Reading the recent editorial “No Uterus, No Opinion,” I have to applaud author Jennifer Fauci who added a great scholarly read to her opinion. I thank her for that and the motivation she gave me to send a letter I had written on the same subject to a Roman Catholic magazine in 2013. Perhaps it was well received, but I was somewhat disappointed in not seeing any replies.
The main point of the letter was to tell how for centuries men were in control of women and feminism did not change that in regard to abortion. Women now control women. They get the same results as men did and, in effect, men are the winners. Here is my original letter:
When I was a factory worker in the 1950s my impression of women was that they would love to have children. Men more often than not favored abortion. That was true of my coworkers who time and again brought up the subject of abortion. Quite a few of the men said that if their girlfriends ever became pregnant, they would have to face the abortionist, coat hangers and all.
The boyfriends seemed to have the last word on the subject, for it was obvious that men considered abortion their right. As time went by, it became easier for men to maintain this right. It was only for the men to convince women that abortion was a woman’s right.
In the early 1960s Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Although the book was considered an eye-opener, it never once mentions the word abortion (though it was included in an epilogue in a 1973 reprint).
The National Organization of Women (NOW), which Friedan cofounded in1966, at first did not present “abortion rights” as a majority position. At the time, abortion was still viewed by most of the women who belonged to NOW as disreputable. Their thinking was about the same as in the 19th century, when abortion was seen as patriarchal oppression and an exploitation of women.
Then came Lawrence Lader and Bernard Nathanson, cofounders of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL). In 1967 these two men persuaded Friedan to have NOW endorse legal abortion, which it did that very year. Friedan was awarded with the vice presidency of NARAL. Nathanson would later disavow abortion advocacy and become a prominent voice for the right to life of the unborn. Lader, however, wrote several pro-abortion books, one of which was cited numerous times by the Supreme Court majority in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
What seems ironic is that abortion in earlier times was seen as patriarchal oppression and an exploitation of women, yet today is celebrated as a “woman’s right.” It appears that women were sold a bill of goods by men who favored abortion and wanted to secure their own rights. And that in doing so, women lost theirs.
—Robert McNally
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