What single constituency is the biggest casualty of our election season messaging thus far? Women.
And the damaging and erroneous messages are not confined to one side of the political aisle.
Over the past few months, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has made a multitude of degrading remarks about women, including his infamous insults towards Carly Fiorina and Megyn Kelly. In late March, after a PAC created an ad including the (publicly available) seductive picture of Trump's wife Melania from a European GQ spread, Trump proceeded to attack Heidi Cruz, wife of Republican candidate Ted Cruz by tweeting a picture of his model-wife next to an unflattering image of Mrs. Cruz along with the caption "the images are worth a thousand words."
Last week Mr. Trump stated during a town hall interview that he would be in favor of punishing women who had an abortion if abortion were made illegal — and in doing so set off an immediate firestorm of responses from pro-life leaders who distanced themselves from the candidate's stance.
On the other side, we have Democratic front runner Hillary Clinton campaigning on access to unrestricted abortion as a fundamental, beneficial right for women. Clinton advocates for abortion until the day of birth, a view that is out of touch with the American people. A recent Marist poll shows that 81 percent of Americans are against late-term abortion. The former secretary of state also opposes commonsense health and safety regulations that would protect women at abortion facilities. Recently, Mrs. Clinton even went so far as to admit that the developing baby is an "unborn person" but one "without constitutional rights."
So what do the Trump and Clinton campaigns have in common? In short, a damaging overemphasis on the importance of a woman's body — in particular how it looks — or, on the other side, an erroneous under-emphasis of the significance of a woman's body. In doing so they are putting forth negative messages about women that are essentially two sides of the same coin.
Hillary errs on the side of reducing the significance of a woman's body. She does so by downplaying the complementarity of the sexes and in particular, a woman's capacity for motherhood, which is viewed as a liability, not a gift. Most explicitly her radical stance on abortion is evidence of this. In support of the nation's largest abortion provider, she recently said, "I'll never stop fighting to protect the ability and right of every woman in this country to make her own health decisions." (By "health" she was referring specifically to abortion in this quote.) In reality, problems arise from this view because a woman's capacity for motherhood is at the core of who she is as a person; no amount of trying to do away with it changes that reality. An example of this is the multitude of women who regret having chosen abortion.
Trump on the other hand seems to overemphasize a woman's appearance and body. His comments reflect a mentality that reduces women to their physical appearance and sexuality, overemphasizing both and subtly defining a woman by these attributes. "[W]ho would vote for that face?" or commenting on women competing in his reality television show, "It's certainly not groundbreaking news that the early victories by the women on 'The Apprentice' were, to a very large extent, dependent on their sex appeal."
Both of these lines of thinking are damaging and incomplete. A true understanding of the gift of the dignity and vocation of women includes a vision of her as a whole person; a composite of mind and body, not reducing woman to her body but equally not dismissing the significance of her body.
During this election season, let us not buy into either side of this disintegrated way of thinking. Such perspectives do a disservice to women and the larger culture. For any woman who really wants to make a difference in the world, the best gift she can give to her society is to be authentically herself, body and all.
Jeanne Mancini is president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.