Barbara Ortiz Howard and Susan Ades Stone are making headlines as they push to get a female on a U.S. banknote by 2020. They’ve created the non-profit Women on 20s and have chosen the 20 dollar bill as their target.
Why the $20 bill you ask? They argue that the current face of the 20 dollar bill, Andrew Jackson, strongly opposed the central banking system and cite his harsh treatment of Native Americans are reason enough for his replacement. More importantly, 2020 will mark the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage, and the group thought it might be fitting to follow with that theme. Women on 20s said they hope to “commemorate that milestone by voting to elevate women to a place that until now has been reserved exclusively for the men who shaped American history.”
For now, let’s set aside whether or not we should dump old Andy and think this proposal through a bit.
Click here to sign up for daily pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
The group is asking women to vote for who they’d like to see placed on the bill from a list of 15 candidates. The list includes heroes like Rosa Parks, Clara Barton, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sojourner Truth. Nestled in that list, however, are also women like Margaret Sanger and Betty Friedan.
Am I surprised that these two names are on the list? Not at all. Am I saddened? Yes.
Most of the women that made the list are tremendous examples of female strength and positive impact. For instance, Rosa Parks altered the race discussion through her brave efforts in the Civil Rights Movement. Then there’s Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross, an organization which prevents and alleviates human suffering. However, Women on 20s’ board of “more than a dozen women’s historians and academicians” have unfortunately included women who have negatively impacted our history — Margaret Sanger and Betty Friedan have done more to victimize women than empower them.
The 1960s brought with them an era of women like Friedan and Sanger who publicized their own version of “women’s rights” — which cast husbands and children as problems to be managed and advocated for abortion-on-demand. The feminist “sexual revolution” led to the “hook-up culture” which has cost the American people emotionally, physically, and financially. Our nation now pays almost $16 billion a year in STD-related costs. Furthermore, since the Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade, it is estimated that more than 56 million babies have been aborted — which, to put that number in perspective, is relatively equal to the population of Texas, North Carolina, and New York combined.
Instead of expending so much energy trying to get a female on our currency, a better use of our time as women would be to spend it on another bill — the 20-week Pain-Capable bill. Women should be pushing their congressional leaders to pass a bill which would protect mothers from the dangerous effects of late-term abortion and the unborn from an excruciatingly painful death.
The 20-week Pain-Capable bill puts commonsense regulations on a procedure that leaves one person dead and another emotionally, and sometimes physically, wounded. As women, we should be caring for the least of those among us; we know that at 20-weeks gestation, little girls and boys in utero hear and respond to their mother’s voice. We also recognize that those same babies require anesthesia for fetal surgery because they can feel pain; doctors have said that unborn babies at 20-weeks’ development probably feel more intense pain than adults and react to stimuli through responses such as recoiling.
According to a Quinnipiac poll, 60 percent of women support the 20-week ban. This legislation should be a no-brainer for the majority of women who believe that abortion at this stage in development is clearly wrong.
Forget currency. What better legacy could women leave for future female generations than speaking up for the most vulnerable and protecting millions of babies who, might I add, are the next female generation.
LifeNews Note: Hannah Wegman is the Project Coordinator/Writer at Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee (CWALAC), the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization with 500,000 members across the country.
