March is Women’s History Month, when we celebrate the accomplishments of the brave women who marched before us.
The first wave of feminists rallied support for their movement in the 1800s by embracing efforts to grant women the legal right to vote. The second wave of feminists in the 1960s, inspired by Betty Friedan’s landmark book The Feminine Mystique, eventually embraced another legislative mandate that coalesced their movement: the fight to legalize abortion. As we assess the impact abortion has had on women’s rights today, we find that instead of liberating women, abortion has hindered our progress in achieving true equality.
In her revealing, behind-the-scenes book, Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement, Sue Ellen Browder, a former investigative journalist for Cosmopolitan magazine, exposes the events that led to the resolution for legal abortion being inserted in the National Organization for Women’s “Bill of Rights.” This was done by a handful of power players in a closed-door meeting — NOW’s second national conference in Washington, D.C. — on Nov. 18, 1967.
Abortion was a controversial topic among women and a heated debate ensued, lasting until almost midnight. One-third of the women who attended the conference resigned from NOW in protest of the way the abortion issue was “railroaded” through. As Browder wrote, “It was a dark hour that changed history.”
How did this happen? Friedan, who was president of NOW, never even mentioned abortion in The Feminine Mystique. It wasn’t until two men collaborated to influence a reluctant Friedan to include legal abortion on NOW’s political platform. One was Dr. Bernard Nathanson, director of one of the world’s largest abortion clinics. He would later became a pro-life activist after watching ultrasounds of abortion.
In his book Aborting America, Nathanson admitted to lying about the number of women dying from illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade. He wrote, “It was always 5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year. I confess that I knew the figures were totally false. … But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?”
The other man who influenced Friedan was Larry Lader, a population-control proponent, who, together with Nathanson, founded the National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws, which later became NARAL Pro-Choice America. Lader was a biographer of Planned Parenthood’s eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger. He was having no luck promoting abortion as birth control, until he pitched abortion to Friedan under the label of “reproductive rights.” From there, it quickly grew to become the most commonly performed surgery on women today.
Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the real needs of women. It promotes the male model of superiority. In order to participate freely and equally in a man’s world, women are expected to think like a man, act like a man, and change our bodies to be like those of men — wombless and unpregnant at will. Instead of forcing women to change their bodies to fit into society, we should be demanding that society change to accept and accommodate women.
Not every woman need be a mother. But to view the beauty, power, and strength of pregnancy as a disease or deviation, we are internalizing attitudes of low self-esteem toward our own bodies.
Like Susan B. Anthony and other early American suffragists who unanimously opposed abortion, today’s pro-life feminists envision a better world in which no woman would be driven by desperation to abortion. In the words of Anthony, “Sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them.”
Let’s work to provide holistic, nonviolent, women-centered solutions to the continuing struggles we face in the workplace, on campus, at home, and in the world at large. Then we can declare, as Anthony did, “Failure is impossible.”
Marilyn Kopp is a past president of Feminists for Life of Ohio.
