Early feminists would view abortion as unthinkable

Serrin Foster doesn't remember the graduation ceremony, but it has become part of her family’s oral history. Foster, the president of Feminists for Life America, was in her father’s arms when he graduated from the University of Maryland, and Foster’s mother was pregnant with her second child.

Life hadn’t been particularly ideal for Foster’s father. He had been an orphan during the Great Depression and spent years in foster care. “He was passed around,” Foster said.

But Foster’s parents always cherished family life and valued education, especially for their daughters. Foster and both of her sisters graduated from college, and Foster’s mother actually was in college herself in the mid-1970s working on a degree in special education.

This was a year or two after the Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand in 1973 through Roe v. Wade. For one of her course assignments, Foster’s mother was asked to research abortion from a sociological perspective.

Rather than regurgitate information from the latest periodicals, she decided to set up personal interviews with representatives of Planned Parenthood and Birthright, an organization dedicated to supporting women with unplanned pregnancies.

“This was early in the (feminist) movement,” Foster said. “My mother was absolutely freaked out. She came home after interviewing both sides and wanted to turn our rec room into a maternity home. She became an early Birthright volunteer.”

Foster, meanwhile, was majoring in public relations and speech at her college. By coincidence, she was assigned to promote the case against abortion, while a classmate advanced the contrary position. That debate has assaulted the moral conscience of America for the last 40 years.

“My mother gave me the notes from her interviews,” Foster said. “It came down to a class vote, and the class voted that I would get an ‘A-minus.’ They gave me an ‘A’ because they said I argued it very well, and they gave me a ‘minus’ because they said they hated everything I said. It was only a few years after Roe v. Wade, and the world had changed. I was the only pro-life feminist I knew.”

Foster presented “The Feminist Case Against Abortion” on Tuesday at Tulane University, and she exposed how the 19th century movement of those advocating for equal rights for women – dating back to Susan B. Anthony and Sarah F. Norton – had been hijacked by a pro-abortion ideology.

Those pioneers would be horrified by the actions justified in the name of women’s rights, when, in fact, they were clear that unborn human life should be protected.

“These women and men came out of the abolitionist movement, and they understood and believed in the rights of all human beings,” Foster said. “It would be inconsistent for them not to be pro-lifers.”

Norton wrote: “Perhaps there will come a time when an unmarried mother will not be despised because of her motherhood … and when the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with.”

Alice Stokes Paul, who died in 1977 at age 92, was a link to the American suffragists and women’s rights activists who lobbied to pass the 19th Amendment in 1920, which gave women the right to vote. Paul, the original author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, bitterly denounced the linkage of women’s rights to abortion rights.

“Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women,” Paul said.

Legal and legislative efforts to reverse the effects of Roe v. Wade are laudatory, Foster says, but Feminists for Life believes the best strategy for preserving human life is to “systematically eliminate the root causes that drive women to abortion” by providing practical solutions.

Much of Feminists for Life’s activities target college campuses, because quite often college-age women who become pregnant, even though their families may have money, see few options in carrying a child to term. Foster said Georgetown University has established a pregnancy care center for students who become pregnant, offering them housing, prenatal care and health care after giving birth.

Using that model as an impetus, the Benedictines of Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina donated four acres to build a college-based maternity center. Foster says as she travels around the country making talks on college campuses, she rarely sees a “visibly pregnant” student walking to class.

A “pregnancy resource forum” at Georgetown in 1997 identified some of the challenges.

“We heard the story of a woman who had an abortion because she couldn’t figure out a way to stay in school,” Foster said. “She didn’t want to disappoint her parents. They had invested a lot, and she didn’t want to drop out with her parents having all this debt and nothing to show for it.”

Foster does anticipate a sea change. Pro-life feminism is gaining steam. More women who have had abortions are speaking out about their pain. And, she says, “the science we have now puts a window on the womb.”

“If you look through history, it’s 75 years for most movements,” Foster said. “So, we’re obviously looking toward the next generation. But our goal is bigger than making abortion illegal. It’s to make it unthinkable.”

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at pfinney@clarionherald.org.