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5 pioneer feminists against abortion:

1. Elizabeth Stanton was clear that she considered abortion to be a form of infanticide, and therefore rejected it totally. She also blamed men for abortion, saying that it was a symptom of the oppression of women (rather than a sign of their empowerment!),

2. Susan B. Anthony viewed abortion as an evil consequence of the oppression of women by men, and not a tool of their empowerment. In her famous 1875 speech “Social Purity,” she denounces abortion alongside adultery, rape, and infanticide as examples of symptoms of the mistreatment of women by men,

3. Mary Wollstonecraft viewed abortion as a symptom of the mistreatment of women by men. In Vindication of the Rights of Women, she wrote that a lack of education for women means they “have not sufficient strength to discharge the first duty of a mother” and “either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born. Nature in everything demands respect … men ought to maintain the women they have seduced."

4. Sarah F. Norton “child murder” and “infant butchery,” longing for the day when “the right of the unborn to be born will not be denied or interfered with” and

5. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman graduate of an American medical school. “The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term “female physician” should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women…I finally determined to do what I could do “to redeem the hells,” and especially the one form of hell thus forced upon my notice.”

These early feminists viewed mistreatment of women by men the reason for the existence of abortion, as abortion benefited men to the detriment of women.