Posted on 06/16/2024 3:45:08 AM PDT by Morgana
The “Father of Abortion Rights,” Larry Lader, held eugenic beliefs inspired by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger — but on abortion, they parted ways, with Lader being extremely in favor of abortion. Lader and his colleague Bernard Nathanson were the two men most instrumental in pushing the 1960’s women’s movement towards abortion.
The reason we know this information, says “Subverted” author Sue Ellen Browder, is because Nathanson, an abortionist who later converted to the pro-life cause, had stories to tell. Image: Larry Lader and Bernard Nathanson. Both men worked against the feminist pro-life movement to push abortion on women.
Browder told Live Action president Lila Rose in an interview, “These two men, Larry Lader and Bernard Nathanson, had founded this organization [NARAL] and… Lader knew Betty Friedan very well. They were magazine writers together in New York. Larry Lader had graduated from Harvard University. He was fairly independently wealthy… and his greatest passion was to make abortion legal. And he worked on Betty Friedan for years to try to convince her to insert abortion into her list of demands [within the National Organization for Women (NOW)]….”
“We would never had known it was Lader who at last persuaded Betty to insert abortion into NOW’s package of ‘women’s rights’ if it weren’t for the written testimony of a third party who eye-witnessed events as they unfolded behind the scenes,” Browder wrote in her book. That eyewitness was Nathanson.
“If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and into the streets, we’re going to have to recruit the feminists,” Browder quotes Lader as suggesting.
“Friedan has got to put her troops into this thing – while she still has control of them,” Lader stated.
Friedan, Browder notes, had agreed to write a foreword in the jacket of Lader’s book. “He wrote a book on abortion and it was full of half truths, selective truths and truths out of context. But it was trying to prove to women that they need abortion to be free,” Browder stated. “And Betty Friedan bought it. She gave him a wonderful blurb on the back cover saying what a wonderful book this was. So, she now agreed with him.”
Lader wanted to “unleash the fury of women”
Nathanson, who reluctantly agreed to work with Lader in 1967 to convince Friedan’s feminists to support an abortion plank, once admitted, “Larry’s marriage with the feminists was a brilliant tactic.” But Nathanson later regretted the decision.
“In short I found, to my surprise, that I had been subtly dragooned into planning political strategy with Lader,” Nathanson wrote regretfully in his book, “The Hand of God.” Nathanson called himself and Lader “radicals,” writing, “We would settle for nothing less than striking down all existing statutes and substituting abortion on demand.”
The scheme was simple. In “Abortion,” Lader placed the responsibility on women to pronounce abortion as a freedom:
Women themselves must bear the special responsibility of rallying opinion behind reform, standing up and making their demands for justice known throughout the country. Nothing is stronger than the moral power of an idea once it has come of age. And the moral power of legalized abortion will surely prevail when women have directed their anger against the superstitions of centuries, and cried out for the final freedom of procreative choice.
In “Abortion II,” Lader prophetically concluded that to legalize abortion, women would need “to stand before television cameras and describe their own abortions to the public…. It needed brawling women, shouting defiance of the law….” Lader then took credit for convincing women to join, writing, “It took only a few of us in 1966 – the early fanatics – to break the silence and unleash the fury of women. Once the National Organization for Women and Women’s Liberation groups joined the abortion movement, we were ready to shake the country.”
“Significantly, even Friedan, one of the most impressive militants of her time, avoided the abortion issue at first,” Lader recounted in the same book. He wrote, “[W]hile she was writing Mystique, I occasionally suggested that all feminist demands hinged on contraception and abortion and a woman’s control over her own body and procreation. Yet, her book hardly touched this fundamental problem and mentioned Margaret Sanger only peripherally….”
“The breakthrough came slowly,” Lader wrote. “In June 1966, at a meeting of the Commissions on the Status of Women in Washington, Friedan emerged from the status of woman to activist,” Lader said, recounting how Friedan founded NOW. “Although pounding away at the abortion issue in her lectures, she still hesitated to force it into the NOW platform for fear of splitting off Catholics and conservative professionals.”
Then, in a 1966 news conference announcing Lader‘s book, the LA Times recounted how reporters began using new rhetoric, calling abortion “a civil rights movement for women.”
One year later, in 1967, Lader would convince Friedan to add an abortion plank into NOW.
“Friedan has claimed that she did not start out consciously to start to a revolution,” Lader noted in his book “Ideas Triumphant.” But, he said, “This is not completely accurate. At the time she agreed to write a plug for my book jacket in 1965, we were discussing how to turn ideas into organizing. The founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 was pivotal.”
“By bringing NOW and eventually Women’s Lib into the abortion campaign, Friedan assured that the struggle for feminine liberation was solidly rooted in the one base that could turn theory into reality – a woman’s control over her own body and procreation,” Lader wrote in “Abortion II.”
Lader’s abortion obsession continued into the 1990’s when he pushed for the legalization of the abortion pill, RU486. In a 2000 press release, Lader bragged about his “plot” to break the law and smuggle the drug into the US.
He told an audience, “We have all sorts of little tricks; we’re tricky people. We smuggled some in from China through a doctor I knew coming in…. We then set up a very small lab… to make a small amount… and then we were very lucky; we found a very good manufacturer in the US and we have been with them ever since.”
Lader died in 2006 from colon cancer. He was 86.
Women have no agency; it’s all men’s fault./S
“I know that in *Christian* colleges, used to be that if a girl got pregnant out of wedlock, she had to quit college and was sent home in shame.
What happened to the guy?
Usually nothing.
He was allowed to finish his degree and graduate and go into missions or the ministry, or something.
Mind you, I’m a Christian, but this policy absolutely ROTTED. Talk a bout a two tiered *justice* system.
That girl did NOT get pregnant in a vacuum, and yet she was always the one who bore the blame and was shamed over it.
The double standard men manage to rationalize in their minds is disgusting and hypocritical.”
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Back in the 1980’s my stepmom would listen to “Focus on the family” on the radio.
I remember one day they were talking about this very situation.
One Christian college had to stop this because they found out the women were just getting abortions.
Of course they were! Christian colleges are private and that is a lot of money and they were going going to be hauled off the the Dean’s office, lose that tuition and all those credits over a pregnancy, when in fact the boy did not get kicked out.
Why did it take abortion for them to realize their mistake?
Problem is it only helped the pro aborts sell more abortions. They might as well had a shuttle bus to that school to the abortion mill.
At the time I was pro-choice as were a lot of girls in high school. That only made me more pro-choice because I saw in that story abortion giving those girls “rights” or “power over” those oppressive males and rules of that school.
At the end of my HS year I was asked by an older woman if I’d ever attend a Christian college and I was like “are you freaking kidding me lady?” She was shocked she did not understand why I answered her like I was insulted she would even ask why I would want to attend one.
It’s only because of the Catholic Church and the Blessed Virgin Mary that I’m pro-life now. Most Protestants are shocked when I say the Virgin Mary and not Jesus. In my church we have all kinds of images of the Virgin Mary holding Baby Jesus and one day while starring at one I thought to myself “if she had had an abortion we would have all been screwed”. Be so thankful the Virgin Mary chose life.
That's what they did with LBJ's Great Society Programs so 90% of the Blacks are voting for the Democrats.
I’m prolife because murder is wrong.
It has nothing to do with Catholicism.
Most Christians I’ve ever attended church with also feel the same way and for them the stand of Catholicism has nothing to do with it either.
Not all of us by a long shot. I know lots of women who are pro-life.
And there are plenty of men who are pro-abortion. There are way too many accounts I have read of women being pushed into abortions by the husband or boyfriend who don't want to deal with child support for the child they fathered.
This blaming all women for problems that men also have a hand in is disingenuous. Men need to own up to their share of the responsibility in the matter and quit the blanket blame shifting.
It was also sometimes the other way around. I witnessed a conversion of the woman’s point of view from pro-abort to anti-abort while people were demonstrating outside an abortion mill. Someone heard them speaking Spanish as the woman left to go inside the mill and gathered that the man was against this. She had a rosary with her, even though she was not Catholic. She went up to the car and asked the man if they could say the rosary together.
After the first few prayers, the woman came out again. She had changed her mind.
Even to call the employees “health workers” . . .
In our area, the Catholics aren’t involved in any pro-life events or organizations. It’s the Presbyterians and Baptists who organize the March For Life every year, fund and support the pro-life resource centers as budget line items, and help pregnant mothers in other ways. Nary one Catholic to be seen.
I know it works both ways, in all cases.
However, some here on FR seem to be oblivious to that fact and blame every wrong on the planet on women as a group.
That's anecdotal.
The referendums in Kansas and Ohio passed in favor of legalizing abortion.
I'm just dealing with political reality.
Even Donald Trump said that it's up to each state to do their own thing on abortion.
It seems to depend on how strong a person’s faith is...
I was involved with both Catholic and Protestant churches for many years. The devout Catholics and Evangelical Christians were pro-life, whereas the mainstream Protestants and so-called “cafeteria Catholics” were a mixed bag.
Around here, the Catholic churches have always been more actively involved in pro-life issues, from protesting abortion clinics to counseling pregnant women. Every Catholic church where I went had a pro-life group.
Overall, the Evangelical Christians were not as focused on the issue. Their churches focused more on other issues.
Some atheists are pro-life. I remember a few on this forum in the early days, especially one who posted about it all the time. If you strongly believe there is no afterlife, well...
You seem to be confusing two different issues. Plenty of young, single women who sleep around become mothers long before 40.
The women who remain virgins while waiting for marriage sometimes "hit their forties with no prospects" because too many men expect a test drive before the wedding night.
Despicable. As is “Women’s health care”. What is “healthy” in death?
That's the other debate that I said you and I would probably agree on, which we do.
Bringing in trafficked women: thats rape.
It's also a billion dollar industry that caters mostly to you know who.
Women still are the losers.
You seem to be changing your point from "It is all on women" to "women are the losers".
That's not always true either. A woman can get pregnant without the man's verbal consent, although I would say he consented by ramming it into her, then the male judge falls all over himself awarding the woman as much he can in order to score point with whomever he wants to ram it into. I've seen this happen for decades, and men refuse to learn from it. That's why I have so little sympathy for men.
But getting back to the issue at hand, there is a famous actress/comedienne who admits to having had four abortions. If a man screws her knowing that she'll abort any baby that is conceived, then he is at least at fault for contributing to that situation.
Yep, whatever....continue the trend.
Have a good day.
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