Feminist Disputes Pro-Life Tie

One in every five women who has an abortion is an undergraduate living on a college campus and one out of every two women who has an abortion is college-age, the president of “Feminists for Life” reported in a speech at Harvard Law School last night.

Serrin M. Foster—who became the president of the anti-abortion organization in 1994—attributed the high number of abortions in college to the lack of options that many undergraduates have, and added that most co-eds must unfairly choose between school and raising their child.

“I’m here to free women from abortion,” Foster said to a packed audience in Pound Hall. “Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the needs of women.”

She argued that feminism is the belief that all people are equal, and that this “without exception” includes “the unborn.”

“If you believe that all people are equal,” Foster said, “all choices are not.”

She cited the mothers of American feminism, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as the pioneers of the pro-life movement and as evidence that feminism and a pro-life stance are compatible.

According to Foster, Stanton called abortion “infanticide, feticide, and murder.”

Foster said in her speech that the pro-choice movement originated in the 1970s with two men who were the founders of NARAL Pro-Choice America, not from Betty N. Friedan and Gloria N. Steinem, the founders of the National Organization for Women.

She argued that Bernard Nathanson and Larry Lader convinced Friedan and Steinmen to take up their pro-choice cause.

Jeremiah D. Braunlin—who recently graduated from the Harvard Extension School—said he thought that Foster’s definition of the word “feminist” was interesting.

“When I think of the word ‘feminist’ I think of Foucault, J.S. Mill, or Katherine McKinnon, not necessarily a pro-life organization, but I think it was a politically cunning move to use that word because it drew together people who would not necessarily agree with them,” he said.

Karen A. Narefsky ’10, the co-president of Harvard Students for Choice, disagreed and said that Foster’s use of the word “feminist” was inappropriate.

When asked about the speech, she called the organization’s opinions “anti-woman” and “anti-feminist”.

Narefsky attended an event in the fall with a “Feminists for Life speaker” and said that she was dismayed by the comments.

“I felt that women were talked about as though they were children or objects and not as though they were active, thinking adults,” she said.

—Staff writer Sofia E. Groopman can be reached at segroopm@fas.harvard.edu