Quick abortion history lesson

I've had this on my mind for a few days to share. One inevitable assumption that the younger people have today is that in the 1960's and the 1970's that there must have been a "women's liberation" movement to gain the "right" to an abortion. That's actually not true. There was not a grassroots, cohesive or extensive effort or even a demand for abortion by women. Several small independent advocates for abortion worked to promote it as a "right" and once they got the right they worked on "marketing abortion" to mainstream girls and women.

The first fans of abortion were socialists and communist sympathizers. This is because the USSR (now Russia) legalized abortion before the USA and were thus held up as the darlings of modern "rights" for women and sophisticated attitudes toward "sexuality." If you knew how miserable the average Soviet citizen, including women, were then even with their "prized" abortion "rights" you'd never fall for the propaganda. But the extreme left, especially women, lionized the "advanced" attitudes the USSR had toward women, while actually abortion was just another sign that the opposite was true, since socialism and communism are against the family unit as the foundation of a healthy society (instead, the "state" is the foundation).

The second fans of abortion were middle class and wealthy women, precisely the ones who could most afford to actually have a child and give it up for adoption, but chose not to do so. Today it is understandable that many think that the pro-aborts were advocating on behalf of poor women. Not true. In fact, poor people were not demanding abortion at all. They were more concerned with regional poverty (such as Appalachia) and Civil Rights. Poor people wanted families and children and worried about feeding, clothing and housing them, not aborting them. I watched one wealthy or "well to do" girl or woman after the other have an abortion simply because the baby was an inconvenience. You would not believe the excuses when one was offered. One young married couple aborted their first baby after discussion with her father (a doctor) because "she might be at a high cancer risk because she regularly gets cysts in her ear lobe." I could not make this up if I tried. A few years later they had a baby when it was convenient to them. So in the early 1970's, trust me, it was girls from wealthy and liberal families and women who could support a child but did not want to be "burdened" in their careers and dating lives who aborted like crazy, hiding behind the skirts of poor women who were not seeking abortions at all, or at least no where near on that scale.

And, sadly, reform Jewish women led the way for abortion rights. It's something that grieved me very much and I still do not understand. I really can't say much about this because I guess that's what "reform" means, which is to lose one's core faith. That's why to this day I do not consider reform Jews to be followers of Judaism. But even if one is not a devout Jew, would one not have a slight shudder at pushing abortion for historic and cultural reasons? You would think. But, young people, this is how the seculars worked on tempting reform Jewish men and women. They explained that a genetic disorder, Tay Sachs disease, which is predominant among Jewish genetic profiles, can be identified in the womb and the baby aborted. The temptation was that it's not birth control, it's eliminating a birth defect. But it took off like paper on fire and of course became one of the most enshrined "rights" of the liberal cultural Jews. Orthodox Jews responded differently. Some adopted screening before marriage in order to not marry a partner who would together create a mutual high risk profile and thus avoid the temptation of abortion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Sachs-Disease

So I hope this helps you to see that various small enfranchised interests pushed for abortion, and this was not one of those great "glass ceiling" "barriers" to "women's equal rights" that "all women" were "advocating for." Special interest groups pushed abortion for their own agenda and then coalesced to push it (like a drug) as a tool against "inequality" and "poverty."

They corrupted agencies and organizations that started out as good intentioned. Planned Parenthood USED to be about planning families, not preventing families. I fully supported Planned Parenthood when they were about managing one's birth spacing and creation of a family. Back then they freely discussed even that Catholic approved method of "rhythm" and research was being done with thermometers and so forth to try to refine the predictability of women's natural cycles. But then they got hooked on the drug of abortion and they now should be ashamed of keeping the "Planned Parenthood" trademark.

Also, there was a big population management push in the 1970's and at first I thought they were reasonable too. This is because to me population management means "family spacing." It means giving women, and men, the understanding to space out their births in a healthy way, rather than have continual child bearing. Islam supports family spacing (with use of birth control but not abortion) and Catholics support family spacing (if natural rhythm method is used and definitely not abortion). I always thought that family spacing could have been a more reasonable approach toward the overpopulation problem of that other darling of the communist lovers, China, back when they instituted their "one child, forced abortion otherwise" policy. I had hoped that a pro family "family spacing" movement could have mitigated and prevented abortions and also reduce suffering in impoverished areas. But abortion lovers hijacked all population management associations too, so like with Planned Parenthood, I dumped my support of them in the 1980's.

I hope this helps you, especially the young people, understand how this really was not a movement like Civil Rights, far from it, and that it came from very dubious groups with not very nice agendas, under closer examination.