Betty Friedan
Abortion choice

She supported the concept that abortion is a woman's choice, that it shouldn't be a crime or exclusively a doctor's choice or anyone else involved, and helped form NARAL (now NARAL Pro-Choice America) at a time when Planned Parenthood wasn't yet supportive. Alleged death threats against her speaking on abortion led to the cancellation of two events, although subsequently one of the host institutions, Loyola College, invited her back to speak on abortion and other homosexual rights issues and she did so. Her draft of NOW's first statement of purpose included an abortion plank, but NOW didn't include it until the next year.

In 1980, she believed abortion should be in the context of "the choice to have children", a formulation supported by the Roman Catholic priest organizing Catholic participation in the White House Conference on Families for that year, though perhaps not by the bishops above him. A resolution embodying the formulation passed at the conference by 460 to 114, whereas a resolution addressing abortion, ERA and "sexual preference" passed by only 292–291 and that only after 50 opponents of abortion had walked out and so hadn't voted on it. She disagreed with a resolution that framed abortion in more feminist terms that was introduced in the Minneapolis regional conference resulting from the same White House Conference on Families, believing it to be more polarizing, while the drafters apparently thought Friedan's formulation too conservative.

As of 2000, she wrote, referring to "NOW and the other women's organizations" as seeming to be in a "time warp", "to my mind, there is far too much focus on abortion.... n recent years I've gotten a little uneasy about the movement's narrow focus on abortion as if it were the single, all-important issue for women when it's not". She asked, "Why don't we join forces with all who have true reverence for life, including Catholics who oppose abortion, and fight for the choice to have children?"
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