When Women Unsexed Themselves
The following is an excerpt from a series I’ve begun at Catholic Sistas.
The book, Our Bodies, Our Selves, is passed out around the U.S. to women at reproductive health facilities, the standard guide for information on women’s health advertising that it “provides clear, truthful information” from a “feminist and consumer perspective.” The book has been published since 1970 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, a nonprofit, public interest women’s health education, advocacy, and consulting organization. They claim to have inspired the women’s health movement.
Since 1970? Really?
The book has a chapter about the history of abortion. Abortion was actually criminalized in the U.S. in 1880 and, not surprisingly, this book depicts that legislation as part of a “an effort to control women and confine them to their traditional childbearing role,” It says the laws were a way for the medical profession to “tighten its control over women’s health care,” and that midwives, willing to commit abortions, were a “threat to the male medical establishment.” It also claims that with the “the U.S. government and the eugenics movement were concerned about ‘race suicide’ and wanted white U.S.-born women to reproduce.” But none of that is true. The history recorded in the writings of the doctors themselves tells a very different story. Their quotes are below.
This is undignified.
Do you know the real history of how abortion became illegal in the U.S.?
Recently I have had the privilege of (virtually) meeting the leading expert on the history of abortion, Dr. Frederick N. Dyer, and he has obtained the actual writings and publications of the doctors during that time. He has also actively pursued a long-held interest in the key figure in that history, Dr. Horatio Robinson Storer. Dr. Storer practiced in the mid 1800’s in Boston when the topic of abortion was taboo, but the practice of abortion was becoming more common. Enlisting the American Medical Society to begin a crusade against abortion, he led nineteenth century physicians to successfully persuade the legislature to criminalize abortion.
Read the rest at Catholic Sistas!
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How do I find the rest of the article on the Cathoic Sistas site?
What amazing information this is. I need that book!
As a young woman in the early ’70′s, I was captivated by “Our Bodies, Our Selves”; I don’t know that I had my own copy, but I know I read my sister’s. I read other “women’s lib” books (like Betty Friedan’s), and I was a charter subscriber to Ms Magazine. I look back and ask myself, “Why?!” I was young and susceptible, I guess, and had a boyfriend who wanted sex…My parents, like so many others, had been unprepared for the “women’s movement”, and didn’t “innoculate” me against it. I went to a PP clinic for birth control pills, and was disgusted by the degrading treatment I received, but that didn’t open my eyes to their lies. I thank God that I have a daughter who is committed to purity and whose sole aim in life is to become a wife and home-schooling mom.
Lena,
My apologies for taking so long to release your comment and to answer it. We were out of the house today.
You can read the rest of the article here:
http://www.catholicsistas.com/2012/01/19/when-women-unsexed-themselves/
The next in the series will be in 2-3 weeks and I’ll post an excerpt here then too. Dr. Dyer’s work on this subject is one of a kind.
Jay, the book is very revealing. Dr. Dyers has quotes throughout, no speculating about what the doctors meant back then. They weren’t trying to oppress women. They thought abortion was murder.
Thanks to you both for your interest.