If one train left Durham, North Carolina headed south at 10:30 a.m. and another left the same station headed north an hour later, when would the two meet?
Only in the imagination of abortion promoters, including one who recently called for a “more intersectional” relationship between abortion and childbirth.
The appeal came from Kate Townsend, a volunteer case manager for the Carolina Abortion Fund—which exists solely to pay for abortions—in a Q&A published Wednesday at the DailyTarHeel.com, the student newspaper for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Intersectionality,” for the uninitiated or otherwise sane reader, refers to, “the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual,” according to a noble stab at a definition by Dictionary.com.
Race. Gender. Sexuality. Class. Anything missing?
Oh that’s right, how about stage of fetal development or level of dependency on one’s mother? Maybe those will turn up in definition 2.0.
Relying on the clear-as-mud definition of “intersectionality,” Townsend made a Herculean attempt to equate abortion and pro-life advocacy after falsely depicting community-funded pregnancy centers—which receive well over 90 percent of their expenses through private, local donations—as state-constructed barriers to abortion.
“With activism, we need to be more intersectional,” Townsend, said. “We need to not just be about reproductive rights, but reproductive justice. We need to make sure that it’s not just about abortion—because while abortion is an incredibly important topic, it’s about more than that.”
What’s the difference between “reproductive rights”—a common euphemism for abortion, which is anything but “reproductive”—and “reproductive justice”? Townsend’s organization provides the following distinction, crafted and promoted by far-left group SisterSong:
The human right to have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments
That decoder ring of “reproductive justice” may come in handy when Townsend goes on to call for a greater overlap between advocating both parenting a child and taking that same child’s life through abortion.
“It’s about making sure the individuals who do carry through the pregnancy, and are able to have families and children, are able to raise those children in a safe and healthy environment,” Townsend said—and note her use of “individuals” rather than oppressive terms like, “women” and “mothers.”
Tweet This: How about including "fetal development" in #intersectionality def? #NationalWomensHealthWeek #prolife
How exactly Townsend—and for that matter, SisterSong and Carolina Abortion Fund—mean to help women who do decide to give birth and parent their own children is anybody's guess. Also missing is any nod whatsoever to the “human right” of the preborn child to live in “a healthy and safe environment.”
Though the rights of unborn children go overlooked in the Q&A, Townsend does go on to point out two of the most pressing needs of abortion-tethered feminism: doing away with the racial oppression within the ranks of feminism itself and, of course, fending off President Donald Trump.
“I feel like we’ve gotten better over the years, but a lot of hegemonic, white feminists are still ignoring the work that women of color have been doing for so long,” Townsend said. “This is definitely a field right now that is under attack, and that’s really scary. But I’m hoping that people will become more aware of this issue that we’ve taken since Roe v. Wade, and that people won’t let Trump and this wave of conservatism take away our right.”
While Townsend and others fight to protect and expand abortion under the guise of “reproductive justice” and “intersectionality,” the preborn children whose lives are at stake await the day their own oppression is recognized and ended.
Along with the parents bereft of their children through abortion, let’s pray that day comes before Durham’s north- and south-bound trains cross paths.
