Be Pro-Life, Like the Early Feminists

O n July 19, 1848, hundreds of women and men met in Seneca Falls, N.Y., to establish what would become the first wave of the feminist movement. By the time it was finished the next evening, the Seneca Falls Convention had produced a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, which articulated the principles of gender equality that would guide the new movement as it fought to secure voting rights for women over the next seven decades. The convention’s attendees didn’t know it at the time, but they’d just fired the opening salvo in a campaign that would ultimately lead those rights to be enshrined in the Constitution, with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

Visit the website of almost any pro-abortion-rights group today, and it will claim that the group is working in the tradition of the great heroes of Seneca Falls. But many of the feminists who attended the convention that July would have found the efforts of these groups horrendous: The most famous early suffragettes were vehemently opposed to abortion, and saw their belief in the dignity of the unborn as an essential part of their activism.

Perhaps the most notable attendee of Seneca Falls was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the convention’s organizers, who embraced motherhood on both a personal and public level. In her own home, she was proud of having a large family, which would ultimately total seven children. Whenever she and her husband, Henry, welcomed a new baby into the world, she would raise a flag outside their house — red for a boy and white for a girl. After she gave birth to her daughter Harriet in 1852, Stanton sent a letter to fellow Seneca Falls organizer Lucretia Mott. “I am at length the happy mother of a daughter,” she wrote. “Rejoice with me all Womankind for lo! A champion of thy cause is born.”

In addition to privately adoring her children, Stanton also made more explicit overtures against abortion. In a letter to her friend Julia Ward Howe in 1873, she wrote, “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.”

While Stanton and Mott played a central role in the Seneca Falls Convention, the woman whom history would come to most closely associate with the early feminist movement, Susan B. Anthony, did not attend. But she was just as devoted to the cause as Stanton — they became important allies a few years later — and was similarly emphatic in her belief that the unborn had a right to life.

With editorial help from Stanton, Anthony produced The Liberator, a periodical that advocated fearlessly for women’s equality. A February 1868 issue republished a report from another paper that lamented that, going hand in hand with brothels, covert institutions led women to be “relieved of all the bonds of maternity.” Clearly regarding abortion as tantamount to infanticide, the report recounted “the murder of children, either before or after birth.” Added to the reprint were comments from Stanton, who wrote that “the cause of all these abuses lies in the degradation of women.”

One of Anthony’s and Stanton’s policies was not to advertise medicines from “quacks” in The Liberator. In an August 1868 editorial item entitled “Quacks and Their Drugs and Deeds,” the two praised an Ohio law that prohibited the selling of “drugs and nostrums to prevent conception or procure abortion.” At the same time, they criticized the law for not prohibiting newspapers from advertising such medications and said the law would not “fail to lessen the disgrace we are subjected to now by the number of beings who make a living by the slaughter of their race.”

It was no accident that suffragettes such as Stanton and Anthony were staunch and clear in their belief that abortion resulted in the murder of a baby, and in praising efforts to outlaw the procedure. The notion that women needed to partake in something immoral for the sake of their advancement was itself immoral, they believed. Infanticide was one part of a larger system that hurt and exploited women.

They passed these beliefs on to their successors and disciples, too. Angelina Weld Grimke, a black feminist who participated in the Harlem Renaissance, wrote multiple short stories that centered on lynchings. In a scene from one such story, which she said was based on an actual event, she described how a white mob had tied a pregnant black woman to a tree and cut her belly open with a butcher knife before setting her on fire. As a result, “her unborn child fell to the ground at her feet. It emitted one or two little cries but was soon silenced by brutal boots that crushed the head.” Alice Paul, a contemporary of Grimke’s who wrote the original Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, called abortion “the ultimate exploitation of women.”

Sometime later, of course, the women’s movement came to reject the idea that opposition to abortion should be central to feminist ideology. The second-wave feminists of the late 20th century were rightly horrified at a society that castigated promiscuous women while turning a blind eye to unfaithful men, but they faltered in concluding that the solution was to embrace “free love” for women as well men. With that came the movement’s embrace of abortion, which discredited its own claims that it was standing up for women’s well-being.

Happily, however, alongside the feminist movement’s shift away from opposition to abortion, the pro-life movement sprang up. Today, major pro-life organizations are headed by women, such as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which recognize that abortion kills children and also abuses their mothers. They are the true intellectual heirs to those who gathered at Seneca Falls close to two centuries ago. They are fighting for life just as those who came before them. And like those noble suffragists, after decades of hard work and persistence through countless setbacks, they’ve finally begun to taste success.