As Roe v. Wade turned 40, we reiterated what we all know: that abortion kills.
“An abortion kills the life of the baby after it has begun. It is dangerous to your life and health.” Those are not the words of current pro-life activists—those were the words of Planned Parenthood in 1963. What’s changed since then? After all, abortion still kills. What’s changed is the decision of Planned Parenthood to float a fiction: it decided that the nascent feminist movement had to include the right of a woman to kill her unborn child. In doing so it broke ranks with the first feminists.
When President Obama invoked Seneca Falls at his inauguration, he sought to call attention to the first women’s rights convention in 1848. What he didn’t say is that the organizer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saw abortion as another case of treating women like property.
Pro-abortion feminists know that abortion kills. For example, Gloria Allred, the famous feminist lawyer, was once asked on TV whether it would be better if there were no abortions. “Not necessarily,” she said. Yet three years later when she took the side of a pregnant woman, Laci Peterson, who had been killed after naming her unborn baby Connor, Allred contended, “The fact that there are two individuals who are dead here, Laci and Connor, that has to be the most important consideration of everything.” She got it right—two individuals were killed.
Hillary Clinton upset some feminists in 2005 when she said, “We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women.” She didn’t say why abortion is sad, and didn’t have to: everyone knows abortion kills.
