Forty years ago, there was a landmark feminist protest against the Miss America pageant. Now we have a vice presidential candidate who was a former beauty queen.

On Sept. 7, 1968, in Atlantic City, N.J., a group called New York Radical Women staged a protest and unveiled a banner bearing the words “Women’s Liberation.” They also tossed what they called “instruments of female torture” into a “Freedom Trash Can.” Items included underwire bras, high heels, and false eyelashes. (Contrary to legend, no bras were burned.)

That protest marked the visible beginning of the second wave of feminism.

Today, we have a Republican nominee for vice president, Sarah Palin, who calls herself a feminist, and yet she was formerly “Miss Wasilla” and a runner-up in the Miss Alaska contest.

But Palin is a far cry from a feminist.

She is zealously anti-abortion.

And she has opposed most programs for sex education, favoring instead “abstinence only.”

Apparently her daughter Bristol missed the message, and is now going to have a baby and marry the father.

That’s the Palins’ business.

But it is certainly fair to note that in the days prior to Roe v. Wade, being an unwed mother was not publicly acceptable.

Only since the women’s movement and the availability of legal abortion has the terrible stigma that was unmarried motherhood been eased, if not erased. As an advisory group to the Carter administration found, the only alternative to abortion in cases of unwanted pregnancy was motherhood, suicide or madness.

Suicide was not uncommon in the face of disgrace, family shunning and abandonment. Many women died from back alley or self-inflicted abortions, and even more were maimed. Anti-abortionists only began embracing “fallen women” when they became rare due to safe, legal abortion.

Palin, like the rest of the religious right, views government as a tool to inflict religious dogma upon the nation. It was “God’s will” that the Palins bring into our overpopulated planet a fifth offspring. She and other anti-abortionists believe it is “God’s will” that all pregnancies, intentional or otherwise, be carried to term. The GOP plank calls for outlawing all abortion, even to save the life of the pregnant woman. It also calls on their ticket to appoint only anti-choice Supreme Court justices.

Women’s reproductive freedom has come a long way in the United States since 1968, even if beauty contests haven’t changed much. And we could still fill a large “Freedom Trash Can” with underwire bras, high heels and false eyelashes.

But women across America would lose tremendous ground if we allowed the far right to turn back the clock and ban all abortion.

Annie Laurie Gaylor is a board member of the Women’s Medical Fund (based in Madison, Wis.), the longest continuously operating abortion rights charity. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.