Feminism, Motherhood, and Animal Rights by Sylvie Abate

I've been searching for the right words to express how feminism, motherhood, and animal rights are deeply connected — and it hasn’t been easy to untangle. Mother's Day was the catalyst. I know the vegan community feels a sense of grief when they think about non-human mothers. And putting these thoughts together has helped me. I hope this is worth your read, or that the philosophy sparks some interest.

If feminism is about honoring the autonomy, dignity, and rights of females —then it makes sense that feminism could extend its compassion to the non-human mothers whose bodies are exploited, whose daily lives are shaped by violence and domination.

At its heart, social justice is the belief that every sentient being — regardless of intelligence, gender, species, or any other factor — deserves freedom from violence, pain, and exploitation. Yet speciesism has allowed industries to profit from the systematic sexual violation and reproductive control of animal mothers.

And when we fight for female human rights but overlook the suffering of non-human females, we leave systems of violence and domination intact — when they need to be dismantled entirely.

But to truly connect the dots, we need to understand what happens in industrial farming:

Mother cows are forcibly impregnated, only to have their calves taken from them within hours of birth so that humans can consume her milk — the milk meant for her baby. These mothers bellow in grief for days. They endure repeated artificial insemination without anesthesia — a practice so invasive that workers themselves coined the term "rape rack" for the device used to restrain them.

In nature, cows could live over 20 years, forming deep, lasting family bonds. In the dairy industry, they are deemed "spent" after just four to five years of relentless pregnancies and machine milking, often collapsing, skeletal, unable to stand, and dragged away by chains and machines, if not worse.

Mother pigs are confined to gestation and farrowing crates so small they cannot function — stripped of the right to move, to nest, to nurture their babies — forced into an endless cycle of artificial impregnation shortly after each birth, moved from one cage to another.

All Mother turkeys, bred so unnaturally large they can no longer mate naturally, are forcibly impregnated through violent, invasive procedures that traumatizes everyone involved.

Hens, whose wild ancestors laid 10–20 eggs a year to raise families, are genetically manipulated to lay 250–300 eggs annually, leading to brittle bones, organ failure, and painful early deaths.

To squeeze even more production from their weakened bodies, hens are starved of food, water, and light for weeks to "shock" them into laying one last cycle of eggs — a practice causing immense physical and psychological suffering.

When we treat non-human mothers as reproductive machines — forcibly impregnating them, stealing their babies, breaking their bodies for profit — we have to ask: What does this say about our capacity for justice for others who are not like us, for non-humans? Don't they deserve justice as well?

I believe that if we are committed to justice, to compassion, to dismantling systems of oppression — then our circle of justice must be wide enough to include all beings, human and non-human alike.

Because the values that drive feminism — autonomy, dignity, freedom from violence — loses nothing when we extend them beyond ourselves. In fact, they become even stronger.

Thanks for reading.