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NARAL Pro-Choice America & the Dissolution of a Generation

The National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was officially born in February 1969 at Chicago's posh Drake Hotel, but its origin traces back a few years earlier to a duo of white, upper-class, New York men—atheist Marxist Lawrence Lader and abortionist (later a pro-life convert) Bernard Nathanson. Lader, the driver and spearhead, had been publishing fabricated "facts" about abortion law and statistics for years, and at great length had persuaded newly minted NOW president Betty Friedan, formerly an adamant opponent of abortion, to adopt abortion as a women's cause. It was Lader who created the slogan, "No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body."

After the...