After reading Amanda's post at Pandagon and the comments after it (which stated unequivocally that abortion is the defining issue of feminism), I decided to go look at some other feminist sites to see if there were other defining issues of feminism. Not surprisingly, I found a ton of them.
At feminist.com, there were numerous issues discussed:
--Aging
--Building self-esteem in young girls
--Health (including issues about breast cancer and depression)
--Violence against women
--Work and career
It was encouraging to discover that abortion didn't seem to be the issue that defined these feminists. In fact, it was encouraging to discover feminists who didn't define themselves solely by their wombs, but who considered a variety of issues to be important to women. What a refreshing notion!
But there are other feminist organizations who seem to be interested in more than abortion.
There's feminist.org, which contains information about a variety of issues affecting women (not just abortion!).
The National Council for Research on Women includes a variety of female health issues (not just abortion!)
Centre for Women's Research includes articles about issues facing women around the globe (not just abortion!)
It is understandable that Teh Sex is the most important part of feminism for some feminists and that abortion available 24/7/365 is critical. Whenever someone states that abortion is the defining feminist issue, however, they should really bother consulting feminists. Most of them consider contraception and abortion to only be two issues of concern. After all, most feminists recognize that we are more than a sum of our body parts.
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