Susan B. Anthony Quotes
I think it a much wiser thing to secure for the thousands of mothers in this State the legal control of the children they now have, than to bring others into the world who would not belong to me after they were born.
Harper, Ida Husted. The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. Vol. 1, The Bowen-Merrill Company, 1898, p. 117.
This is a fascinating quotation. In general we associate religious fundamentalism and especially theocracy with retrograde and ancient views of living with modernity avoided wherever possible. However, in Iran, where almost all other fundamentalist leaders have claimed that in vitro fertilization in general and 3rd-party donation in particular are against God’s law, the Supreme Leader, not only allowed this techniques but also instituted major programs of birth control and in vitro fertilization to allow the woman to control her reproduction. His stricture was that the parents of these children bring them up following Islamic law.
At the time, the mother had no legal rights whatsoever over the upbringing of their own children. If the father did not want the mother to nurse a child, she could not. Although born and educated in the United States, she lived mostly in England and was politically active there.
This is an important reason to preserve the right of women to have abortions that few people make out loud in public, but is a major factor in the vast majority of the decisions women make each year to have an abortion.
This was an amazingly controversial quotation. At first glance it seemed like a typical position that a very conservative, anti-government politicization might take—the government should not interfere with a parents bringing up their children. However, there was a more ominous part of the quotations. While everyone in America would certainly agree with Paul that the Government does not “own” the children, there are few who would agree with the point that follows—that the Parents “own” the child. Paul reveals the normally hidden aspect of his politics—that he is highly influenced by the extreme, Biblical Literalist Fundamentalist Christians and Jews. In the Old Testament, the Father really did OWN the child. The latter was his chattel. A father had the legal and duty-bound power of life and death over his children. Most American Christians and Jews have long since abandoned the literal biblical notion of children being owned by a father and today see a child as a person who can sometimes need the protection of the state just like any other citizen. And there are occasions where the child must be PROTECTED from the parents who may be acting within their fundamentalist notions of Biblical rights and duties, but not with their civil rights and duties. Ownership, of a child is not one of the modern civil rights of parents.
Birth control was not commonly available and knowledge about it was also sparce. Having many children was the “will of God” in common parlance.
Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
