Choose Life at Yale (CLAY) Makes A Bad Choice

By CHASE OLIVARIUS-MCALLISTER

April 5, 2010

In 2007, the first time Choose Life At Yale (CLAY) applied to be a res­i­dence group of the Women’s Cen­ter, I was on the Women’s Center’s Board.

At the time, Peter John­ston ’09 was the pres­i­dent of CLAY and quickly becom­ing influ­en­tial in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment at Yale. Intel­lec­tu­ally, I had grown to know him well, due to the fact that we both took Directed Stud­ies and were in nearly every sec­tion together, a proof that God, if exis­tent, is not with­out an exquis­ite sense of irony.

CLAY was founded in 2003, a few years before John­ston took it over. The pub­lic rela­tions prob­lem con­fronting it was typ­i­cal of those faced by other “pro-life” orga­ni­za­tions, though, of course, harder to solve at Yale. Ronald Rea­gan and David Rear­don first real­ized in the 1980s that the “pro-life” move­ment was dam­aged by the grow­ing per­cep­tion that it did not care about women. This per­cep­tion was com­pounded by the most vis­i­ble pro-life cam­paigns of the 1990s, which often por­trayed women who’d had abor­tions as “baby-killers,” and, per­haps, by a spate of clinic bomb­ings. To detox­ify their polit­i­cal brand, “pro-life” orga­ni­za­tions rephrased their argu­ment in a fem­i­nist cadence. Women, as opposed to the unborn, became abortion’s pri­mary victim.

I was very impressed by Johnston’s deci­sion to apply to be a Women’s Cen­ter res­i­dent group: It was smart pol­i­tics. Still, the Board voted unan­i­mously to reject its request, on the grounds that the Women’s Cen­ter was pro-choice.

Shortly after­ward, I ran into John­ston. Ever cor­dial, he asked how I was, and I asked how he was; briefly, we dis­cussed the Board’s deci­sion. He expressed feel­ing some dis­ap­point­ment, but no sur­prise. I told him I thought the polit­i­cal strat­egy he had tried out was extremely clever, fear­fully so.

We were both earnest believ­ers. But what I always enjoyed about John­ston was that our con­ver­sa­tions on such mat­ters were pro­fes­sional: there was no pre­tense that we were any­thing but par­ti­san stu­dents of America’s abor­tion debate.

Johnston’s appli­ca­tion to the Women’s Cen­ter was a bet; I respected it. It didn’t cost CLAY any­thing to place. Though it lost, he, I thought shrewdly, chose not to pub­licly whine about it.

CLAY’s cur­rent lead­er­ship appar­ently lacks Johnston’s acuity.

Last week, Isabel Marin ’12, CLAY’s “Women’s Out­reach Coor­di­na­tor,” authored a col­umn that argues CLAY should be “sup­ported under the Women’s Cen­ter umbrella” (“A place at the Cen­ter,” March 31). It goes so far as to attack the Women’s Center’s repeated rejec­tions of CLAY’s appli­ca­tion as unwor­thy of its name and con­trary to “the spirit of feminism.”

Marin’s col­umn is rid­dled with dis­tor­tions. For instance, Marin quotes abstract, care­fully selected sec­tions of the Women’s Center’s con­sti­tu­tion, choos­ing to omit the clause that declares the Women’s Cen­ter to be a pro-choice orga­ni­za­tion. Fur­ther­more, Marin’s attempt to ally CLAY with Yale Men Against Rape under the cat­e­gory of “non-stereotypical fem­i­nist groups” is disin­gen­u­ous. The goals of Yale Men Against Rape are fem­i­nist in the most con­ven­tional sense of the word and the move­ment; it is she who is doing the stereotyping.

Marin argues that the Women’s Cen­ter should unhesi­tat­ingly grant CLAY “the appel­la­tion ‘fem­i­nist.’” Unfor­tu­nately, the word “fem­i­nist” means some­thing, both to the Women’s Cen­ter and apart from it.

The cen­tral fail­ing of the col­umn is Marin’s will­ful mis­ap­pre­hen­sion of this fact. Fem­i­nism is an ide­ol­ogy; the women and men who sub­scribed to it are those who won women the vote, the right to own prop­erty, access to edu­ca­tion, pro­tec­tion from sex­ual harass­ment and legal abor­tion. Fem­i­nism is defin­i­tively pro-choice; it defines abor­tion as a civil right and insists that the with­hold­ing of abor­tion is dis­crim­i­na­tion. This is the posi­tion of the Yale Women’s Cen­ter, National Orga­ni­za­tion of Women and every major 20th-century fem­i­nist thinker.

More offen­sive than Marin’s indif­fer­ence to his­tory is that the role that she pro­poses for CLAY — pro­vid­ing preg­nant women with help — is already played by a Women’s Cen­ter group. The Repro­duc­tive Rights Action League, has long labored to address all aspects of sex­u­al­ity and family.

Marin is right that “the pro-life women in CLAY face glass ceil­ings and tough choices as do all women.” The Women’s Cen­ter mer­rily fights for all women, includ­ing pro-life women. It is pos­si­ble to be both pro-life and a fem­i­nist; pro-life women have cer­tainly made seri­ous con­tri­bu­tions on many fem­i­nist fronts; I am sure that Marin holds many fem­i­nist opin­ions with which I pas­sion­ately agree. But the pro-life ide­ol­ogy seeks to limit women’s choices, is opposed to women’s free­dom, is itself anti-woman and will always be anti-feminist.

In deny­ing CLAY its sup­port, the Women Cen­ter did not imperil the future of fem­i­nism, or its rel­e­vance, but res­cued its life. Fem­i­nism is an autho­riz­ing legacy. In invok­ing fem­i­nism, pro-life orga­ni­za­tions — even pro-life women — seek to steal fem­i­nism from its his­tory, and, wit­tingly or not, reduce it to a mean­ing­less term.

For the pro-life move­ment, that’s smart pol­i­tics. Peter John­ston would have known that. Per­haps that’s why I miss him.

Chase Olivarius-McAllister is a senior in Yale Col­lege.