The insistence that abortion was central to woman’s independence and autonomy was a new addition to women’s liberation, by Betty Friedan, in a mid-century best-seller, The Feminine Mystique.
For public consumption, the myth was cultivated that Friedan was a devoted house-wife who felt stifled by bourgeois mores until she broke free.
The reality was different. Bettye Naomi Goldstein Friedan was actually a communist activist and trade unionist, who inserted the demand for abortion, on the advice of Lawrence Lader, founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, and Bernard Nathanson, an activist obstetrician who later recanted and became pro-life, admitting that he was personally responsible for 75,000 abortions.
Betty Friedan’s fame rested on her transformation from disillusioned suburban housewife to feisty leader of women’s liberation.
However, as Prof Horowitz revealed, under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein was a member of the Young Communist League at Berkeley (1942-43). From 1946 to 1952, she worked as a journalist for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, “the largest Communist-led institution of any kind in the USA”.
Take this quote from Frederick Engel’s famous 1884 essay, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State:
“The emancipation of women becomes possible only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social scale, and when domestic duties require their attention only to a minor degree.”
Engel was saying that equality of the sexes would only happen when women abandoned their homes and become worker-drones.
Lader, the brains behind Friedan’s strategic use of abortion, was deeply prejudiced against the Catholic church and sought to reduce its influence on public policy.
The roots of the pro-abortion movement thus lie in Lader’s anti-Catholicism.
Lader, as recalled by Nathanson, “brought out his favorite whipping boy”:
“`…(A)nd the other thing we’ve got to do is bring the Catholic hierarchy out where we can fight them. That’s the real enemy. The biggest single obstacle to peace and decency throughout all of history.’”
Nathanson continued, “He held forth on that theme through most of the drive home. It was a comprehensive and chilling indictment of the poisonous influence of Catholicism in secular affairs from its inception until the day before yesterday. I was far from an admirer of the church’s role in the world chronicle, but his insistent, uncompromising recitation brought to mind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It passed through my mind that if one had substituted ‘Jewish’ for ‘Catholic,’ it would have been the most vicious anti-Semitic tirade imaginable.’”