Yorkin’s Gift to Feminism
Peg Yorkin’s $10-million endowment will fund the Feminist Empowerment Center, a think tank that is designed to build strategies to get women to the decision-making tables, such as corporate and foundation boards, and legislatures.
The largest single expenditure, however, will support the foundation’s campaign to bring the controversial French abortion pill, RU-486, to the United States or to develop a similar pill here.
The foundation says the pill has the potential for use other than abortion, such as treating breast cancer and endometriosis, and cites scientific research it has studied.
Yorkin’s grant was not universally applauded.
At the National Right to Life Committee’s headquarters in Washington, education director Richard Glasnow called it “very disturbing” that such an amount of money was going to fund something that “kills the unborn, deforms those that survive it, injures and kills women and causes defects in subsequent offspring.”
While Glasnow said his organization does not oppose testing the pill in this country for uses other than abortion, he accused the Feminist Majority of presenting more ideological assertions than documented research.
Yorkin dismisses such criticisms, saying politics not science has kept the pill out of the United States.
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