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Grrr, argh
Jan. 22nd, 2008 09:07 pmSo, today is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Which didn't seem to get much coverage in the media I generally consume. But there were protests. At the place where I go to happy hour, the sign outside said something like "Welcome Right to Live" or something. I remember that it said "live" instead of "life." And then there were signs in various trash cans on the way back to Union Station, and some people wearing pro-life things, and I actually growled at them as I passed. And then on the Metro there was a sign with Susan B. Anthony's name on it saying "I vote pro-life" and I got really, really mad. I was chatting with a new friend, but oh, I was not amused.
In fairness, a lot of the 19th and early 20th century proto-feminists were anti-abortion. And Susan B. Anthony was a little bit on the conservative side, for all that she was a Quaker and an abolitionist and women's right's activist. She was also involved in the temperance movement (as were lots of other women, all the reform movements of that period are related and overlap). And she wasn't as radical as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was always trying to get my girl Lizzie to chill out and focus on suffrage rather than getting behind all these other causes too. (When Mrs. Stanton wrote a letter congratulating Frederick Douglass on his second marriage, which was to a white woman, Miss Anthony was very afraid that Mrs. Stanton was going to make that her new campaign, and you can imagine that in the aftermath of Reconstruction inter-racial marriage as a platform plank wasn't gonna win too many people over.)
And even later, Margaret Sanger, the champion of birth control and the founder of what became Planned Parenthood, was against abortion. Part of why she wanted birth control to be available was to reduce abortions, mostly because she'd seen so many of them go bad but she may also have thought it was immoral on top of being very dangerous.
But even though my head knows these things, my heart still gets upset when I see "my people" being used by my opponents. And, of course, it's not really fair to speak for the dead. You can use their words to support your cause, but to try to assume what they would have thought or felt is tricky.
These are the people who made the sign, btw.
In fairness, a lot of the 19th and early 20th century proto-feminists were anti-abortion. And Susan B. Anthony was a little bit on the conservative side, for all that she was a Quaker and an abolitionist and women's right's activist. She was also involved in the temperance movement (as were lots of other women, all the reform movements of that period are related and overlap). And she wasn't as radical as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and was always trying to get my girl Lizzie to chill out and focus on suffrage rather than getting behind all these other causes too. (When Mrs. Stanton wrote a letter congratulating Frederick Douglass on his second marriage, which was to a white woman, Miss Anthony was very afraid that Mrs. Stanton was going to make that her new campaign, and you can imagine that in the aftermath of Reconstruction inter-racial marriage as a platform plank wasn't gonna win too many people over.)
And even later, Margaret Sanger, the champion of birth control and the founder of what became Planned Parenthood, was against abortion. Part of why she wanted birth control to be available was to reduce abortions, mostly because she'd seen so many of them go bad but she may also have thought it was immoral on top of being very dangerous.
But even though my head knows these things, my heart still gets upset when I see "my people" being used by my opponents. And, of course, it's not really fair to speak for the dead. You can use their words to support your cause, but to try to assume what they would have thought or felt is tricky.
These are the people who made the sign, btw.
