Pro-Life Groups Honor Susan B. Anthony’s Birthday, Point to Abortion Opposition
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
February 15, 2010
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Susan B. Anthony is often considered one of the earliest leaders for women’s rights but, as Americans remember her today on her birthday, pro-life groups point out that she was vehemently pro-life. Though modern-day women’s groups promote abortion, Anthony would not have joined them.
America’s most well-known women’s rights leader was born 190 years ago today, on February 15, 1820.
The president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a national organization named for the pro-life suffragette, reflected on Anthony’s largely unknown pro-life legacy.
“If Susan B. Anthony were alive today, she would be overjoyed by the strength of the growing American pro-life majority,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the group that helps elect pro-life women to office.
“While many are familiar with Anthony’s efforts to earn women the right to vote, few realize she vehemently opposed abortion. Anthony recognized that authentic women’s rights could never be built upon the broken rights of innocent unborn children," she told LifeNews.com today.
Dannenfelser says American women are coming to the realization that abortion doesn’t represent them — a concept Anthony readily understood two centuries ago.
“Susan B. Anthony’s brand of original, authentic pro-life feminism resonates with today’s American woman,” said Dannenfelser.
“And it’s why the old guard of abortion-promoting feminists struggles to remain relevant. In our increasingly pro-life culture, the ‘pro-choice’ label has worn out its usefulness. The modern feminist mantra calling for a taxpayer-funded abortion in every home flies in the face of Susan B. Anthony’s legacy of equal rights for all, even the unborn," she explained.
Sally Winn, executive director of the museum at Anthony’s birthplace home in Adams, Massachusetts, confirms Anthony’s pro-life heritage.
"We have one section that is on Susan B. Anthony’s opposition to Restellism — which was a term for abortions in that era," she told the Bennington Banner newspaper.
The museum has more than 80 issues of Anthony’s newspaper, The Revolution, which makes more than 100 references to abortion and Winn said each of the references is in direct opposition to abortion. She also points out that the newspaper did not accept advertising for abortion.
Anthony referred to abortion as “the horrible crime of child-murder,” and said that abortion would “burden [a woman’s] conscience in life, [and] it will burden her soul in death.”
"I think people would be hard-pressed to find any evidence to the contrary," Winn said about Anthony’s opposition to abortion.
Serrin Foster, the president of Feminists for Life of America, which continues in the pro-life, pro-woman mindset of Anthony, also confirms the women’s rights leader was pro-life.
"There’s no real debate about where Anthony stood on abortion," Foster says.
Dannenfelser says women today, like Anthony, appear to understand that abortion is bad for women.
She points to an October 2009 poll conducted by the Polling Company and WomenTrend that found two-thirds of women objected to government-funded abortions in a healthcare bill, including majorities of women of all ages, races, regions, marital and parental statuses, and political parties.
Of these women, 55% self-identified as Democrats, 66% as Independents, and 84% as Republicans. Even the minority of 39% of women who identified as “pro-choice” opposed abortion funding.
This data supports the Gallup poll from May 2009 that found a majority of Americans (51%) labeled themselves as “pro-life.” The Gallup poll also found that more women, 49% over 44%, call themselves “pro-life” over “pro-choice.”
Related web sites:
Susan B. Anthony List – https://www.sba-list.org
Feminists for Life of America – https://www.feministsforlife.org
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