"The pro-life movement is a war on women by the patriarchy."
Or, so we are told.
Joe Biden: I think the war on women is real.
Al Sharpton: The war on women has exploded.
Eliot Spitzer: An ugly new battlefront in the war on women.
Chris Matthews: The war on women.
Ed Harris: This war on women.
Anthony Weiner: The fight to protect a woman's right to choose is the most fundamental and patriotic
fight we have right now.
Eric Schneiderman: Are we ready to fight against male supremacy in all its forms?
The abortion lobby tries incessantly to claim the mantle of women’s rights, empowerment,
and equality, by portraying childbearing as an obstacle to empowerment.
Recently we’ve seen abortion advocates latch on to imagery from The Handmaid’s Tale,
a story that frames our ability to bear children as a means of enslavement by patriarchal forces.
But if we look at the actual history instead of fantasy, we see that pro-life, pro-family
feminism has been carrying the torch for women’s empowerment all along.
It is the sexual revolution and the abortion movements, both largely driven by men, that
have waged the real war on women.
Let’s begin our story with the 1950’s and early 60’s - that period of time which
is often criticized as the epitome of women’s oppression under a patriarchal system.
Mad Men: “I’m not going to let a woman talk to me like this.
This meeting is over.
Good luck, Ms. Menken.”
In the 50’s and 60’s, women did face genuine problems of inequality and oppression – lacking
the opportunities that men had to excel educationally and vocationally.
In the workplace, it was common to hear of women that were fired simply for being pregnant.
In her landmark book called The Feminine Mystique, a feminist named Betty Friedan – who herself
had been fired for being pregnant -- issued a war cry for equal opportunity for women
in every sphere of life.
The Feminine Mystique has some serious problems, but here’s what I want to point out: Betty
Friedan claimed that the reductionist view of women
as “just housewives” was a bad idea.
But not of traditionalism or Judeo-Christianity, but of atheist Sigmund Freud.
Furthermore, Betty never mentioned abortion or contraception
as a means to liberate women.
She said that “creative work would set women free,”
and that this was always inclusive towards marriage and motherhood, though Betty herself
would later admit she did not emphasize the importance of marriage and motherhood as much
as she should have.
Betty became leader of the National Organization for Women, and her initial stance for women’s
equality which excluded abortion was consistent with the early feminists who came before her.
Alice Paul, Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragettes – these heroes
of feminism agreed that abortion was wrong, but they also saw it as a sign of female oppression,
often used by men to control and abuse women.
Standing against Betty Friedan’s women’s movement was the sexual revolution, epitomized
by Hugh Hefner and his Playboy magazine.
Hefner’s vision for sexuality was popularized among women by Helen Gurley Brown, who had
wanted to work for Hefner, until she got the opportunity to transform the homemaker magazine
Cosmopolitan into a sex magazine—a Playboy for women.
She featured nude centerfolds just like Playboy, and an icon of a pussycat after the articles
just like the Playboy bunny icon.
Helen wrote the book which became the basis for the modern hit TV show and films,
Sex and the City.
Helen’s solution for women was that hard work and lots of unmarried sex without getting
pregnant would set them free.
This philosophy came to life in the Cosmo Girl,
this ideal woman portrayed in Helen’s magazine.
Only, the Cosmo Girls were often complete fabrications.
The writers were given a set of rules or guidelines on how to invent their stories and how to
make up "experts" to quote, then they told these lies to unsuspecting women
as if they were Gospel.
The Cosmo girl was little more than a money-making scheme.
A marketer’s and CEO’s dream come true.
She worked hard, she bought lavishly from the pharmaceutical, medical, beauty, fashion,
and travel industries, and to top it all off, she did not push for all those pricey, bothersome
extras like family tax breaks, maternity leave, shorter work weeks,
and more flexible work arrangements.”
Sex and the City: I'm talking about a woman's right to shoes.
Through her magazine, month after month, in many subtle ways, Helen sent the message to
America’s women that motherhood and children were an insurmountable obstacle to their freedom.
Betty Friedan called Cosmopolitan “Quite obscene and quite horrible.”
Betty opposed treating women merely as sex objects,
and she defended motherhood and the family.
Betty said, “You want a feminism that includes women who have children and want children
because that’s the majority of women.”
So how did the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Helen Gurley Brown
take over the women’s movement of Betty Friedan?
Answer: two more men, white and upper middle class, whose goal was to legalize and mass
market abortion all across America.
Larry Lader and Bernard Nathanson were abortion advocates who would go on to found the abortion
advocacy group NARAL, which still exists today.
Lader’s goal was the complete repeal of abortion laws as a means to controlling population
growth and upsetting sexual morality.
He was the biographer and good friend of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.
But Lader’s ideas on abortion were so radical, even for Sanger, that it fractured their relationship.
It wasn’t until another man, Alan Guttmacher, took over Planned Parenthood, that the organization
began publicly advocating the mass legalization of abortion.
Abortion was mainly an upper-middle class white man’s practice, and Lader worked hard
to push it on the feminists, knowing they could promote it even better than he could
– if only they’d buy in.
In “Aborting America,” Bernie records what Larry said to him at their NARAL meetings:
“If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going
to have to recruit the feminists.
Friedan has got to put her troops into this thing—while she still has control of them.
We’ve got to keep the women out in front…and some blacks.
Black women especially.
Why are they so damn slow to see the importance of this whole movement to themselves?”
Just as Helen told lies to sell the Cosmo Girl,
Lader and Nathanson told lies to sell abortion.
As Nathanson would later confess, “We sensationalized the effects of illegal abortions, and fabricated
polls which indicated that 85% of the public favoured unrestricted abortion,
when we knew it was only 5%.”
“When we spoke of [deaths due to illegal abortion]
it was always 5,000 to 10,000 a year.
I confess that I knew the figures were totally false.”
But these lies were so effective that Lader was able to win over many people,
including Betty Friedan.
On Nov. 18, 1967, in the Chinese Room of the Mayflower Hotel in DC, Betty insisted that
abortion be inserted into the National Organization for Women’s platform.
Abortion was adopted by the votes of 57 people after which a third of the women at the conference
resigned from the National Organization for Women.
Larry’s lies and propaganda even made their way into the infamous Roe v. Wade decision,
with his book “Abortion” being cited no less than seven times in the Court’s opinion.
After abortion on demand was legalized, the rates of abortion and divorce skyrocketed,
while birth rates dropped and marriage rates plummeted.
Today, Americans commit about 1 million abortions per year, 2,700 preborn children every day
-- and more than a third of abortions are committed by Planned Parenthood.
Seeing trends like these even back in 1981, Betty Friedan wrote a follow-up book called
The Second Stage, expressing her regrets that the feminist movement had demonized the family.
Bernard Nathanson left his position at NARAL, converted to Catholicism,
and became a pro-life activist, producing
one of the most important anti-abortion films of all time, The Silent Scream.
Bernard Nathanson: There's no question this child senses the most mortal danger imaginable.
But let’s think back to the beginning of our story, to one of the moments that first
stirred a fire in the soul of Betty Friedan: when she was fired for being pregnant.
To say that abortion was the solution to her pregnancy
is, in essence, to agree with her boss.
It is to say that her pregnant self is the problem, that her natural ability as a woman
is the problem, that her child is the problem.
Abortion has done nothing to correct the oppression and inequality
that women in these situations face; it perpetuates it.
Abortion is an excuse for men, businesses, and communities
to neglect, exploit, and discriminate against women.
Rather than support the mother and her child, they forcibly divide the two, pressuring the
mother to have her child killed.
Abortion is the ultimate manifestation of the oppression of women, and women and children
cannot be liberated in society until abortion is unthinkable.
Telling women that they must have the ability to kill their children in order to achieve
fulfillment is not empowering.
True Feminism seeks to promote all aspects of who a woman is -- in her education, in
her vocation, in her marriage, and in her motherhood.
For it is that commitment to a holistic view of women and children in all of their personhood
that will truly set us free.
For more on the story of how the sexual revolution hijacked the women’s movement, see the book
Subverted, by Sue Ellen Browder.