as Fisher shows, citing their own words.
If men gave us abortion, men can end it as well. Fisher outlines why and how, and he urges men to take up the task with courageous women. He lays out a five-point plan for men to “with humility, faithfulness, and relentless perseverance, commit our time, resources, energy, heart, and testimony to ending abortion in America for the sake of women, men, and the family.”