OSV STORY FOR April 21

Reclaiming the pro-life tradition: Feminists for Life

A new book is pro-life feminists' latest effort to set historical record straight

By Mary DeTurris

Feminism and abortion have been so closely linked in the minds of many Americans that the two have become inseparable - some might even say synonymous. Pro­abortion has come to mean pro­woman and vice versa.

Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the sexual revolution and the Equal Rights Amendment began focusing attention on women and their growing dissatisfaction with the status quo, abortion advocates have been chipping away at the pro-life views of early feminist foremothers such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and replacing them with a pro-abortion mentality, telling women they cannot be pro­life and be pro­woman.

This revision of history is getting another look, this time by pro­life women who want to reclaim what they say is the heart and soul of feminism. Feminists for Life of America has been working toward that goal since it was founded in 1972.

Now, a new book, "Prolife Feminism: Yesterday & Today" (New York: Sulzburger & Graham, $30), challenges true feminists to take their foremothers at their word.

The book includes the writings of nearly two dozen early feminists, dating back to the 1800s and early 1900s, and about 20 feminist writers since the 1950s. Collectively, it offers encouragement to every woman who has ever shied away from women's rights or the pro­life cause out of loyalty to - or fear of - feminism.

"The history of the pro­life feminist is really quite solid and this book documents that," said Rachel MacNair, former president of Feminists for Life, who edited the book along with Mare Krane Derr, a psychotherapist, poet and writer based in Chicago, and Linda Naranjo­Huebl, a professor of women's literature at the University of Colorado. "Some of the pro­abortion people said, 'You can't pull these quotes out of context.' So we said,'OK, here's the full context,' " MacNair added.

A quick read through some of the famous feminists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries offers a whole new perspective on the abortion issue. Rather than seeing abortion as a solution to women's problems, these first soldiers in the fight for women's rights saw abortion as an evil and a symptom of the way society - that is, men - treated women.

"The murder of the innocents goes on," wrote esteemed suffragist Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis in 1870, eulogizing Charlotte Denman Lozier, a physician who refused to perform an abortion and even turned the would-be patient and her male friend into the police. "Shame and crime after crime darken the history of our whole land. Hence it was fitting that a true woman should protest with all the energy of her soul against this woeful crime."

Dr. Alice Bunker Stockham, who authored popular medical books, was even more direct in her condemnation of abortion: "Life must be present from the very moment of conception. If there was not life, there could not be conception. . . . Is it not plain that the violent or forcible deprivation of existence of this embryo . . . is its premature death, and hence the act can be denominated by no more mild term than murder, and whoever performs the act, or is accessory to it, is guilty of the crime of all crimes?" she wrote in 1887.

Such a reaction to abortion was not unique or extreme for its time, and it definitely was not anti­feminist, as "Prolife Feminism" attests. Page after page of the book includes arguments against what the early suffragists considered the ultimate exploitation and oppression of women.

Considering feminism's extensive pro-life history, exactly how and why did the movement come to embrace abortion as the great liberator of women?

According to MacNair, the "second wave of feminism" in the 1960s saw women who were angry and frustrated and yet didn't have something like the right to vote to focus on. As a result, MacNair said, the unborn baby became the scapegoat.

"Rather than going after the men, they went after someone less powerful," she said. "That's a typical reaction of oppressed people. That's not a healthy reaction."

MacNair, whose writings are included in "Prolife Feminism," said that since contemporary women weren't fighting for the right to vote but instead for the right to get into professions, abortion became a way of proving that they, too, could join the male-dominated rat race.

"What happened was a skewed view of equality that bought into the whole patriarchal line to begin with," she added. "There are loads of articulate women in professional positions who think they cannot be feminists because they are not pro­abortion. The pro­abortion advocates have tainted the use of the word."

MacNair stressed that pro­life feminism is about basic equality for all people, especially women - and taking that one step further, especially women in the womb.

"To be a pro­abortion feminist would be like being a racist feminist," she said. "It seems inconsistent."

Serrin Foster, the current executive director of Feminists for Life of America, said that it is "ironic" that advancing abortion is the top issue on the agendas of organizations such as the National Organization for Women, since early feminists worked for just the opposite cause.

"It's turned itself around after they had worked to enact the abortion laws," she said. "[Abortion] goes against our natures. It's a denial of ourselves as women. We have had to capitulate to employers who don't want to recognize that we are women. . . . All we have done is shifted the total burden to women. Women have gotten what they asked for now and they are not happy either."

"Prolife Feminism" is not the first publication to chronicle the works of early feminists. An earlier and shorter work, "Man's Inhumanity to Women Makes Countless Infants Die" - which took its name directly from a headline in "The Revolution," a feminist publication headed by Susan B. Anthony - was the forerunner to the newest collection.

According to Foster, the new book "is essential reading for people who want to understand where the new feminism is going to fit. It's essential for us to look back at the original feminists."

But using the words of yesterday's feminists to support the work of pro­life feminists today does not sit well with many on the other side of the abortion fence.

MacNair said she has encountered problems with some liberal publications over advertisements for "Prolife Feminism." She said that Mother Jones magazine refused to run an ad with quotes from early feminists because they said the quotes "were out of context." The Utne Reader ran the ad once and refused to run it again on similar grounds. MacNair said that when she contacted the magazine she was told that they had not even read the article.

"The media is very good at not covering the reality that they put forward," she said, adding that when Feminists for Life attended a pro­life march, news crews turned off their cameras when they got to the group and would not interview spokespeople.

"This is the one issue where a media person could get away with avoiding an articulate woman who has been chosen as spokeswoman and go to an inarticulate man who is not a spokesman," MacNair said, adding that pro­life feminists don't fit the media's stereotype of anti­abortion activists.

Mare Krane Derr, whose story of her own crisis pregnancy is included in "Prolife Feminism" and who was the scholar who gathered many of the early feminist selections for the book, said that the women she has met through Feminists for Life are "the most independent­minded women I have ever encountered. . . . They are Catholic, Protestants of all denominations, Quakers, people who have no religious affiliations and different races," said Krane Derr, adding that members include atheists, vegetarians, animal-rights activists and others. "It's not what comes to mind when the media talks about pro­lifers."

Krane Derr said that her personal experience with a crisis pregnancy has put her in an especially unique place to reach out to others.

"One of the biggest blocks to hearing the pro-life side are these ad hominum arguments that you don't care about people after they're born, that if you were pregnant you would not go through with it," she said. "I spoke once on a panel on abortion with pro­choice feminists, and after it one of them came up to me and said that she had never before felt that a pro-life person was understanding."

"That said to me that this is a very powerful way to get the message across - speaking from the heart as a human being."

DeTurris is a senior correspondent for Our Sunday Visitor.

For information on Feminists for Life, call (202) 737-3352

Sidebar quotes

"Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh, thrice guilty is he who . . . drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!"

Susan B. Anthony

Abortion was referred to as "child-murder."

Susan B. Anthony

The Revolution, July 8, 1869

"We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil. . . . It is practiced by those whose inmost souls revolt from the dreadful deed."

Susan B. Anthony

The Revolution, July 8, 1869

"All the articles on this subject that I have read have been from men. They denounce women as alone guilty, and never include man in any plans for the remedy."

Susan B. Anthony

"The Revolution, July 8, 1869

"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief. . . So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies."

Emma Goldman

Mother Earth, 1911

"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."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Letter to Julia Ward Howe, Oct. 6, 1873

"There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?"

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Revolution, March 12, 1868

"Child murderers practice their profession without let or hindrance, and open infant butcheries unquestioned. . . . Is there no remedy for all this ante-natal child murder? . . . Perhaps there will come a time when . . . an unmarried mother will not be despised because of her motherhood . . . and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with."

Sarah Norton

Woodbull's and Claffin's Weekly, Nov. 19, 1870

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