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The contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to abortion, which is a contentious topic. Please consult the procedures and edit carefully.
Dannenfelser said that while the anti-abortion cause was not "the issue that earned Susan B. Anthony her stripes in American history books, historians would be wrong to conclude that Anthony was agnostic on the issue of abortion". She quoted Anthony's business partner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as saying, "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." Attempts to authenticate this quote, however, have been unsuccessful. After Thomas notified the FFL in 2011 that she could not locate the source for this alleged quote, the FFL acknowledged the problem by saying that, "Earlier generations of pro-life feminists informed us that these words were written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in a letter tucked into Julia Ward Howe's diary on October 16, 1873," but that they could not locate the letter. The FFL said that Howe's diary entry for that date indicated that she had argued about infanticide with Stanton, who, according to Howe, "excused infanticide on the grounds that women did not want to bring moral monsters into the world, and said that these acts were regulated by natural law. I differed from her strongly". Thomas added that the disagreement occurred during public discussion at a women's conference in New York City.
Dannenfelser's Stanton quote reasonably could be interpreted that (if the quote is accurate) the latter was anti-abortion. Yet FFL quotes Howe's diary entry, which says that Stanton "excused infanticide." If Stanton excused infanticide, how could she have been against abortion? These depictions of Stanton in the same paragraph are contradictory and the contradiction is not explained at all. Rontrigger (talk) 06:50, 24 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The statement claimed to have been made by Stanton in a private letter whose existence has never been proven does indeed contradict what, according to Howe, Stanton said in a public meeting. If a claim has been demonstrated to be true or false, it is proper to document that in Wikipedia. But a claim involving the content of a letter whose very existence cannot be demonstrated cannot, by its nature, be given any sort of definitive treatment. A "dispute" article like this one, in my opinion, does better by documenting the various claims and statements without necessarily trying to resolve any resulting contradictions. Bilpen (talk) 17:30, 25 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with your points, particularly about resolving the contradictions. But what I tried to say was that the contradictions were not even acknowledged. FFL based their position on Stanton's anti-abortion views on this dubious letter, and then noted something (Howe's diary) that flatly contradicted the letter (assuming that the letter existed). What I found mystifying was that nothing in the text of the article pointed out that these assertions contradicted each other, and thus that FFL's argument regarding Stanton made no sense. Rontrigger (talk) 18:13, 25 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it makes no sense, FFL making contradictory assertions about Stanton. Perhaps we should downplay the interchange between FFL and Thomas because of the contradiction. On the other hand, Stanton was mercurial; she wanted to shake the world up, and in retrospect the things she wrote and said at various times include some contradiction. Binksternet (talk) 18:21, 25 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
