Atheism Has Done Little for Women’s Dignity

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By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist

A writer for the British Catholic press says that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair missed an opportunity to show how little atheism has done for women’s rights during his debate with committed atheist Christopher Hitchens this past weekend.

Francis Phillips of the UK’s Catholic Herald listened to the debate, entitled “religion is a force for good in the world,” which took place in Toronto on Dec. 11. She faulted Blair for not stating the obvious when the subject turned to women’s rights.

“I thought there was one point where Blair could have got underneath his opponent’s hard carapace: when Hitchens attacked religion for doing nothing for women’s dignity. The way to bring about ‘the empowerment of women’ was to take them off ‘the animal cycle of reproduction,’ he stated.  . . . Blair had a golden opportunity here to go on the attack: what had atheism to offer women but ever easier ‘reproductive rights’ – i .e. ever easier access to contraception and abortion? What had the most atheistic society in the world, China, done for women’s dignity in enforcing their ‘one-child’ policy?” Phillips asks.

She went on to say that while thinking of all the arguments Blair could have made on this point, she remembered the compelling testimony of American Steven Mosher, now the president of the pro-life Population Research Institute. At one time, Mosher was a student of social anthropology at Stanford University and an unthinking atheist and supporter of “women’s liberation” like everyone else around him, Phillips writes.

“As part of his research he went to China in the 1980s where he got on well with the local Communist committee and was invited to witness a forced late-term abortion. I won’t describe what he saw, merely the electric effect it had on him: in the space of a few minutes he went from an insouciant attitude of ‘abortion is a women’s right’ to being profoundly and unhesitatingly pro-life.”

If Blair had engaged passionately at this juncture in the debate, Phillips said, he would have shown how Christianity has always defended women’s dignity.

“But he didn’t and he couldn’t,” she writes. Why? “Because throughout his parliamentary career and after, he has always taken the line that ‘I don’t personally like the idea of abortion but women must have the right to choose.’. His voting record on pro-life issues is clear. He is a compromised man – and the opportunity was lost.”

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