Misogynistic Roots Will Bear Bad Fruit

He and his friend Larry Ladar—who Betty Friedan called “the father of the abortion rights movement”—convinced Friedan to add abortion to the National Organization for Women’s platform. In fact, Lader stated that “Abortion never became a feminist plank in the United States among the suffragettes or depression radicals. It was ignored, even boycotted by Planned Parenthood women in those days.”1

In 1969, Nathanson2 and Ladar, alongside Friedan, founded the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (or NARAL, currently known as Reproductive Freedom for All3). Friedan would later go on to say that “I remember that there were some men… that had been trying to reform these criminal abortion laws. And they got a sense somehow that the women’s movement might make everything different…. They kept nagging at me… to try and do something…. ‘We need some organization to take up… abortion rights.’”4