Forty-one years ago, on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court announced its abortion rulings of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. In these companion cases, the Court effectively legalized abortion during all nine months of pregnancy for virtually any reason. The result? More than 55 million unborn human lives ended, countless mothers and fathers, grandparents and siblings wounded, human life at every stage cheapened, and the conscience of our nation dulled.
Blessed Mother Teresa said “Roe vs. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience.”
Rewind the clock to the late 1960s and a budding new feminist movement working for equal rights between men and women. What if Betty Friedan and her fellow feminists at NOW [National Organization of Women] had followed in the footsteps of the founders of the women’s movement and condemned abortion as an abandonment and degradation of women?
One of those founders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, said “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” Another founder, Mattie Brinkerhoff, said “When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society—so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.”
Unfortunately, Betty Friedan and her cohorts followed instead the advice of two men, Dr. Bernard Nathanson and Lawrence Lader, who were on a crusade to legalize abortion. In his 1979 book “Aborting America,” Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who became pro-life, said Lader convinced Friedan that if a woman wanted to be educated like a man, hired like a man, and promoted like a man, women shouldn’t expect their employers to accommodate pregnancy.
“We got them to see legal abortion as a civil rights issue, a basic women’s rights issue,” Nathanson explained.
This impoverished reasoning was clearly espoused by Sarah Weddington in her arguments before the Supreme Court representing Norma McCorvey, Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade. Weddington made this argument in favor of legalizing abortion: “There are many schools where a woman is forced to quit if she becomes pregnant. ... In the matter of employment, she often is forced to quit at an early point in her pregnancy. She has no provision for maternity leave.... She cannot get unemployment compensation under our laws, because the laws hold that she is not eligible for employment, being pregnant, and therefore is eligible for no unemployment compensation.”
Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life, points out that “Weddington saw the discrimination and other injustices faced by pregnant women. But she did not demand that these injustices be remedied. Instead, she demanded for women the ‘right’ to submit to these injustices by destroying their pregnancies.”
“Weddington repeatedly said that women need ‘relief’ from pregnancy,” Foster added, “instead of arguing that women need relief from these injustices. What if Weddington had used her legal acumen to challenge the system to address women’s needs?”
“In short,” Foster says, “abortion has masked rather than solved the problems women face. Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the needs of women. Clearly, women deserve better.”
The pro-life movement must persistently challenge the lie that abortion helps women and amplify the pro-life feminism espoused by the pioneers of the feminist movement and their authentic successors at Feminists for Life.
