Politics & Power Quote by Kathleen Parker

Parker is doing something slyly surgical here: she frames abortion politics as a story of generational turnover, then slips in a critique of feminism’s supposed orthodoxy without having to litigate abortion’s morality head-on. The opener, “Earlier feminists were almost universally pro-choice,” is less a historical footnote than a power move. “Almost universally” flattens decades of internal disagreement into a monolith, so the next claim, “dominated political debate,” can land as an indictment: one faction didn’t just persuade, it controlled.

The subtext is a challenge to the pro-choice movement’s foundational argument: abortion as the master key to equality. By repeating that logic plainly - “the only way women could have full equality” - Parker makes it sound both absolutist and dated, inviting the reader to see it as a brittle, single-issue definition of liberation. The line works because it quietly shifts the terrain from rights to rhetoric: she’s critiquing the story feminists told about women’s bodies, not merely the policy outcome.

Then comes the kicker: “who, until recently, couldn’t get pregnant.” It’s a culture-war needle threaded through a demographic claim, gesturing at trans men and the contemporary debate over who counts as “women” in feminist politics. The sentence pretends to be a biological aside, but it’s actually a boundary test: if pregnancy is no longer exclusively female-coded in public discourse, what happens to abortion as a women’s-equality argument? The context is a media moment where abortion, gender identity, and institutional authority collide, and Parker’s intent is to suggest that an old consensus is losing its monopoly - not because opponents won, but because the categories underneath it are being renegotiated.