Susan B. Anthony abortion dispute
Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) is widely known for her dedication to three issues: women's suffrage, abolition and temperance. She was raised by abolitionist Quaker parents, later attending Unitarian churches and becoming an agnostic.
As a young woman she worked in the temperance movement and as a speaker and organizer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. She is known primarily, however, for her leadership in the women's suffrage movement, a cause to which she devoted most of her life. The Nineteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right of women to vote, has been called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment because of her efforts to achieve its passage.
In 1979 she was honored as the first American woman to be represented on U.S. currency, the Susan B. Anthony dollar.
Susan B. Anthony abortion dispute
Several pro-life feminist groups such as Feminists for Life (FFL) (founded in the early 1970s), as well as conservative organizations such as Concerned Women for America (founded in 1979) have used Anthony's words and image extensively to promote the pro-life cause, saying that Anthony was pro-life. Catholic theologian Michael Novak wrote in February 1989 that FFL had "unearthed quotations showing that many of the founders of the feminist movement had grave reservations about abortion." Ann Dexter Gordon, a 30-year scholar of Anthony and the leader of the Rutgers University "Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony Papers Project", says she, too, noticed in 1989 that such assertions were being made about Anthony, and disagreed with these assertions. In 1993, the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) was founded; it is a political group with the ultimate goal of ending abortion in the United States by supporting pro-life politicians, especially women. The organization was so named because its founder, Rachel MacNair, who was also the president of FFL, believed that Anthony opposed abortion and had once called it "child-murder".