The Advertising Campaign That Sold Abortion to the US| National Catholic Register

Nov 03, 2024

Mothers love their babies, so how did these men convince American women to join their anti-baby crusade?

With the abortion debate in full flower during this election season, now is a good time to revisit the questions: Who were the influential opinion-makers who sold abortion on demand to the U.S. government, radical feminists and the American people? And how did they do it?

Oddly, a preliminary question we need to ask is one Albert Einstein asked in a letter to Sigmund Freud nearly 100 years ago: “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?”

This essay was inspired only after I watched the Democratic National Convention and saw person after person on that stage, in a couple cases with laughs and broad smiles, declaring their enthusiastic support of abortion, while microscopic human beings were being slain in a Planned Parenthood trailer right outside the convention hall.

Freud provided no answers to Einstein. But after two world wars, which claimed more than 100 million lives, one man thought he did have the answer.

Wealthy entrepreneur Hugh Moore (who invented the disposable Dixie Cup) became convinced the “root cause of war” was the population explosion. Terrified there were too many hungry, poor people in the world — and firmly convinced the birth rates of all those starving poor people would somehow lead to World War III — Moore published a fearmongering booklet in 1954 titled The Population Bomb.

One of Moore’s greatest admirers, National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL Pro-Choice) co-founder Lawrence Lader, wrote:

Although abortion was still illegal in every state, Moore was firmly convinced his utopian plan to limit human population growth through birth control and abortion would prevent all future wars. In his way of thinking, an unborn baby was as disposable as a paper cup. He mailed out his pamphlet to 1,500 public-opinion influencers and persuaded a host of powerful men to join him.

John D. Rockefeller III, who became a funder of Catholics for a Free Choice, was already terrified of population growth among the poor and was using his vast fortune to develop and export new birth-control methods to developing nations. But Rockefeller would never have succeeded, Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher observes, without the help of Moore’s savvy salesmanship.

Fourteen years after Moore published his pamphlet, Stanford University entomologist Paul Ehrlich borrowed Moore’s lurid title (with Moore’s permission) for his own fearmongering book, The Population Bomb, which sold millions of copies and was recently described by Smithsonian magazine as the book “that incited a worldwide fear of overpopulation” and “triggered a wave of repression around the world.”

Throughout the 1950s, journalist Marvin Olasky reports, Moore’s public-relations strategy was extraordinarily successful:

For Moore, the world population movement’s most glaring deficiency was its pitiful budget: a mere $35,000 annually as late as 1959. To solve this problem, Moore stepped up his rhetoric and launched the World Population Emergency Campaign, which attracted many financial and industrial leaders.

By 1961, Moore now had millions of dollars to spend and he embarked on a new strategy: a massive advertising campaign in leading newspapers to push the government towards action in the population-control field.

Terror-promoting headlines on full-page ads in The New York Times screamed:

“Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause unless we control population,” warned the headline of another full-page ad that ran in The New York Times and later in Fortune, Harper's, Saturday Review and Time. This ad alone, Lader reported, “generated requests for hundreds of thousands of reprints.”

Many distinguished citizens from all walks of life signed one or more of these advertisements. With a few notable exceptions, all these powerful opinion-makers in the early days of the population-control movement were men. Female feminists were, in fact, among the last people to be recruited and brought aboard the abortion train.

Aside from his public-relations blitzkrieg, some of Moore’s most powerful victories occurred behind closed doors in rooms away from the public eye. Although few talked about it, there was concern among physicians that the intrauterine device (IUD), which was becoming widely used in the late 1950s, could in rare cases fail to prevent pregnancy and cause a “miscarriage” (also known as a “spontaneous abortion”). In 1962, the American Law Institute (ALI), an advocacy group of lawyers, judges and law professors, proposed the liberalization of all state abortion laws in the U.S. — not to protect women, but on the grounds that changing the laws against abortion would shield doctors from liability.

One flaw in Moore’s population-control plan was the fact the birth-control pill isn’t 100% effective. That’s why the population controllers needed abortion as a backup.

A second flaw in Moore’s utopian plan to prevent World War III was that he didn’t understand the maternal heart: Mothers love their babies, so how were these men going to convince American women to join their anti-baby crusade?

Lader was good friends with feminist Betty Friedan (who launched second-wave feminism in 1963 with her book The Feminist Mystique). On Oct. 7, 1967, Lader told Dr. Bernard Nathanson (with whom he co-founded NARAL), “If we’re going to move abortion out of the books and onto the streets, we're going to have to recruit the feminists. Friedan has got to put her troops into this thing ...”

As the National Organization for Women’s first president, Friedan was reluctant to include abortion in the feminist political platform. But Lader convinced her to do it anyway.

Just six weeks after Lader told Nathanson they needed to “recruit the feminists,” Friedan rammed through a vote at NOW’s second-annual conference to include abortion in feminism’s platform of political “rights.” Only 57 of 103 delegates at that meeting voted to insert abortion into their political platform; one-third of them walked out in disgust; in protest, some even resigned from NOW.

The deed was done, and the dominant media story became that all women who want to be “liberated” need and demand the abortion “right” to be “free.”

What’s more, the masculine push to set women “free” by aborting their babies didn’t stop there.

In 1972, the “Rockefeller Commission Report on Population Growth and the American Future” (chaired by Rockefeller) pushed the U.S. government to loosen abortion laws or to repeal them all together.

In that report, one feminist dissenter — attorney Graciela Olivarez, the first woman to graduate from Notre Dame Law School and a founding member of NOW — wrote that advocating “legalized abortion on a national scale” was “anti-women’s liberation” because it subverted the true equality of men and women. Equality, she observed, means “an equal sharing of responsibilities by and as men and women” (italics in the original). Legalized abortion freed irresponsible men “from worrying about whether they should bear some responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity.” Further, she wrote, “Those with power in our society cannot be allowed to ‘want’ and ‘unwant’ people at will. ... The poor cry out for justice and equality and we respond with legalized abortion.”

But, of course, Olivarez’s warnings went largely unreported.

In 1973, just one year after the “Rockefeller Report” came out, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, a churchgoing Methodist and conservative Republican, also fell into the population-control trap. His male colleagues on the Supreme Court joined him, and Roe v. Wade, along with its companion case Doe v. Bolton, made abortion legal at every stage of pregnancy in every state.

After Roe v. Wade, American politicians and welfare administrators quickly saw that the benefits of funding abortions for poor women in developing nations could be extended to poor mothers in the U.S. In A Private Choice: Abortion in America in the Seventies, Judge John Noonan Jr. of the 9th Circuit Court pointed out that many politicians saw abortion as “a cheap way to reduce the rising costs of welfare.” One year after the Supreme Court twisted legal and historic facts to invent the abortion “right” in Roe v. Wade, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) reported to Congress that it had funded “at least” 220,000 abortions among women on welfare — saving the government millions of dollars.

The report declared, “For each pregnancy among Medicaid eligible women that is brought to term, it is estimated that the first year costs to Federal, State, and local governments for maternity and pediatric care and public assistance is [sic] approximately $2,700.”

Subtracting the cost of abortions — $200 a piece — each legislator could calculate the net savings in the first year alone were “at least” $500 million in 1973 dollars.

The HEW estimates may have been conservative. When arguing to Congress for the federal funding of abortions, a representative of NARAL stated in 1974 that delivery of a child, “plus welfare for one year,” cost $4,600. On this basis, the savings in the first year exceeded $1 billion.

In the abortion world, Noonan observed, “it was not strange that a rich man should tell a poor man, ‘I’d love to help you. Let me show you how to kill your unborn children.’” Fast-forward 50 years and the specter of the culture of death dwells everywhere in the United States, most recently and notably in Chicago.

The “right” to abortion and contraception is advocated politically as so sacrosanct that the Democratic Party highlighted the availability of a Planned Parenthood mobile unit to kill unborn babies right outside the Democratic Convention hall.  People have been so deceived by the induction of fear and lies about abortion that they think this is a good thing. Exposed in all its diabolical horror, the insanity of the 20th-century utopian plan to ensure world peace and save money by killing innocent babies is literally destroying us and our future.

Sue Ellen Browder Sue Ellen Browder has won eight investigative medical-journalism awards, including the “Project Censored” award (sometimes called the “alternative Pulitzer Prize”) for “the news that didn’t make the news” about “Deadly Doctors.” For more than 30 years, she wrote hundreds of articles for the corporate press (including Cosmopolitan magazine), until she converted to Catholicism in 2003. As author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement she has spoken at pro-life events across the country and has appeared at the United Nations on a “status of women” panel sponsored by the Holy See.