переписка с Ганди

в ИндияТудей
In 1924 a birth control league was established in Bombay and the secretary wrote to [Mahatma] Gandhi, seemingly to ask for his blessings as it would help the Indian population problem. Gandhi responded: "I am totally opposed to artificial means of controlling the birth rate, and it is not possible for me to congratulate you or your co-workers on having brought into being a League whose activities, if successful, can only do great moral injury to the people." Margaret Sanger entered the ensuing debate writing to Gandhi in protest.
Gandhi replied that he was open to further education on the subject and Sanger started planning a visit to India. … She came following an invitation to speak at the All-India Women's Conference, which the previous year had passed a resolution favouring birth control and now wanted to draw up a practical programme of action. How could she refuse? It seems that India was ready for her; by the time she completed her stay, she had travelled 10,000 miles, presided over more than 40 public meetings and had established some 50 birth control information centres. And she was more than ready to take her crusade to the subcontinent and to its perceived moral leader. Although originally expected to arrive on November 26, 1935, it was not until a week later that, after a bullock cart ride from Wardha railway station, Sanger arrived at Gandhi's headquarters on December 2, a Monday, Gandhi's day of silence. … The next day, after having accompanied Gandhi on his accustomed early morning walk, she was granted an interview at 11 and it continued till 3 o'clock.
Margaret Sanger's diary notes that the arguments in the formal interview "were along the same lines as in the morning", and she felt that "his personal experience at the time of his father's death was so shocking and self-blamed that he can never accept sex as anything good, clean or wholesome." During the interview … Gandhi counselled celibacy: "I have felt that during the years still left to me if I can drive home to women's minds the truth that they are free, we will have no birth control problem in India. If they will only learn to say 'no' to their husbands when they approach them carnally! … The real problem is that many do not want to resist them."
Not unexpectedly, Sanger raised the phantasmagoria of "irritations, disputes, and thwarted longings that Gandhiji's advice would bring into the home", citing cases of "great nervous and mental breakdowns as a result of the practice of self-control."
Gandhi countered that this would only be the case with "imbeciles", not with "healthyminded people". When Sanger insisted that his advice was not practical, that it would "mean a revolution in the home" and lead to divorce because "the average marriage contract assumes that intercourse and the married relationship shall be harmonious", Gandhi tried to draw a distinction between love and lust: "When both want to satisfy animal passion without having to suffer the consequences of their act it is not love, it is lust."
Sanger did not accept the analogy, explaining that "sex expression is a spiritual need" and that the quality of the expression is "more important than the result". She tried to get Gandhi to admit that he was against "sex lust" rather than "sex love"; however when she asked him whether he thought "it possible for two people who are in love, who are happy together, to regulate their sex act only once in two years, so that relationship would only take place when theywanted a child?", Gandhi answered that "I had the honour of doing that very thing". Sanger saw it as "illogical to contend that sex union for the purpose of having children would be love and union for the satisfaction of the sexual appetite was lust, for the same act was involved in both." Gandhi explained that he knew that all sexual unions partook of the nature of lust from his own personal experience because "as long as I looked upon my wife carnally, we had no real understanding. Our love did not reach a high plane."
Sanger responded by asking if that meant that "the sexual union takes place only three or four times in an entire lifetime?" In response to the woman who, like Olive Schreiner 30 years before her, had been a lover of Havelock Ellis, the pioneer of sexology and author of the seven- volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Gandhi responded: Why should people not be taught that it is immoral to have more than three or four children and that after they have had that number they should sleep separately? … If husband and wife have four children, they would have had sufficient animal enjoyment."
Not long before his discussion with Margaret Sanger, Gandhi received a letter from a councillor of the Municipal Corporation of Bombay asking him to support the opening of a birth control clinic … and issuing posters advising people to take advantage of it. Gandhi replied: "Everybody would welcome sex gratification without having to have children. Therefore the means of ensuring this are spreading like intoxicants. If there is any cause for regret, it is only that what is morally bad is being regarded as morally desirable."
In her autobiography Sanger notes that even though Gandhi appeared to be going along with her in their discussions, as soon as she stopped he continued "as though he had not heard you", putting up a "stone wall of religion or emotion or experience" which she could not "dynamite him over".
However, he had heard her, and tried hard to counter her arguments, and perhaps Sanger had slightly more impact on him than she imagined or he admitted to. At the end of the session of interviews, Gandhi conceded that he thought highly of Sanger's purpose, otherwise he "would not have given time to this subject". As a conclusion to the section of his article that contains the interview with Margaret Sanger, Desai wrote:
"And yet as Mrs Sanger was so dreadfully in earnest Gandhiji did mention a remedy which could conceivably appeal to him. That method was the avoidance of sexual union during unsafe periods confining it to the 'safe' period of about ten days during the month. That had at least an element of self-control which had to [be] exercised during the unsafe period."
What had induced this change? Later a close friend and member of his secretariat, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur [independent India's first health minister], was to recall how the talks with Sanger "grew tense and strangely exciting, as if longburied trains of thought were emerging".
Gandhi biographer Martin Green claims that the encounter left [the Mahatma] exhausted, resulting in his hospitalisation and a breakdown in his health that "was very painful to him because it involved an episode of involuntary sexual excitement." Green appears to be making a causal link between Gandhi's seminal discharge and the resurfacing of buried emotions, particularly those that had led to the platonic yet sexually charged love affair (or spiritual marriage) with Sarala Devi Chaudhurani [pioneering women's rights activist, Rabi- ndranath Tagore's niece and wife of Punjab Congress leader Rambhuj Dutt Chaudhary] that had fleetingly threatened his own marriage in 1920.
This is not an outrageous interpretation.
In her interviews, Sanger had put to Gandhi that, "If we have a choice in our mates [as he did not] there is a natural sex attraction between two people. You then have a different experience and in the experience an expression of love which makes you a finer human being ... and contributes to a finer understanding and a greater spiritual harmony."
GANDHI'S response was illuminating: "I had a woman with whom I almost fell. It is so personal that I did not put it in my autobiography. We have considered if there can be this spiritual companionship. The marriage relationship is a matter of contract. Your parents arrange it in your childhood and you have nothing to do with it. I came in contact with an illiterate woman. Then I met a woman with a broad, cultural education. Could we not develop a close contact, I said to myself? This was a plausible argument, and I nearly slipped. But I was saved."
In an article on birth control that appeared in his paper only a few months later, Gandhi reiterated that he would agree to at least consider the rhythm method of birth control, even though he did it reluctantly. Although she had no luck in convincing Gandhi of her position, her lecture tour of India led to the opening of several birth control clinics in the country. When, in 1959, Prime Minister Nehru declared that a large sum of money would go to family planning in India, Margaret Sanger was standing at his side.
- Extracted with permission from Going Native: Gandhi's Relationship with Western Women (Roli Books Lotus Collection; Rs 295). Weber, who teaches at Melbourne's La Trobe University, has been researching and writing on Gandhi's life for over 20 years.

в следущем году 90 лет

November 11th - 13th 1921


In her opening speech at the Conference, Sanger made some interesting points about the importance of exchanging ideas, the diverse perspectives of the crowd, and about the necessity of birth control:

“The idea in calling this Conference was to bring together not our old friends, the advocates of Birth Control, whose worth we know and whose courage has stood the test of opposition; but rather to bring together new people, with other ideas, the people who have been working in social agencies and in other groups for the same results as we, namely a better nation and the banishment of disease, misery, poverty, delinquency and crime.”
“There are two instincts which have ever guided the destiny of mankind. These instincts are hunger and sex. The instinct of hunger has received consideration in practically every civilized country and man has adapted his institutions to meet its needs. But the instinct of sex has been ignored. Not I claim, and most of us who make a study of the subject know, that this instinct is just as deep, just as fundamental, as the instinct of hunger. It cannot be crushed. It cannot be denied. But we must understand it. We will then utilize it, as we utilize music and prayer for out highest powers and for higher illumination.”
“Our definite aim is to repeal the laws so that the medical profession may give women at their request knowledge to prevent conception. We believe that with the assistance of the intelligent members of the community we can bring this about in a very short time, but we need your help. We need your courage. We need you to come out and stand with us on out platform. We also want your guidance, your assistance, your suggestions.”

[Read the full speech here.]

The Town Hall Raid

надо бы узнать список участников

фото: жаба и монтаж

In the interest of historical accuracy, here are Sanger’s feelings about Hitler in her own words:

“The first thing I want to say in relation to my attitude regarding the present War and World Peace is that before Hitler came into power in Germany I was one of the few Americans who joined the Anti-Nazi Committee and gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.”

“When Hitler got into the saddle and burned all books he considered (not immoral) but dangerous to the State, my three books were destroyed and have not been allowed to circulate in Germany. The publisher and translator were put into concentration camps and I have never heard of them since.”

“I firmly believe that Europe will not have a just Peace until Germany gets rid of Hitler, but also shall Italy, England and France get rid of their own leaders whom History will certainly identify as War Lords.”

источник блог МСБП и сам проект

Питирим Сорокин о сексуальной революции

цитата 1956 года:

Among the many changes of the last few decades, a peculiar revolution has been taking place in the lives of millions of American men and women… it goes almost unnoticed. … Unmarked by dramatic events on a large scale, it is free from civil war, class struggle, and bloodshed. …It does not try to overthrow governments… Without plan or organization, it is carried on by millions of individuals, each acting on his own….Its name is the sexual revolution.


дальше истошнег порет ахинею:

In 1870 there was one divorce for every 33.7 marriages. By 1956 that number had already changed to 1 divorce for every 3 marriages (Revolution, p. 8). This is not a significant difference from where we are today, with roughly 1 divorce for every 2 marriages.

-- не мудрено: продоложительность жизни то возросла, а попробуй поживи лет 20, хотя в браке трудно только первые 70 лет

но +
In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud would argue that “sexual love [is] the prototype of all happiness.” Among other things, this definition implied that love is based ultimately on the pursuit of pleasure-a quest to satisfy the self rather than others. Thus the self-sacrificial love of agape, rooted in the Christian worldview, would begin to be supplanted by the self-centered desire of eros or erotic love, rooted in the autonomous self.

On the heels of Freud came Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League in 1921, which would go on to become Planned Parenthood. Sanger, like Freud, argued that the repression of sexual desires was harmful, adding that such repression would result in negative health consequences and even the inhibition of intellectual capacity-not an uncommon theory in her era. From our vantage point, we easily see Sanger as a moral monster. However, Sanger’s argument for abortion as a tool for population control and poverty alleviation gained traction precisely because there was growing agreement with Darwinism and eugenics among elites, which was buoyed by a racism among the populace that was prevalent at the time.

проверить: что за люди?

Voltairine do Clayre, a
Louise Michel, an
Emma Goldman, or an
Elizabeth Flynn

хотя 2х последних знаю

ссылка

What Every Girl Should Know

интересная запись на  ресурсе техасского университета
о программе по истории контроля рождаемости в 1910 е гг


Layne Craig, a lecturer in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin, recently used materials from the Ransom Center’s collections to supplement her class “Literature of the Birth Control Movement.

linx:

• The Literature of Birth Control
• case of Mary McCarthy
• Final papers (regulatiobs)
• Birth Control time line (mostly US)

и вот то, что давно искал:

First Birth Control Clinic Opened

Jul 1, 1878 12:00 pm  

Aletta Jacobs opened the first-ever clinic in Amsterdam. Sanger and Stopes used the Netherlands as an example of progressive birth control legislation throughout their careers.

Annie Besant arrested

Jul 1, 1877 12:00 pm  

Besant and her husband were arrested in England for publishing Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy, a book outlining some contraception methods.

Link: http://books.google.com/books?...age&q&f=false

short list of Sanger's Lovers

из статейки некой католички (в целом бессердечно лицемерной и со стандартным набором подлогов):

• sexologist Havelock Ellis, 
• writers H. G. Wells and 
• Hugh de Salincourt, 
• anarchist Lorenzo Portet, and 
• architect Angus Snead McDonald

Feminists for Choice Explore Issues of Sanger and Race

Нашёл проект сэнгеровских бумаг на wordpress'е


On the Feminists for Choice blog, Serena Freewomyn posted “Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?” The post offers a quick look at a topic much in the blogosphere, and while we don’t entirely agree with the author’s analysis, it at least adds some context to the debate .  The comments posted on the article are just as interesting as the blog itself.
In the interest of adding to the conversation, we’d like to provide a bit more information about Sanger and the Negro Project.
The Negro Project was an attempt to empower the black community to rise out of poverty through the use of birth control. The project was widely supported by black leaders, including Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Sanger proposed this project because she wanted to help  “a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste’ system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation.”
- Margaret Sanger to Mary Lasker on July 10, 1939. [Source]

Sanger was targeting the black community because, at the time, most of that community was at a disadvantage. The racism that wove through American history made it consistently more difficult for people of color to get ahead was the ‘caste’ system that left the black community, “notoriously underprivileged and handicapped”  according to Sanger. In conceiving this project Sanger wasn’t trying to use birth control as a means of getting rid of people of color; instead, she wanted the Negro Project to give a marginalized community power over their bodies and the ability to decide how many children to have. This would, in turn, make it easier for them to provide for themselves and get ahead.
Furthermore, Sanger did not enter the project without first observing a desire for reproductive health information from black women in the communities that she intended to work within.
Hazel Moore, a veteran lobbyist and health administrator, ran a birth control project under Sanger’s direction and found that black women in several Virginia counties were very responsive to birth control education. A 1938 trip to Tennessee further convinced Sanger of the desire of African-Americans in that region to control their fertility and the need for specific programs in birth control education aimed at the black community.
After observing this need Sanger teamed up with the Birth Control Federation of America to get funding for a campaign that would teach Southern black women about contraception. Unfortunately once they secured funding the project left Sanger’s control. She had wanted to train a black minister and a black doctor to tour the South, preaching about contraception in every city, church, and organization that they could. She believed that this step was necessary to drum up support and gain the community’s trust before launching a practical campaign that would actually supply contraception to black mothers.
The men running the Birth Control Federation of America decided that they wanted to go a different route, to include working birth control services for the black community into the general public health program, without any prior education in the community. They also refused Sanger’s idea to build a black-staffed clinic within the community, choosing instead a more mobile plan that swept in and out of the area like the vaccination caravans of the time.
The Negro Project was fairly problematic  because, as devised, it centralized control in the hands of white physicians, which did not empower the black community. It is important to note that this was not Sanger’s vision, this is what happened after her input in the project was ignored and her influence taken away.
Margaret Sanger’s papers make it clear that she wanted to develop a project that would empower black community leaders to bring contraception options and education to the people of their own communities. It’s unfortunate that she lost control of the project and it did not become what she had envisioned. It is also unfortunate that her efforts on behalf of people of color and other impoverished mothers have been turned into an example of some evil plot by writers who do not take the time to understand Sanger’s intentions.

ещё про негритянский проект 

16 октября

In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn, N.Y.
(The clinic ended up being raided by police and Sanger was arrested.)
 94 года, так штоли?
вот времечко летит :)

йа! креведко

Ваш Тотем раскрылся! Это... Лосось

Это создание всю жизнь проводит в постоянном движении, уходя из родного гнездышка и возвращаясь, чтобы вывести свое собственное потомство, причем никогда не сходит с намеченного еще далекими предками маршрута. Жизнь порой кажется вам скучной и однообразной, но вы отнюдь не стремитесь выбиться из родного течения и отправиться исследовать другие возможные пути. Такие как вы отличаются поразительным хладнокровием и некоторой флегматичностью, иными словами, вы не спешите принимать решения, да и вообще не любите действовать. Зачем что-то менять, если знаешь, что лучшего уже не найдешь? И все же, иногда стоит иметь запасные пути оступления, иначе вы рискуете угодить на "медвежий нерест". Почему бы вам не попробовать что-нибудь новое, впустить свежую струю в свою жизнь? Старая вода уже порядком застоялась. А уверенность в новых начинаниях вам придаст подарок Тотема - Жемчужина.

Пройти тест

the Hepburns

I was, and still am, a big old Hollywood movie fan. So I proposed as a topic the political/activist role of women in Hollywood (viz., Bette Davis' landmark but unsuccessful lawsuit against her studio, which chipped away at the stable system, where actors were contracted to big studios and had little control of their careers).

Ok, to the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature [RGPL], an index the younger generation probably know nothing about. There was a certain art to looking through the RGPL: by year, by decade, indices.

What I was to find out when I looked up Bette Davis was one thing. But when I looked up references for Katharine Hepburn I was taken far from Hollywood and to the dark side of our liberal tradition.

If you type Hepburn's name into your Internet search, you will get all listings about the famed and admired actress. But via RGPL, interestingly, you would find another Katharine Hepburn: the actress's mother of the same name. The elder Hepburn was a prominent activist, alleged social reformer, woman's suffragist, and an early birth control advocate. Hepburn the daughter has said she was also a Communist.

While the only sign I could find of overt Hepburn activism was her political support of the Communist Party-backed, democratic socialist Henry Wallace in 1948 in his presidential bid, and against Harry Truman, the elder Hepburn's record was a pretty rich one. And disturbing to behold.

Disturbing because the Hepburn mother was one of the founders, with Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood [first called the Birth Control League]. These crusading women advocated not only legalizing abortions but also sterilizations ... of Black and Asian women.

For whatever the elder Hepburn's true political affiliations, she dared to equate poverty with color and [to her logic] reasonably thought an end to poverty would come when poverty ceased to produce poor babies, ergo, sterilize the poor.

Before Hepburn the actress died, Planned Parenthood honored the elder Hepburn and named a fund after her both women in the 1980's.

Further, Bryn Mawr College, the prestigious women's college that both Hepburns attended, honored mother and daughter for their achievements.

The Hepburn revelation was one of my first introductions into the nasty underbelly of the liberal politics we marginalized are supposed to ignore - those marginalized include people of color, the poor, lgbtq's, women, not to forget men who dare to walk a different path, queer or straight, in spite of public rebuke.

I myself have held Planned Parenthood in particular and the abortion issue in general at a chilly distance ever since.

It has been the recognition of these crimes against humanity, demands for social justice, reparations, regime and system changes that has gotten the reactionaries to mobilize to dismantle social and public services, especially our public schools. In fact, a whole elaborate propaganda system has been fortified, which includes our mass media and increasingly includes our "intellectuals" in the universities. It has certainly impacted public education, note Ronald Reagan's desire to shut down the US Dept of Education, Bush I's education presidency, Bush II's No Child Left Behind, and Obama's Race to the Top.

The assault - the crime - continues to infect our rising generations with ignorance and compliance to a brutal system that wants only part-time labor from them, then to throw them away when finished.

The US "medical" crime in Guatemala is interesting. It comes just before our successfully toppling its democratically elected government in 1954, with the direct assistance of the CIA. So the war aims included not only saving United Fruit [precursor to Chiquita Bananas] but also for Nazi medical experiments.

The elder Hepburn was no Nazi, and she did make ample pronouncements which would make her communist sympathies believable and admired, but she also testified to US Congressional committees that Black and Asian women needed to be sterilized, that it was cruel to allow them to produce children they could not care for, etc. She did this rather than offer a radical critique of a capitalist system which had barely ended chattel slavery for Blacks and Asian workers and had made wage slaves of all workers: from this comes poverty, not color.

And what of the actress Hepburn's father? She described Thomas N. Hepburn as a "dyed-in-the-wool socialist." Dr. Hepburn was a physician and, like his wife, an activist in his own right. His concern was around venereal diseases and starting various private organizations to tackle this serious issue.

What was his role or knowledge, if any, in the crimes against Guatemala? Further, the records about that experiment show that the same doctors were involved in the domestic Tuskegee Experiment, where Black men were left untreated for syphilis and told erroneously they were being treated.

Dr. Hepburn was no small, local doctor with a pet interest. He was actively involved in addressing - to his credit - a serious health issue. Certainly someone with his involvement would have known about these things. But can he be as implicated in these experiments with "good" intentions as his wife was to her campaign?

We must no longer be shocked and awed by these revelations. There has always been a strange disconnect between the narrative of our supposed masters and that of the masses of humanity who suffer. Unfortunately, we must assume the worst from our rulers and the least from our collective response.

источник можно обнаружить по ссылке через картинку

коллекция открыток Пальчевской

на её сайте в ун-те северной Айовы

In honor of the birthday of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, feminist writer and commentator Gloria Feldt discusses Sanger’s life and work, the history of the birth-control movement, the role that birth control plays in women’s equality and empowerment, and what activists today can learn about leadership from Sanger’s organizing. This event took place at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on September 13, 2009. Video courtesy Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation.

ещё по сэнгеровским местам

фотка из ньюйоркской клиники
сама клиника (неск фоток)

по сэнгеровсеим местам

There are many sites throughout the city that Margaret Sanger used to establish the importance of contraceptives and women’s rights.

September 14 Birth Control Crusader Born

Margaret (Higgins) Sanger was born on September 14, 1879, the sixth of 11 children, in Corning, New York. Her father was a poor Irish tombstone cutter. Her mother died at the age of 48 of tuberculosis. When she was 17, Margaret came to New York. She married William Sanger, an architect; joined the Socialist Party and nursed tenants in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

On a hot, muggy day in July, 1912, Nurse Sanger was called to attend Sadie Sachs, 28, a mother of three who was near death from attempting to abort another child on the way. Sadie begged Sanger and the doctor to tell her what she could do to prevent having more babies. The doctor told her to tell her husband to sleep on the roof. When Sadie Sachs died three months later of another self-induced abortion, Margaret Sanger felt it was time to crusade for birth control.
Margaret traveled to birth control clinics in France and Scotland in 1913. On her return to New York she began publishing a magazine called Woman Rebel with the motto: “No Gods, No Masters.” In this issue she forecast future articles on birth control. Postal inspectors confiscated copies and Sanger was indicted for sending birth control information through the mail. She fled to Europe to give herself time to prepare her defense. When she returned to the states, she discovered she was gaining public support in her efforts. There had been no actual writings in the first issue of her magazine regarding birth control. The indictment was withdrawn by the government.
But Sanger had not seen the last of trouble with the law. On October 16, 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic in the nation at 46 Amboy St. in Brooklyn. No fewer than 150 baby-buggy-pushing women from the Brownsville area lined up to pay a 10- cent registration fee. On October 25, policemen and, to her chagrin, a policewoman raided her clinic. Sanger was charged with distributing birth control information and was imprisoned for 30 days.
Sanger was not so tied up in her cause not to have suitors, such as writer H.G. Wells and pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis. After her divorce in 1922 from her first husband, she married millionaire maker of Three-in-One oil (used mainly on sewing machines) J. Noah H. Slee, but only after he agreed to ensure her independence and allow her to use the name Margaret Sanger. They would also occupy separate apartments in the same building. The agreement shocked conventional minds of the ’20s, but the marriage held up.
The use of contraceptives remained illegal throughout the 1920s and ’30s. Though the use of them spread, few admitted to the “crime.” Sanger campaigned futilely for the mail to be opened to birth control information and devices. In 1937 the government finally gave in, but it was not until 1965 that Connecticut became the last state to allow birth control clinics.
That crusade at last successful, Sanger decided it was time to fight to secure the freedom of the individual woman. The female, in her terms, was: “a brood animal for the masculine civilizations of the world.” In the meantime, she became a role model for many women who wanted to control their own destinies and to achieve the goal of making every child a wanted child through birth control.
Margaret Sanger died in Tucson, Arizona on September 6, 1966.

by Vernon Parker (history@brooklyneagle.net), published online 09-14-2010 brooklyneagle

Для улучшения понимания см: The black community should ask why both the Democratic Party and black leaders oppose school vouchers and support abortion.

history of contraceptives

Dittrick Medical History Center in Cleveland pays tribute to history of contraceptives

Sunday, September 12, 2010

By Marylynne Pitz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

CLEVELAND -- Women who were desperate to prevent pregnancy took some frightful health risks, such as eating a poisonous plant called pennyroyal or douching with Lysol.

This is just one horrifying fact in a concise exhibition about the development of the birth control pill, which became available in America in 1960 and turned 50 this year.

This show, "Virtue, Vice and Contraband: A History of Contraception in America," is on permanent view at the Dittrick Medical History Center and might surprise two generations of American women.

Gen X-ers and Millennials, who were born into a world where oral contraceptives are advertised on television, may not know about the scientific and political efforts that were necessary to make the Pill so readily available.
If you go

The center, part of Case Western Reserve University, owns a major collection of contraceptive literature and devices amassed over 40 years by Percy Skuy, a Canadian executive with the company Ortho, a maker of oral contraceptives. Donated in 2004, the 800-item collection also includes prototypes.

In the 1800s, literature about childbirth and reproduction was scant. American couples eager to learn about those subjects turned to "Aristotle's Masterpiece" and Charles Knowlton's 1832 book "Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People."

Condoms existed in America during the 1800s; their code names were "French letters," "safes" or "armour." They cost $1 when a week's pay was about $14. The French called them "redingotes," meaning "English riding coats."

A section devoted to sex during the Civil War reveals that more than 100,000 incidents of sexual misconduct resulted in courts-martial. The Union Army alone recorded 183,000 cases of venereal disease.

Alarmed by these statistics, Union Army leaders, from 1863-65, authorized government-sanctioned prostitution in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and hired doctors to conduct regular medical exams.

There's a good reason many Americans understood little about conception. It wasn't until 1930 that two doctors, one Japanese and the other Austrian, discovered the time of a woman's ovulation, the period when she is most fertile.

That discovery led to the "rhythm method," a natural form of birth control in which intercourse was avoided when the woman was ovulating.

During a visit to Austria in 1930, engineer Gilmore "Tilly" Tilbrook had conversations with doctors about reproductive health. He invented a precise but complicated device like the "Rythmeter."

A 1915 graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Mr. Tilbrook patented the daunting-looking device in 1944 and 1947. The inventor warned people not to use it to calculate the time of ovulation unless they had a record of a woman's previous nine menstrual cycles.

The man who tried valiantly to explain the rhythm method to Americans was Leo J. Latz, a physician, devout Catholic and author of "The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women."

By 1942, more than 200,000 copies of his work were in print; Roman Catholic priests often gave out the pamphlet as a prize to winners of parish bingoes.

Dr. Latz believed couples could use the "rhythm method" to space the births of their children. Two years after he published his research, he was fired from his teaching job at Loyola University in 1934. Apparently, Dr. Latz was ahead of his time. In 1951, Pope Pius XII sanctioned rhythm as a natural form of birth control.

This show highlights the work of Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood and coined the phrase "birth control." Ms. Sanger worked closely with suffragist Katharine McCormick, who earned a biology degree at M.I.T. and was the heiress to a large fortune from the International Harvester Co. Mrs. McCormick bankrolled research on oral contraceptives in the 1950s. Contraception also became part of popular culture. The exhibition includes a recording by country singer Loretta Lynn, who was married at 14 and had six children. By the time the songwriter wrote and recorded her own anthem, "The Pill," in 1975, millions of women were taking oral contraceptives.

Ms. Lynn's lyrics express the freedom from repetitive childbearing that oral contraceptives gave women.

"This old maternity dress I've got is goin' in the garbage. The clothes I'm wearin' from now on won't take up so much yardage."

US historically legal abortion

In fact, abortion was legal in the U.S. up until the mid-1800s, when Victorian, Christian moralists pushed forward a national censorship campaign to rid the country of “pornography” and other sexual deviances. In 1873, the Comstock Act criminalized contraception throughout the country and Anthony Comstock himself sought to arrest Margaret Sanger decades later when she returned from Europe with “new” contraceptive methods based on practices dating back thousands of years.

...Philosophers, such as Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, midwives and abortionists, including Dame Trotula of Salerno and Madame Restelle, and activists, such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, are memorialized through their portraits.

have a look @ 40 Days for Life

The 40-day campaign tracks Biblical history, where God used 40-day periods to transform individuals, communities ... and the entire world. From Noah in the flood to Moses on the mountain to the disciples after Christ's resurrection, it is clear that God sees the transformative value of His people accepting and meeting a 40-day challenge.

source:  4000 Years for Choice

abortion timeline from 3000s BCE till Roe v Wade 
статейко оказалось весьма провокативной и полезной :)

9/6, 1966

“When the history of our civilization is written”, wrote H. G. Wells. “It will be a biological history, and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.” Hearing her tale for themselves, most modern women would find it difficult to disagree with Wells’ conclusion. She instigated the American Birth control movement, named her newspaper The Woman Rebel, and endured a 50-year crusade to convince the world that contraception was a basic human right. Throughout her half-century of struggle, Sanger endured constant legal harassment, prison, exile and the proclamations of political and religious leaders who denounced her as a ‘murderer’. Nevertheless, she relentlessly challenged the government, church, doctors, the press, public opinion, and even her fellow social reformists in her efforts to convince the world of the need for these most radical and liberating changes. So let us here celebrate the struggle of this World Heroine who died forty-four years ago today at the age of 86.
Sanger’s battle began in earnest in 1912 whilst working as a maternity nurse in New York City’s impoverished Lower East Side. Having already observed her own mother’s slow and painful death at the age of forty-eight, her body ruined after eighteen pregnancies, Sanger witnessed multitudes of similarly worn-out women plunged into panic and despair at the thought of a fifth or sixth pregnancy. Many resorted to self-induced abortions, often leading to death; some even chose suicide. Sanger concluded that the only way to end such perpetual misery was through the introduction of birth control. But with no one from her socialist circle willing to help champion such a radical social problem, Sanger felt compelled to act alone.
First came her series of articles called “What Every Girl Should Know”, followed by the aforementioned newspaper The Woman Rebel, in which Sanger – determined to educate these desperate women – blatantly defied federal laws against supplying contraceptive information. In October 1916, Sanger and her sister opened America’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. But within ten days, the clinic was shut down and the sisters arrested and sentenced to thirty days in prison. Despite continuing legal harassment, however, Sanger indefatigably continued her campaign to educate women and lobby for legislative change. Forming the American Birth Control League in 1921, Sanger kept up the momentum until, at long last, public opinion began to turn in her favour. And by the 1940s, the birth control movement had won the acceptance of the medical profession. Legal change, however, was painfully slow to follow. And it was not until 1972 that all unmarried women in America were guaranteed the right to use contraceptives – a benchmark every bit as significant and momentous as the right to vote. For, as Margaret Sanger herself said, “No woman can call herself free until she can consciously choose whether she will or will not be a mother.”

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Labor Day

For the labor side there were Eugene V. Debs, John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and others. Their only weapons were courage and right. Opposing generals, super-rich industrialists, had names like Vanderbilt, Duke, and Gould, and were backed by armed federal troops, marshals and local police.

There were female generals in this war, too, fighting against the forces that would keep them subservient and dependent on men. Margaret Sanger was one, and Jane Addams, and from my hometown of Cleburne, Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons, whose husband Albert Parsons was one of the "usual suspects" hanged for their alleged participation in Chicago's infamous Haymarket Affair.
....
Labor Day began September 6, 1894, to honor workers with a paid holiday to march in their parades. This is what President Grover Cleveland said. But a few months earlier, he had used the military to break the Pullman sleeping car strike, in which a number of strikers were killed. So what Labor Day effectively commemorates, Dr. Feldman told us many years ago, is the government's continuing willingness to support the plutocracy in its use of others in any way it sees fit to do the work, as cheaply as possible, work that it is unwilling, and unable, to do itself.

Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.

'Glenn Beck': Segregation in the 20th Century

Over 100,000 Japanese-Americans alone were forced into camps called war relocation camps. It sounds pleasant. Can we go?
There were separate camps for German-American citizens to relocate.
OK. So, we got that. Oh, and here's science.
You have Margaret Sanger. Science lauded by the left for her family planning. Evil! Read her words. Evil!
She was an open proponent of eugenics, who wrote something to a congressman called in 1932, "a plan for peace," in which she proposed keeping the doors of immigration closed to all of those who would be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as the feeble-minded idiots, morons, insane, criminal and others.
She advocated abortions to stop from creating socially undesirable people. Oh! Who were they?
You see how the forces are beginning to move? The government, segregating. Commerce, segregating. Science, breed, the perfect race.

надо почитать повнимательнее

NEW LEGISLATION, NEW PILL, OLD PROBLEM FOR AMERICAN WOMEN

For OpEdNews: Elayne Clift - Writer

The recent success of mega-wealthy, so-called Pro-Life Republican women in their political campaigns for U.S. Senate and several gubernatorial seats, coupled with new legislation by some states to curb abortion, and the conservative right's attempts to stop a new contraceptive pill, are reason for concern. For women of childbearing age, and those who care about them, it's déjà vu all over again as they try to keep abortion available, legal, and punishment-free, and to keep contraceptive choices available.

The use of ultrasound to stop a woman having an abortion has been mounting for the past several years. To date twenty states have enacted legislation to encourage or require the use of ultrasound to this end. For example, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi require abortion providers to use ultrasound in order to give women a chance to peek into their wombs prior to terminating a pregnancy.

Oklahoma went a step further. The Republican-controlled legislature there forced through a law over the governor's veto requiring that women be shown an ultrasound image and that they be given a detailed verbal description of the fetus's developmental stage. While women needing an abortion for emergency medical reasons are exempt, victims of rape or incest are not. The law has since been suspended because of a pending legal challenge. Limited research on this practice shows that while women may well choose to view what's going on in their uterus, it does not alter their abortion decision. Sometimes it reinforces it.

Ultrasound isn't the only way to stress out women who have made one of life's most difficult and private -- decisions. In Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who could be a Republican presidential candidate in 2012, signed a bill that bars insurance companies from covering abortion in insurance exchanges as called for under new federal health regulations. In Oklahoma, Gov. Brad Henry's veto was overridden by a zealous Republican legislature which now requires doctors who perform abortions to answer a set of more than three dozen questions about each procedure they do, including the woman's reason for ending her pregnancy. Arizona, which has a conservative woman governor, passed a law banning coverage of abortion in the state employees' health plan while in Nebraska all abortions are banned after twenty weeks even though the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that viability occurs at twenty-six weeks. In view of that, the Nebraska law is likely to face a legal challenge.

According to the well-respected Guttmacher Institute, close to 400 state bills regulating abortion have been introduced this year and at least two dozen of them have passed. These bills are "of serious consequence" according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which describes the onslaught of new legislation as "an avalanche." The Center has filed suits against six of the laws to date while the National Right to Life Committee calls 2010 "a good year" in a "friendlier climate."

Meanwhile a battle was mounted recently against a new "morning after" contraceptive pill developed by a French company and currently available in 22 countries. The drug, called Ella, works for 120 hours after sexual intercourse, notably longer than Plan B's 72 hours. But Ella is chemically similar to the controversial RU-486 in that it also acts to block the action of progesterone. While RU-486 can induce abortion, it is unclear whether Ella would do that; still, "Pro-Lifers" wanted to see it banned. The Food and Drug Administration convened an advisory panel to consider Ella in June. The panel voted unanimously that the FDA should approve the drug, which it did last month.

American women have been fighting for the right to reproductive privacy and self-determination ever since Margaret Sanger began her struggle to provide sex education and contraception to women in the early 20^th century. They've made many gains since then, to be sure. Still, ten years into the 21^st century women continue to confront forces that present serious challenges to their human right to bear children if and when they choose. The latest challenges, whether from repressive state legislators or misguided individual zealots, are a reminder that the task is far from complete.

www.elayneclift.com
Elayne Clift is a writer,lecturer, workshop leader and activist. She is senior correspondent for Women's Feature Service, columnist for the Keene (NH) Sentinel and Brattleboro (VT) Commons and a contributor to various publications internationally

колорадские пионэры

In 1967, Colorado became the first state in the US to legalize abortion.
Colorado’s bill was carefully steered through the lower house by then Denver Representative Richard D. Lamm. Lamm was the abortion bill’s principle sponsor. The abortion bill was the first one to pass a state legislature in the United States setting off a domino effect of other bills in various other states. It was signed into law by then Governor John A. Love.
Richard D. Lamm is Co-Director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver, and the former three-term Governor of Colorado, (1975-1987).
Today Lamm sits on the boards of several anti-immigration organizations the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and (PFIR), Progressives for Immigration Reform, and (CAPS), Californians for Population Stabilization.

source

Without women's voice in government, these laws might not exist

If in 1920, the 19th Amendment had never been ratified, many rights and laws that women (and in many cases men) enjoy today may never have passed.

If in 1920, the 19th Amendment had never been ratified, many rights and laws that women (and in many cases men) enjoy today may never have passed. Here are some of the most significant rulings that may have always been “What Ifs” if it weren’t for early suffragists.

The Pill (1960)

Prior to 1960, women used Lysol and lemons to stop procreation. Almost 50 years before that, Margaret Sanger became the voice of birth control. She began trying to overturn the Comstock Law — birth control legislation that outlawed contraceptives — as early as 1916.

In 1936, she helped bring the case of United States v. One Package to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision allowed physicians to legally mail birth control devices and information throughout the country.

In May 1960, the Federal Drug Administration approved the birth-control pill. On Aug. 18, 1960, it was sold for the first time. By 1963, 1.2 million women were on the pill.

Finally, in 1965, the Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut overturned the Comstock Law, ruling that the private use of contraceptives was a constitutional right.

Title IX (1972)

At the time it was passed, fewer than 30,000 female students participated in sports at NCAA member institutions. To put that in perspective, that’s the average amount of students in total that attend Texas Tech — and that was nationwide. Today, thanks in large part to Title IX, that number has increased six-fold. At the high school level, the number of girls participating in athletics has increased ten-fold.

The origins of Title IX arose from the feminist movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. However, sports were not the only arena the law affected. Research shows that females in the classrooms of colleges and office environments felt its rippling effects across America.

Roe v. Wade (1973)

Fought and won by two female lawyers, this historic Supreme Court decision overturning a Texas interpretation of abortion law and making abortion legal in the United States is still one of the most controversial verdicts by the court. The Roe v. Wade decision held that a woman, with her doctor, could choose abortion in earlier months of pregnancy without restriction, and with restrictions in later months, based on the right to privacy. The alias “Jane Roe” was used for Norma McCorvey, on whose behalf the suit was originally filed, alleging the abortion law in Texas violated her constitutional rights and the rights of other women.

Sexual harassment (1986)

A law that gave women the right to fight back against workplace cat calls and indecent proposals, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Vinson v. Meriton Savings Bank that sexual harassment can be illegal sexual discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The court held that sexual harassment is illegal when the workplace is permeated with “discriminatory intimidation, ridicule and insult” that changes the conditions of the victims’ employment and creates an abusive working environment.

Family Leave Act (1993)

Thank this law if you announced you were pregnant to your employers and didn’t lose your job. The FMLA is a labor law requiring larger employers to provide employees job-protected unpaid leave due to a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform his or her job, or to care for a sick family member, or to care for a new child (including by birth, adoption or foster care). Prior to its passing, the provision of leave for family or medical reasons (i.e., a hysterectomy, breast cancer) were up to the discretion of the individual employers. At the time, if you announced you were expecting, you could be expecting to find a new job.

The Lilly Ledbetter Act (2009)

It was passed, but it hasn’t truly kicked in yet. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law by President Obama as an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It all began when Lilly Ledbetter, a production supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama, filed an equal-pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination.

The ruling ensures that women everywhere can effectively challenge unequal pay for doing the same job as a man.


To comment on this story:

shelly.gonzales@lubbockonline.com • 766-8747

Engineering Oblivion: Eugenics, the Remaking of Man and Unmaking of Morality

The year is 1941, and the Nazis are in the midst of their Lebensborn program. Men of pure Aryan stock — especially members of the Waffen-SS, thought the cream of the crop — have a special purpose. In many occupied countries, they are encouraged to mate with blonde-haired, blue-eyed women — those reflecting the very picture of the Aryan ideal themselves. And “mate” is the word; romance is not necessary here, nor marriage, nor moral constraints. For the program is to serve as a baby factory that will produce future Aryan supermen for the Third Reich.


Tuesday, 17 August 2010
Lebensborn grows out of what is central to the Nazi philosophy: eugenics, which is the improvement of the human race through the process of selective breeding. And the Nazis embrace it for a very interesting reason: They have a penchant for indulging ancient myths, and one of these is that they are descended from a race of Aryan supermen who lost their superhuman capabilities because they procreated with inferior races, thus visiting upon themselves a kind of biological devolution. And they aim to reverse the process by jump-starting and accelerating evolution in a sort of hothouse environment.

Of course, talk of breeding supermen based upon an ancient template sounds kooky; speaking of inferior races disgusts the modern palate; and “eugenics,” now joined at the hip with the Nazis, has become a dirty word. Yet it is not at all accurate to say that the Nazis created eugenics. It is more correct to say that eugenics created the Nazis.

Eugenics, at least in a more primitive form, dates back to the time of the Greek philosopher Plato, who, inspired by the Spartans, advocated murdering “weak” children. It wasn’t until 1883 and the theory of evolution’s ascendancy, however, that the word “eugenics” was coined by English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. It was at this time that the field was catching on like wildfire, and it would gain increasing acceptance during the next few decades. For, while it may be hard to believe today, eugenics was considered to be Science with a capital “S,” a “thinking man’s” philosophy, the politically correct theory of the age, only finding opposition from those shackled by faith and fancy. And although German Nazis made it infamous, in the United States in the early 20th century, it was downright popular.

Eugenics Breeding Grounds
Helped by well-heeled benefactors such as the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune, the eugenics movement was already roaring in the Roaring ’20s. And it sometimes manifested itself in relatively innocuous ways. For instance, writes Carol Squiers in Perfecting Mankind: Eugenics and Photography:

“Fitter Families” contests were staged at state agricultural fairs throughout the U.S. in the 1920s. They judged the eugenic worth of local families. Mary T. Watts, the co-organizer of the first contest at the 1920 Kansas Free Fair, explained that when anyone inquired what the contests were, “we say, ‘while the stock judges are testing the Holsteins, Jerseys, and whitefaces in the stock pavilion, we are judging the Joneses, Smiths & the Johns.’” The American Eugenics Society supported the contests, which grew out of a “Better Baby” competition at the 1911 Iowa State Fair. The family contests were featured at seven to ten fairs yearly and were held in the “human stock” sections.

As is always the case when man is reduced to animal, however, the eugenic mindset inspired darker actions as well. Edwin Black treated this subject in The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics, writing:

Elements of the [eugenics] philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

… Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California’s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations — which functioned as part of a closely-knit network — published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.

Yet it would be a mistake to place the United States in the same league as Nazi Germany; rather, it’s more correct to say that many Germans embraced the same fallacy as most of the secular world. For eugenics’ popularity knew few borders. Sure, while Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Research Council were supporters, eugenic policies were instituted in Australia, Japan, Canada, China, Sweden, France, and many other nations as well. In fact, among its most prominent advocates were two foreigners: famed English writers H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.

For example, we could note that The Time Machine, perhaps Wells’ most famous work, has a eugenicist message. Yet we need not interpret symbolism to understand his position on the matter, as he said quite explicitly, “This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animate the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved.” As for Shaw, he echoed these sentiments, saying, “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

Yet, in the early 20th century, the United States was a burgeoning power, and as such, it was often at the forefront of the sciences. And eugenics was no exception. In fact, many German eugenicists looked to America’s policies as a model; Hitler himself said to a fellow Nazi that he had “studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” And, truth be known, the spoiled fruits of eugenics still plague America to this day.

Spoiled Fruits of a Movement
One of these would be the Planned Parenthood organization. While many are unaware of the fact, the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, was a eugenicist with some particularly odious views. For example, in her work Women and the New Race, she wrote, “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” And this culture-of-death spirit certainly lives on. Planned Parenthood affiliates perform more than 300,000 abortions a year, turning a profit of more than $100 million and collecting more than $300 million of your tax money in the process. Sanger also expressed Nazi-like views long before the National Socialists took power. For example, in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, she wrote, “Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes.” (Emphasis added.)

Perhaps it is passions such as the above that inspired Sanger to create the “Negro Project,” an organized campaign to limit — and some say exterminate — America’s black population. Black author Tanya L. Green sheds some more light on Sanger’s motivations in her piece “The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Plan for Black Americans,” writing:

Margaret Sanger aligned herself with the eugenicists whose ideology prevailed in the early 20th century. Eugenicists strongly espoused racial supremacy and “purity,” particularly of the “Aryan” race. Eugenicists hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the race by encouraging the “fit” to reproduce and the “unfit” to restrict their reproduction. They sought to contain the “inferior” races through segregation, sterilization, birth control and abortion.

It is easy for pro-life people, such as I, to look askance at the Margaret Sangers of the world, just as it is easy for anti-American bigots to place the onus on America, or blacks to place it on whites. While there certainly are villains in this story, however, it is more important to expose destructive ideas than deluded people. After all, ideas live on long after idealists pass on.

Certainly, the desire to have strong, vibrant citizens and children is nothing new. The aforementioned Spartans would kill a male infant if he was perceived to have any defect whatsoever, and parents typically hope and pray for healthy, intelligent, and strong sons and daughters. And, of course, offspring’s characteristics can most assuredly be influenced through selective breeding. For example, consider the dogs we have as pets today. The breeds many of us know and love — the Rottweiler, cocker spaniel, Neapolitan Mastiff, etc. — never existed until they were bred by man. Their unique characteristics are the result of taking a group of canines, breeding the ones that exhibit desired traits, and killing those that do not. And repeating this proc-ess generation after generation yielded unique beasts ideally suited to whatever purpose they were to be used for.

And this is the problem with eugenics. We must not “use” people or view them as objects that serve a “purpose.” Yet why does the science endeavor to create a better human? It is for that very reason: so that they will serve the purpose of being better soldiers, citizens, scientists, producers, etc. But, then, what happens once you’ve reduced people to objects, to cogs in the machinery of the state? Well, when it seems that a baby will be insufficient for his purpose, you give him the Spartan treatment; and when a cog gets too old to serve its purpose, you euthanize it — for the good of society. And you then have embraced the eugenicist position that there are “human beings who never should have been born,” as Sanger said; or that there is “life unworthy of life,” as the Nazis said. The point here is that you don’t value people based on what they can do. You value them based on what they are.

Yet this brings us to a very interesting question: What are they? And is it just a coincidence that eugenics took hold in the wake of evolution’s acceptance? Is it possible that classical evolution’s conception of “what they are” engenders a eugenicist mindset? Let us examine the matter.

Evolution’s Ties to Eugenics
Traditional Christianity and classical evolution involve very different conceptions of man’s nature. Christianity teaches that man is the culmination of God’s creation, His sixth-day triumph. Man is not merely a steppingstone on the way to some superior being but a finished product. Sure, he is fallen as well as finished and needs to be perfected, but this is not a matter of improving the flesh but of transcending it. And this is done with knowledge of what is good and the gift of God’s grace. Moreover, even if the flesh is broken, hampered by crippling limitation, the person’s soul bears the beauty of the Ultimate Beholder. The person is valuable not because of what he can do but because of what he is: a child of God with a soul from Heaven.

In contrast, evolution tells us that we are just one stage in a long line of creatures experiencing change in a process that is often, amusingly, called improvement, even though we’re moving toward we don’t know what without knowing why. But evolutionists take it as doctrine that it is improvement, and all people want to improve the human condition. For Christians, this means spreading the faith; for evolutionists, it means improving the genes. Ergo, eugenics.

Of course, many evolutionists will protest, saying that they find eugenics abhorrent. Yet the link between evolution and eugenics is undeniable, as it was made by none other than Sir Francis Galton himself. Galton only developed his eugenic principles after reading his cousin Charles Darwin’s work The Origin of Species, which inspired him to build on Darwin’s work. And this should surprise no one. Sure, today eugenics is thought ill-considered, but it is not illogical. If evolution is improvement and improvement is good, and if the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, it makes sense to facilitate evolution. And because it is logical, at least on the surface, it is necessary to look a little deeper.

Eugenics is an outgrowth of classical evolution, which presupposes that we are a cosmic accident and thus implies atheism. The problem with this worldview is that it makes many assumptions, fails to ask the most basic questions, and then contradicts itself. For one thing, if there is no God, no Truth — no standard for determining good that transcends man — on what basis can we determine what constitutes improvement? Why is it better for man to survive and “evolve” than to perish? After all, ask some of the nature-worshipping misanthropes amongst us, and they will tell you that the world would be better off if mankind disappeared entirely.

Yet, even if you accept — based on consensus opinion and nothing more — that what evolutionists say is improvement is indeed improvement, what purpose does it serve? To illustrate this point, I’ll use a variation on a criticism G.K. Chesterton made of H.G. Wells when the latter suggested that the purpose of life was to beget children. It is as if you asked, “What is the use of hammers?” and the answer was, “To create better hammers.” And then you asked, “And what is the use of those hammers?” and the answer was “To create better hammers still.” It doesn’t answer the most basic questions: “Why create hammers in the first place” and “What is the good of having hammers?” The eugenicist philosophy not only reduces man to animal, it reduces man’s existence to meaninglessness. The Christian knows that he is trying to improve — which he calls growing in holiness — so he can spend eternity with God. The atheist may try to improve, and he may actually succeed. But if his worldview were correct, it would mean that he would spend eternity as dust, indistinguishable from a “defective” some eugenicist might have wanted to exterminate.

Of course, if atheists were right, dust is essentially all we would be, some pounds of chemicals and water. We would merely be organic robots — tools, much like a hammer. And, then, why trouble over how we manipulate these automatons’ circuitry? And what could be wrong with terminating the function of robots that cannot serve their “purpose”? Besides, without Truth and thus without objective right and wrong, nothing could be “wrong” in any real sense, anyway.

Why does this philosophy matter? It’s not because eugenics will rear its ugly head once again, because eugenics, strictly speaking, will not. But it has not been trumped by morality, only technology. With genetic engineering, we no longer have to select people for breeding; we can now select the genes themselves. This science holds the promise of eliminating birth defects, but it can also be misused. It finally gives modern-day utopians a tool with which they can create supermen, Aryan or otherwise, in a laboratory. And unless we want to end up as test subjects, we had better realize that man’s value lies not in his ability to become or create a superman, but in being born of the supernatural and possessed of the eternal.

Photo: Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term "eugenics"

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13 августа 1918 года — Фредерик СЕНГЕР (Frederick SANGER) — английский биохимик. В 1958 году он получил Нобелевскую премию по химии «за установление структур белков, особенно инсулина», а в 1980 ему вместе с американцем Уолтером ГИЛБЕРТОМ была присуждена половина Нобелевской премии по химии «за вклад в установление основных последовательностей в нуклеиновых кислотах» (вторая половина досталась еще одному американцу — Полу БЕРГУ).

Little white pills that may end the abortion impasse

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Could the decades-long global impasse over abortion worldwide be overcome - by little white pills costing around 60p each?
That seems possible, for these pills are beginning to revolutionise abortion around the world, especially in poor countries. One result may be tens of thousands of women's lives saved each year.
Five-sixths of abortions take place in developing countries, where poor sterilisation and training often make the procedure dangerous. Up to 70,000 women die a year from complications of abortions, according to the World Health Organisation. But researchers are finding an alternative that is safe, cheap and very difficult for governments to restrict - misoprostol, a medication originally intended to prevent stomach ulcers.
"I feel like people must have felt when they discovered the nuclear bomb," said Dr Beverly Winikoff, president of Gynuity Health Projects, a non-profit research institution on reproductive health. "This technology is world-shaking."
This pharmaceutical approach is called "medical abortion". In Europe and the US, it typically consists of two sets of "M" pills. The first is mifepristone, formerly known as RU-486, and then a day or two later the misoprostol. Using the drugs in combination produces a miscarriage more than 95 per cent of the time in early pregnancy. But mifepristone is difficult to obtain in much of the world as it is used only to induce abortions. In contrast, misoprostol is widely available and can't easily be banned because it is also used for ulcers and can save lives of women with postpartum haemorrhages. Whatever one thinks of misoprostol for abortions, it also is a potential lifesaver.
Researchers are finding that if women take misoprostol alone, effectiveness drops to 80 to 85 per cent. That may sound low, but it's typically far better and safer than alternatives that women turn to, Dr Winikoff noted.
"Medical abortion represents a revolution in women's reproductive health," said Dana Hovig, chief executive of Marie Stopes International, which provides women's reproductive health services in 43 countries. "It saves women's lives and has potential to increase access to safe abortion."
Medical abortion causes a miscarriage that is indistinguishable from a natural one. That's important for women in countries where they risk arrest if they seek hospital aid after a botched abortion. The risks to a woman seem no greater than with a natural miscarriage, and there's no known harm to a woman who turns out not to have been pregnant after all. One serious downside is that misoprostol is suspected of causing birth defects, perhaps 1 per cent of the time, but only if it fails and the pregnancy continues to term.
It's not clear how late in pregnancy medical abortion is feasible.

Source: Nicholas Kristof, The Scotsman, 3 August 2010

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5 Most Influential Nurses in History

There is no denying that nurses have made a huge impact on our society and on so many of our lives, whether they were famous or not. Although every nurse is sure to make an impact on many people during his or her lifetime, the following women are considered the 5 most influential nurses in history.
Florence Nightingale: The most famous figure from nursing history is definitely Florence Nightingale who cared for the weakest members of the population and fought to improve medical conditions while mentoring others to do similar work. She served in the Crimean War and helped make the conditions more sanitary and later worked with Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell to open the Women’s Medical College.
Margaret Sanger: The legalization of birth control can largely be attributed to Margaret Sanger who fought to spread the word about women’s health topics ranging from birth control to menstruation to sexuality. She got in trouble with the law in the U.S. and had to flee to Europe for a time as a result. She founded the organization that eventually became Planned Parenthood and opened the first legal clinic in the United States where women could get birth control.
Clara Barton: Soldiers in the Civil War would not have had the medical care they did if it weren’t for Clara Barton who started out organizing medical supplies and eventually braved the battlefields to provide care for soldiers as the Lady in Charge of Union hospitals appointed by Lincoln himself. She went on to begin the American Red Cross.
Mary Eliza Mahoney: As the United States’ first African American nurse, Mary Eliza Mahoney is an important part of history for many reasons. In addition to her many years of nursing and work to form new hospitals and African American orphanages, she also co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses.
Anna Caroline Maxwell: She was to the U.S. what Florence Nightingale was to Europe. Anna Caroline Maxwell was in charge of Army nurses in the Spanish-American War, founder of the Army Nurse Corps, recipient of the Medal of Honor for Public Health in WWII and first director of what is now the Columbia School of Nursing.

5 Most Influential Nurses in History

Бернард Шоу поддерживал Гитлера

George Bernard Shaw, “ I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years…just put them there and say , ‘Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence…if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.’

Shaw wrote, “ I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short- a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.”

Interviewed on Germany Shaw declared:
“Germany’s contention of ‘race pollution’ was ‘despicably unscientific.’” But he said he “appreciated” Hitler’s political sagacity and the courage with which he has rescued Germany from the gutter,, and placed her once more at the head of Central Europe.”
( SOURCE: GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Approaches His 82d Birthday Anemic But Still Vociferously Aware of His OwnJJnique. Significance, Galveston Daily News: 7/24/1938)

It is important to note that George Bernard Shaw was a Eugenicist who supported Planned Parenthood Founder, and eugenicist Margaret Sanger and others in the eugenics movement.

What many people do not know is that Shaw was a contributor to Planned Parenthood Founder, Margaret Sanger’s “Birth Control Review”.

Shaw endorsed Sanger, Birth Control, and EUGENICS..

In the June 1929 Birth Control Review, George Bernard Shaw supports Sanger’s efforts to promote birth control when he, ” We are up against an overpopulation problem created by Capitalism…Socialists say quite truly that Socialism can get rid of it…But it cannot wait for Socialism…”

In Margaret Sanger’s Autobiography, Sanger writes, ” Jane had lnvited literary luminaries and their wives George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Sir Arbuthnot Lane, Professor E W MacBride of the Eugenics Education Society, Walter Salter of the League of Nations, and Lord Buckmaster.

“It had been my experience that personages gave little of themselves on formal occasions So many people expected these lions to roar bravely, forgetting that they preferred to save their sparkling sallies for the pages of their books.”

Sanger continues, “I was back In New York by the end of October, and soon came a letter from Shaw cheering me w~th his point of view.”

Sanger reads the letter from George Bernard Shaw and says Shaw compares the “more evolved people” or “White Elitists” to “lower classes who need to be taught to control their populations calling them “amoeba” ,

‘ Birth control should be advocated for its own sake, on the general
ground that the difference between voluntary, irrational, uncontrolled activity IS the difference between an amoeba and a man, and if we really belleve that the more highly evolved creature is the better we may as well act accordingly. As the amoeba does not understand birth control, it cannot abuse it, and therefore its state may be the more
gracious, but it is also true that as the amoeba cannot write, it cannot commit forgery yet we teach everybody to write unhesitatingly, knowing that if we refuse to teach anything that could be abused we should never teach anything at all .’

Margaret Sanger Autobiography Pages 371-372

At the end of this post is a preview for the film: Maafa21, and if you order this movie and watch all 2 hours of it, you will also learn who helped fund the Nazi’s, develop the gas they used in their concentration camps, and fund the development of the abortion pill RU-486 – for the purpose of population control. And how they had ties to Planned Parenthood Founder, Margaret Sanger.

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Когда человек чего хочет – он не может быть счастлив

Если сильно упростить картину, то в антропологии XIX века существовали две теории происхождения человека. Сторонники полигенизма рассматривали расы человека как разные виды, имеющие различное происхождение. Моногенисты считали, что все люди, независимо от расовых различий, восходят к одному предку и составляют один вид. Полигенизм основывался на теории эволюции и позволил подвести под теории расового неравенства научную базу. Будучи завороженными поисками недостающего звена между человеком и обезьяной, Геккель и его последователи строили филогенетические ряды, ведущие от обезьяны к белому человеку через представителей черных рас. Тогда считалось, что это загадочное звено должно непременно реально существовать. Надо только как следует поискать. Так ученые, вооруженные передовой теорией, оказались вдохновителями расистских идеологий и практик, которые вполне соответствовали политическим задачам колониальных держав.
Моногенисты, со своей стороны, утверждали, что все расы восходят к общему предку, т.е., что все люди – братья. Позиция вполне демократическая, но уж слишком близка к креационизму и происхождению народов от сыновей Ноя. Ситуация была очень не простой. Если ты прогрессивный дарвинист, то оказываешься в рядах империалистов и расистов, если придерживаешься антиэволюционных взглядов, то, с одной стороны, оказываешься в лагере прогрессивных гуманистов (вместе с Чернышевским, который однажды что-то пробормотал о равенстве всех рас), а с другой – могут обвинить в мракобесии. Советские историки науки нашли выход из положения и объявили Миклухо-Маклая гуманистом-дарвинистом. Если не нонсенс, то уж точно удивительный вид гоминида.
Сам Маклай, надо сказать, от каких-либо определённых высказываний по этому поводу воздерживался, предпочитая беспристрастное собирание фактов обобщениям. Он «наблюдал людей по возможности без предвзятого мнения относительно количества и распространения человеческих племен и рас». Чуть ли не единственное теоретическое положение, которое у него находим, сводится к тому, что беспристрастное наблюдение устанавливает, что неодинаковость природных условий в разных частях света не допускала повсеместного распространения какой-либо одной расы, а потому «существование различных рас совершенно согласно с законами природы». Его научные наблюдения работали на обе «партии».
Академик Бэр, мировая величина в биологии и антропологии того времени, и последовательный моногенист, не признававший Дарвина, посоветовал М-М. разобраться с точкой зрения, которой придерживались полигенисты, что папуасы принадлежат к особому виду, сильно отличающемуся от людей, на том основании, что волосы у них растут пучками, а кожа отличается особой жесткостью. Маклай разобрался и заблуждение опроверг.
Из всех своих открытий Маклай больше всего ценил явление, которому он дал название «макродонтизм» (большезубость). Практически у всех аборигенов Островов Адмиралтейства передние зубы отличались большими размерами и выдавались наружу даже при закрытом рте. Маклай решил, что эта гипертрофия вызвана некоей спецификой местной пищи и настолько укоренилась среди местного населения, что стала наследственной. Об этом явлении Маклай написал в ведущих европейских научных журналах, включая английский «Nature». Открытие немало способствовало установлению его научной репутации в Австралии. Позже выяснилось, что с зубами у аборигенов все в порядке, а их огромные размеры – вызваны отсутствием зубных щеток и привычкой жевать разновидность местного ореха бетель с соком лайма, что приводит к образованию зубного камня.
От ошибок никто не застрахован.
Однако главный просчёт М-М. был в том, что он считал папуасов прародителями человеческого рода, прямыми потомками обитателей сгинувшей Лемурии. Они же – оказались одной из самых смешанных рас в мире.

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