voluntary motherhood

Contrary to contemporary claims, Susan B. Anthony and her peers rarely discussed abortion, which only emerged as a key political issue in the 1960s

Treva B. Lindsey
May 26, 2022

In July 1869, an anonymously authored article appeared in the Revolution, a weekly newspaper run by suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Titled “Marriage and Maternity,” the essay deemed abortion a “horrible crime of child-murder,” albeit one practiced not out of malice, but desperation, “by those whose inmost souls revolt against the dreadful deed, and in whose hearts the maternal feeling is pure and undying.”

Signed only with the letter “A,” the article has long been used by anti-abortion advocates as proof of Anthony’s anti-abortion views and of a broader throughline within feminist thought and activism. This claim, however, ignores two key facts: first, that substantial evidence points to the author not even being Anthony, and second, that the essay argues against the criminalization of abortion, calling for “prevention, not merely punishment.”

Continued: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-did-the-suffragists-really-think-about-abortion-180980124/

Women Have Always Had Abortions

By Lauren MacIvor Thompson
Dec. 13, 2019

Over the course of American history, women of all classes, races, ages and statuses have ended their pregnancies, both before there were any laws about abortion and after a raft of 19th-century laws restricted it. Our ignorance of this history, however, equips those in the anti-abortion movement with the power to create dangerous narratives. They peddle myths about the past where wayward women sought abortions out of desperation, pathetic victims of predatory abortionists. They wrongly argue that we have long thought about fetuses as people with rights. And they improperly frame Roe v. Wade as an anomaly, saying it liberalized a practice that Americans had always opposed.

But the historical record shows a far different set of conclusions.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/opinion/sunday/abortion-history-women.html

What Did the Suffragists Really Think About Abortion?

USA – Women Have Always Had Abortions