Meet the Pro-Life Millennials
These young feminist women are taking a different kind of stand.
From left: Secular pro-lifers Aimee Murphy, Rosemary Geraghty, and Kelsey Hazzard
by LORENA O'NEIL
Feb 23, 2017
Without basic rights, women can't be free," Rosemary Geraghty yells into a megaphone. "Abortion is a tool of the patriarchy!" She surveys the crowd marching down Constitution Avenue in Washington D.C. and shouts her slogan again. Her short hair is dyed blue and purple. An anti-Trump pin adorns her jacket, a button proclaiming "this is what a pro-life feminist looks like" above it.
It's the second time in a week that Geraghty, 20, has marched against the grain. On January 21, she brought her pro-life views to the Women's March on Washington while protesting President Donald Trump's "disturbing disregard for the inherent dignity of women and certain minority groups." Today, she's an atheist among the religious, speaking out against abortion at the March for Life, an anti-choice rally held in D.C. each year for the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. As Geraghty puts it, she marches "for equal rights for every human being, born and pre-born."
The University of Pittsburgh junior is a member of the secular anti-abortion movement, a small but growing group of mostly young adults who place abortion in the realm of human rights, not theology. And while 61% of American Millennials believe abortion should be legal, young secular pro-lifers are gaining steam in communities online and around the country. The nonprofit where Geraghty serves as social media coordinator, Life Matters Journal, has grown its Facebook following by 27 percent in the last month, and other groups like it have made similar gains. Of Students for Life of America's 1,100 college campus chapters, 115 of them sprung up in the last few months of 2016 alone.
The heightened agita of the current political climate might play a role in that growth among young people. So might the appeal of a newer, non-religious voice in the abortion debate (35 percent of adult Millennials don't identify with a religion). And then there's the pushback from mainstream feminists, who are overwhelmingly pro-choice and many of whom advocate that all feminists should be. Their rejection of secular anti-abortionists seems to have drawn more attention to the pro-life cause: Days before Geraghty attended the Women's March on Washington, secular pro-life group New Wave Feminists was removed from the march's partnership list—and their membership spiked by almost 10,000 as a result.
http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a25265/feminist-pro-life-millennials/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Kinda what I was saying...I guess sometimes it helps to put an idea into several formats.
