I can’t say for sure what caused Blair Polhamus, freshman in political science and women’s studies, to go and tear down “Feminists for Life” flyers and then to proudly announce her actions in the Daily last week. Was it just another example of typical freshman stupidity? Is the political science department so strapped for funds that it skipped teaching the First Amendment? Or is there a massive case of amnesia in the women’s studies department?

My own experience with Women’s Studies 201 leads me to pick the last choice because of an incident when a student, for her class project on activism, made a shirt celebrating pro-life feminists. The class gawked at her the same way Bush gawks when Colin Powell defends affirmative action. Of course we were startled, because though we had spent plenty of class time learning about the feminist struggle for abortion rights, we had never once learned that the women, the ones who founded the American feminist movement and gave WS201 a reason for existing, were in fact, passionately pro-life.

It isn’t hard, though, to realize why early feminists wanted to ban abortions. For one, the primitive medical technology made the procedure hazardous for women. Also, abortion was seen as a way for men to have power over a woman’s body — ironic from today’s standpoint — because he could force her to abort when he did not want to support the child.

But the overriding reason why pioneering feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed abortion was that they saw it as an indignity for women. Stanton wrote in a letter, “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”

If Stanton were alive today, she would be horrified to learn the extent that the unborn have become dehumanized, especially as demonstrated in the controversy surrounding the “Born-Alive Infants Protection Act,” which President Bush signed this past summer.

Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., authored the bill in order to “prevent the killing of infants who are born alive accidentally or during an attempted abortion.” Nurses were brought into to testify how these unwanted babies, whose heartbeats and breathing continued for up to eight hours, were left to die — in one case, in a “soiled utility room.”

The bill’s purpose is so basic that it is redundant — the Supreme Court implied in Roe vs. Wade that a baby which has left the womb is protected by the Constitution. Yet the National Abortion Rights and Reproductive Action League (NARAL) protested angrily, labeling the bill an “anti-choice assault” on “Roe’s basic tenets.” In other words, NARAL was fighting for a woman’s right to be guaranteed a dead baby after an abortion.

The “right to choose” has become so important to NARAL that the group is willing to justify what is infanticide by every medical and legal definition. That is only one example of how twisted their side of the debate has become. This radicalism has made them turn a deaf ear on any suggestion that abortion is not always necessary or justified.

This is not to say that the pro-life movement is any less narrow-minded. I am pro-life, but I don’t trust the limited end goals of the conservative pro-life movement any more than I do the pro-choice goals. I believe that instead of thinking on how to take care of unwanted babies, we have focused on attacking the women who want abortions to the point of turning their babies into scarlet letters. If tomorrow abortions were banned, I think we would actually be worse off, because we would be wholly unprepared to pay the price in money and love needed to support the influx of unwanted babies and their mothers. It is sad enough that a million babies are aborted every year, but it will be the greatest tragedy when a million unwanted babies are born and the people who fought so long to bring them to life can’t or won’t do what is needed for them to live.

This is why Susan B. Anthony, the legendary leader of women’s suffrage, said, “Much as I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder, earnestly as I desire its suppression, I cannot believe that such a law would have the desired effect.” She compared a ban on abortion to “mowing the top of the noxious weed, while the root remains,” and pointed out that “we must reach the root of the evil, and destroy it.”

I haven’t spent any time arguing when human life begins or if abortion is murder; there is no space for it and I’m not qualified anyway. However, I think that any time we can bring ourselves to label the unborn as “unwanted” and then do away with it — no matter how much of a burden it was — we don’t come any closer to our hope of being a more humane society.

I think the majority of people believe this, and more importantly, so do our lawmakers, and it will be a matter of time before they take action to limit abortion. The pro-choice movement, of course, should not let this pass by quietly. But there is no reason why feminists can’t heed the wisdom of Stanton and Anthony and petition for the social programs and reform that would reduce and eventually eliminate the need for abortions. This is the kind of noble, compassionate and longsuffering goal that has made the women’s movement so well-respected in our history.

And it can start with Ms. Polhamus heading to the nearest computer lab and printing out a “Feminists for Life” flyer for every one she tore down last week, carefully placing them on every wall that once had a flyer, and then staying put in the library for a day or however long it takes for her to learn the 200 years of feminist history that she apparently missed out on.

Dan Nguyen is a senior in computer engineering and journalism and mass communication from Iowa City.