Astounding

The real history of the men who legalized abortion:

Blackmun and his clerk constructed Roe and Doe largely upon the false assumptions found in that unreliable book previously mentioned. Published in 1966, the book’s full title was Abortion: The first authoritative and documented report on the laws and practices governing abortion in the U.S. and around the world and how — for the sake of women everywhere — they can and must be reformed. Its author was a magazine writer named Lawrence Lader, whose most significant previous work had been a biography of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (whom he proclaimed to be “the greatest influence” in his life).

Co-founder with Dr. Bernard Nathanson of the National Association to Repeal Abortion Laws (now NARAL Pro-Choice America), Lader was an heir of old money who believed the world was becoming so overpopulated with poor people that we would all soon starve to death, a premise he laid out in another of his books, Breeding Ourselves to Death. In his view, the way to stop all those poor women from overbreeding and ruining the planet was to get them on contraception, with abortion as a backup when contraception failed. 

A sexual revolutionary, Lader wrote in Abortion II: Making the Revolution that the idea of legalizing abortion “struck at the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church and fundamentalist faiths, but even more important, at the whole system of sexual morality to which the middle class gave lip service.” Calling pregnancy “the ultimate punishment of sex,” he said that to tamper with abortion meant the whole system of sexual morality in the U.S. could come tumbling down.

One of Lader’s most persuasive arguments was based on the assumption that abortion on demand was “the ultimate freedom” for women — a “right” women had always wanted and which, due to the miracles to modern medicine, was now safer than pregnancy. Ironically, Sanger would eventually split with Lader over his radical ideas about abortion; she frequently and repeatedly condemned abortion as murder. And yet as late as August 1992, According to his papers, Blackmun was still echoing Lader’s claim that women “need” abortion to be “free” when he said Roe and Doe “are, I believe, a watershed on the road we must travel toward the emancipation of women.” 

What Blackmun apparently didn’t know was that most of the early feminists who won for women the right to vote opposed abortion, and up until 1967 the call to reform America’s abortion laws was led primarily by men. In his 1,283-page volume Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, retired Villanova University law professor Joseph Dellapenna writes, “Despite the growing mythology that describes the entire birth-control movement, as well as the abortion reform movement, throughout the twentieth century as a ‘woman’s movement,’ both movements were largely led by men (especially doctors) until the late 1960s.” Further, Dellapenna observes that “until quite recently most feminists were strong opponents of abortion, and the farther back one goes in time the more nearly unanimous feminists become in their hostility to abortion.”

So it was never a woman's movement after all. It will end because enough women finally will have said, "Enough. There are better ways to help women facing an unexpected pregnancy." Then they will demand parental leave, childcare, and free healthcare during pregnancy and after delivery. 

Let us all become the New Suffragettes!