Lila Rose, the anti-abortion activist best known for her role in an attempted anti-Planned Parenthood sting operation, is one of what she claims are a "growing number" of anti-choice women who also identify as feminists. And like most anti-abortion, anti-birth control advocates, her argument boils down to a very strong aversion to sluts.


In a piece for Politico, Rose claims that she's penned the manifesto of the anti-choice feminist, a modern woman who both demands equality yet refuses to participate in what she sees as the pornification of culture, which would be totally fine if she weren't so hell-bent on forcing every woman to agree with her. Her quest to make a case for being pro-women but anti-letting-women-decide-what-to-do-with-their-bodies quickly descends into self-contradictory fiction, a scary bedtime story warning about all the ways in which sex — and by extension, sluts — ruin everything.

She writes,

We are women who believe that something precious is lost when fertility is intentionally excluded from marriage, a sacred bond and a total giving of each spouse to the other.


In other words, she's a woman who believe that women who have sex outside of marriage and have sex without children inside of marriage (sluts) are depriving themselves of the best possible lives for themselves and thus the law should require women to behave exactly like how Lila Rose behaves. For their own good.

Sluts and their irrational demands to be free from the God-prescribed consequence of sex (pregnancy/babies) are also ruining religion. Rose writes,

the threat to religious liberty posed by the Obama administration's mandate that religious employers underwrite their employees' abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives and sterilization procedures.

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Sorry, Lila, but that strawman argument is not true no matter how many times you repeat it. Abortion-inducing drugs are not and never were to be covered as preventative care under the Affordable Care Act's Preventative Care Mandate. Emergency contraception is, but that's because it's contraception, not abortion.

Rose insists that there's a growing tide of anti-sluts pruding up the joint, and that they're going to Make Thing Happen in America.

And there is a growing group of passionate young women who are transforming what it means to be a woman. Allow me to introduce them to you. We are women who reject both the anti-male feminism of the 1960s and the "girls gone wild" mentality that's pervasive today.


It's true; the women's studies courses I took in college were pretty much like spring break all the time. Just mention the name Susan Faludi or Ariel Levy around a young feminist and watch the tits fly out.

She goes on,

We are depicted as statistical outliers, modern-day counterculturalists. But our numbers are rising.


While anti-choice feminists may be getting more obnoxious, their numbers are far from "rising" in any way that looks to be electorally significant. A USA/Gallop poll released yesterday showed that, in fact, President Obama is currently enjoying his first significant swing state lead of the 2012 election season, thanks to a dramatic exodus of women from the conservative side. The story of the 2012 election is women deciding that they actually kinda like being in control of their bodies and choosing to support candidates that agree with them.

And then the fiction ends and the contradiction starts. She writes,

And we are women who love everything about being a woman, including being mothers. We have noticed that the rise in the availability and use of cheap birth control coincided with increases in the rates of sex addiction, divorce, unmarried childbearing and abortion.


and later adds,

Studies show pregnancy, birth and abortion rates among young women have decreased lately.


So, is abortion on the rise, or is it decreasing? And is the increased availability of birth control causing more abortions, or is it to be thanked for the recent reduction in abortions that Rose cites? How can these two mutually exclusive statements be simultaneously true?! Way to go, sluts. You broke Lila Rose.

Regardless of what Lila Rose says, reducing women to what goes into and comes out of their vaginas is the opposite of pro-women advocacy. And encouraging the government to dictate what all women must do is the opposite of freedom. As Rose states in her confusing, meandering piece, women are not a monolith. As such, saying that what's best for all women is either motherhood or abstinence is either naive or willfully misleading.


The cry of the anti-abortion feminist [Politico]