Hugo Schwyzer has an interesting and thoughtful piece about John Roberts and his wife Jane. He notes that Jane Sullivan Roberts is an accomplished professional and that the Roberts’s life choices do not quite fit the religious-winger nutcase stereotype (she has her own career; they married late; they did not insist on a huge Catholic no-birth-control flock of kids; she calls herself a feminist):

A man who marries a brilliant woman who is his intellectual equal when both are in their forties, and happily adopts children with her, is no troglodyte. And a man married to a woman who is a proud member of a group that has Feminist in its title may not be the disaster for women’s rights that some liberals are predicting, nor the champion for the right that some conservatives are hoping.

He has a good point there, but he sells it too hard.

The “proud feminist group” he refers to is Feminists for Life. Schwyzer goes to some lengths to paint it as a mainstream feminist group with a “consistent life ethic” - they link anti-choice positions with anti-war, anti-death-penalty, spousal abuse, and other “life” issues. He claims:

as a pro-feminist man, I know full well that Feminists for Life is a long way away from more traditional anti-abortion outfits like National Right to Life. Though I’ve criticised FFL in the past for being insufficiently concerned with issues other than abortion, there’s no question that they’ve historically taken a more progressive stance than their conservative sisters on a variety of issues.

A look at their Web site, however, paints a different picture. They are slicker and hipper than most of their “conservative sisters” (Hugo: if you’re anti-choice, you’re conservative), but otherwise little different from the anti-choice run of the mill.

• They peddle the “post-abortion trauma” myth with language like “women who mourn”, “women who are experiencing the aftermath of abortion”, and “the personal tragedy of abortion”, and include links to literature from “post-abortion” dramatizers like Rachel’s Vineyard and Silent No More/Priests for Life.
• They peddle the repeatedly-debunked abortion/breast-cancer “connection”.
• They apparently support male veto over women’s abortion rights, linking a 1996 call for a male plaintiff to legally challenge a woman’s right to make her own choice about abortion, and including “fathers’ rights” in their list of “feminist topics”.
• They support mandated anti-choice “counseling” (calling it a “woman’s right to know”) prior to abortion.
• They exploit the names of women who have died during abortion procedures to exaggerate the apparent risk of the procedure (after something like 40,000,000 legal abortions since Roe, they have identified 14 women who died, and posted their names and medical histories on their Web site).

As for their vaunted dedication to women’s issues other than abortion, that seems to be a highly distorted, in cases even fraudulent, act of principle. In a large Web site devoted almost entirely to anti-choice propaganda, there is a single link to “topics that Feminists for Life deals with when it talks about being a Feminist and being Pro-Life” that includes non-abortion issues such as violence against women, euthanasia, child abuse, and women’s history. Oh, but wait! . . . it turns out that most of these are just screens for more anti-choice rhetoric!

The problem with euthanasia, it seems, is that “[w]hen we devalue unborn children, it’s a short hop to devaluing the ‘nearly dead’”. Child abuse, you will be surprised to know, is merely a form of late abortion: “Has infanticide become more acceptable since legalized abortion started us on the slippery slope toward devaluing life? . . . If parents have the option of disposing of their unwanted child for any reason before birth, could this subtle, societal agreement quietly extend to the child who is already born?” The “Insider’s View of the Cairo Population Conference” includes a discussion of the need for women’s empowerment in underdeveloped countries that treats fertility control as a negligible issue, then concludes “[s]adly, a number of world leaders, including our own, still have much to learn about the real needs of women. The Clinton administration wished to include in the agreement ‘access to safe abortion’ under the guise of reproductive health services . . . .” (Imagine that! The Clinton Administration actually thought “access to safe abortion” fall “under the guise of reproductive health services”!) To be fair, there are more mainstream articles linked on some of these topics, but they universally take an anti-autonomy tone even when not explicitly flogging the abortion issue (”Can a living will be used against you?”).

Being a “feminist for life”, apparently, means giving men the final say over women’s health issues, reducing the control women have over their healthcare decisionmaking, defining abortion as not being a part of reproductive healthcare, and tying every known problem women face (and some imaginary ones) to the fact that some women choose abortion. That’s the kind of “feminist” John Roberts is married to. Maybe Hugo Schwyzer thinks that’s a good thing, but I can’t find much to cheer about there.