"BIRTHRIGHT"

Article about Planned Parenthood as the movement against it was heating up - from November 14, 2011 - by Jill Lepore -  in the New Yorker


snips:

"The fury over Planned Parenthood is two political passions—opposition to abortion and opposition to government programs for the poor—acting as one. So far, it has nearly led to the shutdown of the federal government, required Republican Presidential nominees to swear their fealty to the pro-life lobby, tied up legislatures and courts in more than half a dozen states, launched a congressional investigation, and helped cripple the Democratic Party. What’s next?"  ...

If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights, women cannot have equal rights with men. This, however, is exactly what no one wants to talk about, because it’s complicated, and it’s proved surprisingly easy to use the issue to political advantage.... 

The first birth-control clinic in the United States opened on October 16, 1916, on Amboy Street in Brooklyn. There were two rooms, and three employees: Ethel Byrne, a nurse; Fania Mindell, a receptionist who was fluent in Yiddish; and Byrne’s sister, Margaret Sanger, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse and mother. Sanger and her sister came from a family of eleven children, one of whom Sanger helped deliver when she was eight years old. When Sanger began nursing poor immigrant women living in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side, she found that they were desperate for information about how to avoid pregnancy. These “doomed women implored me to reveal the ‘secret’ rich people had,” Sanger wrote in her autobiography. (A study conducted in New York at the time found that forty-one per cent of women who received medical care through clinics operated by the city’s department of health had never used contraception and, of those, more than half had had at least one abortion; they averaged almost two apiece.) 

Between 1912 and 1913, Sanger wrote a twelve-part series for The Call, the socialist daily, titled “What Every Girl Should Know.” Because any discussion of venereal matters violated the Comstock law, Sanger’s final essay, “Some Consequences of Ignorance and Silence,” was banned on the ground of obscenity. By way of protest, The Call ran, in place of the essay, an announcement: “ ‘What Every Girl Should Know’—NOTHING!” ... 

At Sanger’s trial, during which the judge waved a cervical cap from the bench, Sanger hoped to argue that the law preventing the distribution of contraception was unconstitutional: exposing women, against their will, to the danger of dying in childbirth violated a woman’s right to life. But the judge ruled that no woman had “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” In other words, if a woman wasn’t willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn’t have sex. Sanger went to Queens County Penitentiary. She was sentenced to thirty days. 

…Senator James Reed, of Missouri, told the lobbyists that “Birth Control is chipping away the very foundation of our civilization,” that “women should have many children and that poverty is no handicap but rather an asset.”...
During the Second World War, Planned Parenthood touted controlling family size as part of the war effort. Birth control continued to gain religious support. In 1946, more than thirty-two hundred Jewish and Protestant clergy signed a resolution in support of Planned Parenthood. In the nineteen-fifties, the organization was run primarily by men interested in population control. Barry Goldwater was an active supporter of Planned Parenthood, and his wife served on the board in Phoenix.... 

Here is where we are. Republicans established the very federal family-planning programs that Republican members of Congress and the G.O.P.’s Presidential candidates are this year pledging so vigorously to dismantle. Republicans made abortion a partisan issue—contorted the G.O.P. to mold itself around this issue—but Democrats allowed their party to be defined by it. And, as long as Planned Parenthood hitches itself to the Democratic Party, and it’s hard to see what choice it has, its fortunes will rise and fall—its clinic doors will open and shut—with the power of the Party. Much of the left, reduced to a state of timidity in the terrible, violent wake of Roe, has stopped talking about rights, poverty, decency, equality, sex, and even history, thereby ceding talk of those things to the right. Planned Parenthood, a health-care provider, has good reason to talk about women’s health. But, even outside this struggle, “health” has become the proxy for a liberal set of values about our common humanity. And it is entirely insufficient.

Read the whole thing: 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_lepore#ixzz20wLv6Fek