Delaware Liberal

Barry Goldwater helped his daughter get an Illegal Abortion

Who knew…

Fifteen years ago, Lee Edwards, who had worked on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, interviewed Goldwater’s daughter Joanne for a biography of the senator. Based on the interview, he reported that in 1955, when Joanne, “not yet twenty and still in school, became pregnant with the child of her intended husband and told her father that she did not want to have the child, Goldwater said, ‘I’ll take care of it.’ He arranged for Joanne to fly back to Washington and have a then-illegal abortion.”

Two years ago, Zeitgeist Films released Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, a documentary produced and narrated by C.C. Goldwater, the senator’s granddaughter. In it, Joanne Goldwater tells the story:

I was getting engaged. … It was actually in the Christmas of 1955. And in January, I—I found out that I was pregnant. And I had planned—I had planned this engagement party and a wedding. And—we had—we had planned to have children. We both were still in school. I was getting my degree. And I—I wasn’t ready to have a child. And I got an abortion. … And this was when it was just totally forbidden and very, very dangerous. And young girls were dying by trying it themselves. My father, being conservative, he felt that the government should not decide what women do with their bodies or anything else, you know. The government should stay out of all that. My mother started Planned Parenthood in Arizona in the ’30s. And that’s why I felt that it was easy to go to them and tell them. And they were very, very supportive.

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