Pro-Woman, Pro-life

For part of the lives of my grandmother, Mildred, and my great-grandmother, Pearl, in our great and glorious country of America women did not have equal rights with men. A time existed in America when women could not inherit family property, pursue schooling, get a divorce or vote. They were generally paid far less than men to do the same job and were severely restricted in the types of jobs and businesses they could have. Proper female professions were typically limited to teacher, nurse, farm help, factory worker, mill girl or maid.

Yet in spite of all these impediments, inequalities and injustices, contrary to some of today's feminists, the women's movement started out pro-woman, pro-life. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, passionately-in-love wife married 47 years, mother of seven, women's-rights activist and abolitionist, was both pro-woman and pro-life. In a 1873 letter to Julia Ward Howe, the originator of Mother's Day, Stanton writes, "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit."

Six of Stanton's children were planned; the seventh was not. She supported birth control, but not abortion linking abortion to infanticide. The seventh child was born to Henry Brewster Stanton and Elizabeth Cady Stanton later in life when Elizabeth was 44. She could have gotten rid of the "mistake," but instead of abortion, she chose life for their child.

Abortion and infanticide have an historical and present-day link. Jill Stanek was a registered nurse in the Labor & Delivery Department at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois. She discovered not only were abortions being committed there, but babies were being aborted alive to die without medical care.

When hospital leaders said that they would not stop, Stanek went public, eventually got fired for her outspokenness and has become a national figure in the effort to protect both born and pre-born infants. Her written testimony was included in U.S. Congressional debates on the Born Alive Infants Protection Act which became law on August 5, 2002. The Born Alive Infants Protection Act protects live aborted children from infanticide.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton authored the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments which sought equality for women. The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments reads in part, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . . . The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyrant over her . . . In view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half of the people of this country . . . because women do feel themselves aggrieved, . . . we insist that they have immediate admission to all rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."

Stanton joined with Susan B. Anthony to author the three-volume History of Woman Suffrage. Together these friends of 50 years were not just motivators they were movers. They fought for women's rights with many other women like Sojourner Truth. Although it was illegal for women to vote in America in the 1800s, Anthony cast her vote for president on November 5, 1872. She got arrested for it on November 18, 1872. Anthony says, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God." The Bible agrees. Acts 5:29 New Living Translation Bible says, "But Peter and the apostles replied, “We must obey God rather than any human authority." God does not favor men over women. Galatians 3:28 Amplified Bible says, "There is [now no distinction] neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

God also says through Solomon in Proverbs 22:6 English Standard Bible, "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it." While Anthony did not marry or have children, Stanton married and had seven children, but both died before women had the right to vote in America. Harriot Stanton Blatch, Stanton's daughter, and Nora Blatch, Stanton's granddaughter, continued to fight for women's right to vote. Despite beatings, imprisonments and other persecutions, women obtained the right to vote in America through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.