The beginning of the women’s movement was far different from modern feminism today. If you do a quick history search you’ll see women were focused on creating better job opportunities for themselves and looking to gain the right to vote, along with other equal rights. They had yet to be infiltrated with the pro-abortion agenda from "pro-choice" advocates and supported life.
Dr. Helen Alvaré and Sue Ellen Browder, the author of Subverted, spoke at an event held by Live Action at The Heritage Foundation, on Tuesday, to inform people that original feminism was against abortion, explaining how the sexual revolution hijacked the women’s movement of the 1960s.
“The abortion movement worked really hard to lobby the feminist movement on the idea that it would be a winning combination for abortion — they didn’t care about women!” Dr. Alvaré told the MRC. “I’m still a little confused about how women could have thought, even then before we had the data, that this would be good for them.”
Browder went into further detail explaining how the National Organization for Women (NOW) met in the Chinese room of the Mayflower Hotel in 1967 to “draw up” NOW’s bill of rights.
“They voted on what would be their political platform. At that very hour, the women’s movement split into two different pieces: pro-life feminists who walked out and said we can’t abide by this abortion thing and pro-abortion feminists who stayed in the National Organization for Women,” Browder said.
In her book, Browder notes that contraception and abortion weren’t originally part of the 1960s women’s movement. She explains that feminist Betty Friedan, the then President of NOW, took it upon herself to speak to the press on behalf of all women claiming they were all for abortion “rights,” when in fact, she was speaking for a very small percentage.
“The Washington Post, that next day, said, NOW the National Organization for Women, the women’s movement, embraces the sexual revolution of the twentieth-century by defending abortion, contraception, and sex education. Then the other journalists started following suit and pretty soon that just became the narrative, in our story, that all feminists are for abortion, but in fact, that was never true,” the author explained. “I’d like the journalists to wake up and realize that there’s two kinds of feminism out here duking it out and to stop saying that all feminists are for abortion.”
It’s no surprise the media took an issue like this and exaggerated it to where it is today. Hopefully, we’ll see a change on their side, but if not, we still have women like Sue Ellen Browder and Dr. Helen Alvaré that are doing what they can to teach people the truth about what’s really taking place.