Feminist-socialist Simone de Beauvoir, said in her famous 1975 interview with Communist and feminist Betty Friedan in The Saturday Review:
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one… In my opinion, as long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed.”
Juxtapose w/ former US Sec. of Agriculture and President of the LDS Church, Ezra Taft Benson’s talk ‘The Honored Place of Woman’
Betty Friedan went to great lengths to cover up the facts of her Communist past: her membership in the Young Communist League, her 1944 request to join the American Communist Party, and her work as a propagandist for Communist-led organizations in the 1940s are documented facts.
That reasoning can be traced back to the early days of Soviet Russia.
When Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized the levers of power in 1917, Lenin faced the daunting challenge of jump-starting agricultural and industrial production. So he cast his eye on a vast, untapped workforce: peasant women.
Using the Marxist line on female oppression, Lenin incited women to action at the First All Russia Congress of Working Women:
“The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this.”
Lenin pushed through laws assuring women equal pay for equal work and the right to hold property.
But as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, many women would be tempted to go back to the old ways to tend to hearth and home. So the traditional family would need to be abolished. Lenin understood that fact, as well.
In 1918 Lenin introduced a new marriage code that outlawed church ceremonies. Lenin opened state-run nurseries, dining halls, laundries, and sewing centers. Abortion was legalized in 1920, and divorce simplified.
In a few short years, most of the functions of the family had been expropriated by the state. By 1921, Lenin could state that, “in Soviet Russia, no trace is left of any inequality between men and women under the law.” But Lenin’s dream of gender emancipation soon dissolved into social chaos.
Women who were sent out to labor in the fields and the factories stopped having babies. In 1917, the average Russian woman had borne six children. By 1991, that number had fallen to two. This fertility free-fall is unprecedented in modern history.
But it was the children who were the greatest victims. As a result of the break-up of families, combined with civil war and famine, countless numbers of Russian children found themselves without family or home. Many ended up as common thieves or prostitutes.
In his book Perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev reflected on 70 years of Russian turmoil:
“We have discovered that many of our problems — in children’s and young people’s behavior, in our morals, culture and in production — are partially caused by the weakening of family ties.”
Russian women use abortion as a form of birth control; having eight or more abortions is common. In 2001, the fertility rate was 1.25 in Russia. According to official Russian calculations, each woman must bear an average 2.33 children in her lifetime to stabilize the country’s population over generations. While it’s fertility rate is among the lowest in the world, it’s abortion rate is among the highest.
Radical socialist feminists, intent on achieving a genderless society, are now planning to repeat the same social experiment in Western society. Their opponents believe the feminists would prefer the story of family destruction in Soviet Russia not become common knowledge.
In the USA, Beverly LaHaye founded the organization Concerned Women for America (CWA) because, in her opinion, feminism was destroying marriages, children, families and ultimately, as she saw it, the very culture of society.
LaHaye and a team from CWA were present at the Beijing conference. They saw and heard first hand what was happening behind what they termed the “facade of women’s rights”.
The Beijing ‘Declaration and Platform for Action’ asserted that “…abortion should be safe in places where it is legal and criminal charges should not be filed against women who undergo illegal abortion”. (It would also give homosexuals special civil rights protections and would make certain that schoolchildren receive comprehensive sex education, including access to birth control.)
CWA and other opponents to abortion and radical feminism were concerned that the rights of parents to raise their children, according to their own beliefs, would be eliminated.
These opponents are also concerned that feminist socialists are using UN conferences to force their agenda on other nations. The CWA team say they witnessed United States delegates threatening to end US aid to smaller countries if they didn’t go along with the pro-feminist UN agenda.
In February 2005, at a follow-up meeting to the Beijing conference, the U.S. delegation said the United States would not sign on because they don’t believe women should be guaranteed the right to abortion. Bush administration representatives demanded an amendment stating that a commitment to “reproductive health services” does not guarantee abortion rights. (The Beijing documents do not create, or guarantee, the right to abortion.)
Charlotte Bunch, Executive Director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), said that the UN’s Millenium Development Goal’s (MDGs) must include “sexual and reproductive rights,” which, she said, was “central to all the conferences in the 1990s [but] are missing from the MDGs.”
As mentioned before, it is commonly recognised that in UN, family planning and population control organisations, the term “sexual and reproductive rights,” is a euphemism for abortion.
Pasted from <http://www.life.org.nz/abortion/abortionkeyissues/feministagenda/>
