Feminists today hail the pioneers of women’s rights, the suffragettes and 19th century activists who crusaded for women’s right to vote and equality before the law. But they also crusaded against abortion.
Yes, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Sarah F. Norton would not have been allowed to participate in the “Women’s March on Washington” because they were pro-life.
Marjorie Dannenfelser gives the details after the jump.
UPDATE: See also this, which discusses the Saturday Night Live skit and has a beautiful pro-life quote from Anthony.
From Marjorie Dannenfelser, SNL Susan B. Anthony – Early Feminists Opposed Abortion | National Review:
Susan B. Anthony recently made a surprise appearance in a Saturday Night Live skit, shocking the admiring young women touring her Rochester, N.Y., home by blurting out, “Abortion is murder!” Pro-Life Feminists Are Old-School 00:59 01:19 Saturday Night Live tried to make a joke about this feminist icon’s pro-life views, but the joke is really on them: Susan B. Anthony, like many of our great feminist foremothers, really were against abortion. Early feminists opposed abortion because it took human life, because women were pressured by economics and by male partners to do something they didn’t want to do, and because they believed the vital right to control one’s own body could not include the right to destroy someone else’s. . . .
[The article recounts other early feminists’ opposition to abortion: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Sarah F. Norton]
Some scholars have attempted to say that those who point out these facts are engaging in “revisionist history,” but how many pioneering 19th-century women have had their opposition to abortion shamefully edited out of their biographies and Wikipedia entries because too many modern-day feminists are embarrassed by the suffragists’ pro-life views?
It is a selective reading of history that makes pro-abortion feminists embrace early women pioneers while at the same time denying a profound truth espoused by Anthony and these other early women’s-rights activists: A commitment to the equal dignity of women is not consistent with insisting on a “right” to destroy life.
[Keep reading. . .]
Photo of Susan B. Anthony by G.E. Perine (History of Woman Suffrage) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Feminists today hail the pioneers of women’s rights, the suffragettes and 19th century activists who crusaded for women’s right to vote and equality before the law. But they also crusaded against abortion.
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