The Suffragettes Would Be Horrified by Today's Feminism

Part of what drove Emmeline Pankhurst to found the Women's Social & Political Union (known as the Suffragettes) was her experience as a Poor Law Guardian when she saw how pregnant women were treated, and when she saw that many were later separated from their babies. She wrote of that time:

“I found that there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world. Many of them were unmarried women, very, very young, mere girls. These poor mothers were allowed to stay in the hospital after confinement for a short two weeks. Then they had to make a choice of staying in the workhouse and earning their living by scrubbing and other work, in which case they were separated from their babies; or of taking their discharges. They could stay and be paupers, or they could leave with a two-weeks-old baby in their arms, without hope, without home, without money, without anywhere to go. What became of those girls, and what became of their hapless infants? That question was at the basis of the women guardians demand for a reform of one part of the Poor Law.” 

On other occasions she wrote of babies being sent out to 'baby farms' and her horror at the way they were treated. Above all, she stressed the importance of the care of pregnant women so that the babies would be born healthy, and also the need to allow mothers to stay with their babies. She was absolutely horrified by women who had been driven to infanticide as a result of their poverty.

How then can so-called 'feminists' dare to claim the right to be following in the footsteps of the suffragettes, when they claim that abortion is a woman's right? People should, by all means, be free to express their opinions, but it is shameful and wrong to claim to be continuing the work of the very brave women who risked their lives not only for the welfare of women but also for the welfare of helpless children, born or unborn.