In the USA, feminist pioneers such as Susan B. Anthony and Elisabeth Cady Stanton campaigned to outlaw abortion. They demanded rights and public respect for mothers, including unmarried mothers, believing that abortion only served to reinforce the social stigma surrounding children conceived out of wedlock by sanctioning means of getting rid of them. They saw that many women had abortions because they were unsupported by the father of their child. This is still very true today. Worse, it is very rare for a man to stay with his partner if she does have an abortion.
Current statistics show that more men than women are in favour of abortion.
The early feminists campaigned against abortion partly because it legitimised the unacceptable tendency of many men to want sex without commitment or consequences. Contemporary feminism, with notable exceptions, has been built upon a false androgynous notion of the human person as being not 'both male and female' but rather 'neither male nor female'. It is disembodied and abstract, and no wonder therefore that it fails to connect with the reality of most women's and men's lives. Elaine Storkey, sociologist at King's College, London, points out that egalitarianism which abandons difference is the most subtle way yet of making women invisible. The philosopher of science Mary Midgley, who has published extensively on evolution and the mistaken worship of science, traces this mistakenly androgynous philosophy back to Descartes, who defined the human being exclusively in terms of the 'rational' mind, through to Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Sartre.