'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.

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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

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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.

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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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Stop the Blame: Population Control Imagery (1933-2008)

A new multimedia tool from the Population and Development Program out of Hampshire College chronicles the history of beliefs about population control. Stop the Blame: Population Control Imagery (1933-2008) is available for download or on CD, and lays out a ton of images from newspapers, magazines and other media from the last 70 years. The images illustrate exactly how our beliefs about population, developing countries and the environment have been shaped by eugenics, racism and many other ideological factors.

This digital flash archive displays historical prints, posters and articles that articulate overpopulation anxieties and illustrate population control policies. The interactive presentation offers a rare overview of the visual media of past and present population control agendas in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. It is a tool that can be used in classrooms, activist trainings, and public talks. Each image is accompanied by a written description that provides context and food for thought.

They were nice enough to send me a review copy of the CD and it is really a fantastic teaching tool. My blurb about the project:

The Stop the Blame multimedia project does what a simple written history cannot: it shows us the interplay between race, population, eugenics and the environment.... This project should be a required teaching tool for all history and sociology courses.

It's worth checking out, and best of all, it's free! You can download it or request a hard copy here.
Posted by Miriam - February 09, 2009, at 08:55AM |источник

Margaret Sanger Biography: Margaret Sanger Founder of the Birth Control League

Margaret Sanger was the founder of the Birth Control League
She was born in Corning, New York on September 14, 1879 and was one among eleven siblings. But her mother had undergone eighteen pregnancies. Some of her babies died in infancy, and after this arduous experience of numerous pregnancies and childbirths, her mother died of tuberculosis and cervical cancer.
Her father had ideas like advocating women’s suffrage and free public education. Margaret Sanger seems to have inherited at least in part her ideals from her father’s ideas as well as from her own experiences in a large family. Being the sixth of eleven siblings, she had to assist in household chores and in the upbringing of her younger siblings.
She started her schooling in a boarding school named Claverack College, but had to give up her education half-way to come home and help nurse her ailing mother. After her mother passed away in 1896, she enrolled herself in a hospital in White Plains as part of their program for training nurses.
She got married and had her first baby in 1903. Incidentally she had contracted tuberculosis from her ailing mother. During this time another misfortune befell her when her home was burned in an accidental fire. She later moved to New York City and took up work in the Manhattan slums.
Her experience thus far motivated her to write about them and she started a column “What Every Girl Should Know”, that she published in the ‘New York Call’. She also wrote a pamphlet, her first of many other publications to follow, under the title ‘Family Limitation’.
Her ideas were ahead of her times and when she spoke and wrote about contraceptives it was looked upon as obscene. She risked imprisonment, but was fortunate to be able to continue her activities unmolested by the law for some time at least.
A turning point in her life was when she was called upon to nurse a lady named Sadie Sachs who had undergone a self-induced abortion which led to her health begin affected dangerously. In those days abortion was frowned upon and no medical practitioner would undertake to perform one. After few months Sadie Sachs died while again trying to abort her baby. This got Sanger thinking of the ways and means to prevent such deaths and unwanted pregnancies.
Before she could move on with her mission, she separated from her husband.
But she did not allow this separation to hinder what she had in mind. She started a monthly magazine named ‘The Woman Rebel’ that discussed ways and means of preventing unwanted pregnancies through the use of contraceptives. This magazine was the first to use the term ‘Birth Control’.
The law again intervened and she was accused of having violated obscenity laws by the US postal department. She was indicted in August 1914, but she escaped the clutches of the law by jumping bail and sailing across the Atlantic under an assumed name “Bertha Watson”.
Later in 1915, she returned to the US to continue her initiatives despite legal hurdles, and wrote many books that included ‘Woman and the New Race’ published in 1920, ‘The Pivot of Civilization’ published in 1922, ‘Happiness in Marriage’ published in 1926, ‘My Fight For Birth Control’ published in 1931 and her own autobiography published in 1938.
Finally Margaret Sanger’s ideas were accepted at least by the pro-abortion groups while she was and still is condemned by the pro-life groups. But we can say that at the end of a long struggle she succeeded in raising awareness about this critical issue of birth control and contraception. She passed away on September 6, 1966.

The Life Story Of Margaret Sanger

The Life Story Of Margaret Sanger
The Life Of Margaret Sanger:Margaret Sanger Slee Higgins (14 September 1879 – September 6, 1966) is an American birth control activist and founder of the American League for Birth Control.
The Life Of Margaret Sanger:
Margaret Sanger was born in Corning, New York. Margaret Sanger’s mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, was a devout Catholic who survived 18 pregnancies (11 live births)  to die of tuberculosis and cancer of the cervix. Sanger’s father, Michael Higgins, Hennessy, earning a living, bore the angels and saints of the huge blocks of white marble or gray granite gravestones ” , as well as an activist women’s suffrage, and free public education. Sanger was the sixth of eleven children  , and spent much of his youth assistance in housekeeping and care of her younger brothers and sisters. Sanger attended Claverack College, a boarding school in Claverack within two years. The sisters paid her tuition fees. Sanger returned home in 1896 following his father’s request to return home to feed the mother. Her mother died March 31, 1896. By the end of the century, the mother of one of his friends arranged for her Claverack enroll in the program of care in a hospital in White Plains, New York-rich suburbs. In 1902, Margaret Higgins
married architect William Sanger and the couple settled in New York. Margaret Sanger was developed tuberculosis as a result of caring for her sick mother and her own fatigue and Sangers moved to Saranac, New York Adirondacks, for health reasons. In 1903 she gave birth to her first child, Stuart.
In 1912, after a fire destroyed the house, her husband was developed, Sanger and her family moved to New York where he went to work in the slums of East Side of Manhattan. In the same year she also began writing a column for the New York Call “What Every Girl Should Know.” Distribution of brochures, Family Limitation, for women, Sanger repeatedly caused scandal and threatened with imprisonment, in violation of the Comstock Law of 1873, which outlawed as obscene distribution of contraceptive information and devices.
Sanger felt that in order for women to have more “equal” in society, both physically and mentally healthy life, they should be able to decide when a pregnancy is most convenient for himself.   In addition, access to birth control and carry out a critical psychological need, allowing women to be able to fully enjoy sexual relations without being burdened by the fear of pregnancy.
Sanger and her husband William moved to New York in 1910. They plunged into the radical bohemian culture, which was then flourishing in Greenwich Village . Margaret Sanger friends with local intellectuals, artists and public figures. Some of the more famous friends, they were associated with were John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman.
As Margaret Sanger worked in Lower New York East Side with the poor women who were repeatedly suffering from frequent childbirth and abortion herself, she began to talk about the need for women to get acquainted with the state of birth control. Although she worked as nurse, Sanger met Sadie Sachs, where she was called to his home to help her after she became extremely ill due to spontaneous abortion. Then Sachs asked the attending doctor to tell her how she could let this happen again, that the doctor simply gave advice to remain moderate  . A few months later, Sanger once again called back to the apartment Sachs, only this time, Sachs, was found dead after a new self abortion  . This was a turning point in their lives in Sanger. difficult Sachs’ was not unusual for this period . Margaret Sanger believed, then, more than ever that she wanted to do something to help desperate women, before they were forced to follow the dangerous and illegal abortions .
Margaret separately from her husband, William in 1913. In 1914, Sanger began Rebel Woman, 8 pages per month newsletter promoting contraception, with the slogan “No Gods and No Masters” (and chasing birth control  and every woman to be “the absolute mistress of your own body.” She is accused of violating U.S. laws on postal obscenity in August 1914, but jumped bail and fled to England under the alias “Bertha Watson. Sanger returned to the U.S. in October 1915 and her 5-year-old daughter, Peggy, died November 6  .
In 1915, William Sanger circulated a copy of the publication of his wife, family restrictions, to the postal worker who was actually an illegal situation. Because he was found to be distributing “indecent” material, he was imprisoned for 30 days, while his wife was still in Europe.
Family Planning Clinics :
In 1915 Sanger visited the Dutch birth control clinic, where she found that the diaphragm is actually more effective means of contraception than candles and soul that it extends back to the United States . This realization began to slow introduction of the membrane in the United States with Sanger later illegally smuggle them into the country  .
In 1916, Sanger published, that every girl should know, which was later widely used as one of the E. Haldeman-Julius “Blue Book”. It provides information on issues such as menstruation and sexuality among adolescents. This was followed in 1917 that every mother should know. She also started a monthly magazine of Birth Control Review and birth control News and contributed articles on health on paper of the Socialist Party, Call.
On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in Brownsville area of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States. He was searched nine days later the police. She served 30 days in jail. The initial appeal was rejected, and in 1918 a written opinion of Judge Frederick E. Crane in New York appellate court allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives.
Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921. In 1922 she came to Japan to work with the Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue promote fertility; in the next few years, she returned six more times for this purpose. In the same year she married her second husband, oil magnate James Noah H. Slee.
In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established a Clinical Research Bureau (CRB). Sanger eventually found a loophole in the system, when she learned that doctors were exempt from the law, which prohibits the dissemination of contraceptive information to women when prescribed for medical reasons.   With the help of his wealthy supporters, Sanger was finally able to open the first legal clinic of birth control, which was staffed by only women doctors and social workers. It was the first legal clinic, birth control in the U.S. (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1940). She received a major grant from the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. with the Bureau of Social Hygiene in 1924. Grants were made anonymously to avoid public exposure Rockefeller’s agenda. Families also consistently supported its efforts in respect of population contro.
In addition, in 1923 she formed the National Committee on federal legislation to regulate fertility and served as president until its dissolution in 1937 after the birth control, under medical supervision, was legalized in many states. In 1927 Sanger helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva.
Between 1921 and 1926 Sanger received over a million letters from mothers to provide information on birth control. From 1916 to teaching “in many places-halls, churches, women’s clubs, homes, theaters” to “many types of audiences-cotton workers, clergy, liberals, socialists, scientists, members of the club, and fashionable, philanthropic-minded women. ”
In 1926, Sanger gave a lecture on birth control to women’s auxiliary Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.  She described him as “one of the strange experience I had in a lecture,” and added that it should only use “the most basic terms, as if I’m trying to understand children.”   Sanger was well received by the group, and as a result of “a dozen invitations to similar groups offered.”
In 1928 Sanger resigned as President of the ABCL, severing all legal relations, and took full control of the CRB, renamed it Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.  Two years later she became president of the Birth Control International Information Centre. In January 1932 she appeared in a new history of society, the organization created by Mirza Ahmad Sohrab and Julie Chanler, this address later become the basis for an article entitled “Plan of the world.
In 1937, Sanger became the chairman of the Council on birth control of America and started two publications Birth Control Review “and” Birth Control News. From 1939 to 1942 she was an honorary delegate of the Federation of American Birth Control, which is included as an observer with a Negro project, along with Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble.   From 1952 to 1959 she worked as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, while it was the largest private international “family planning” organizations.
In the early 1960 Sanger contributed to the use of newly available contraceptive pill. She toured Europe, Africa and Asia, lecturing and assistance in establishing the clinic.
Sanger died in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona, 8 days shy of its eighty-seventh birthday, and only a few months after Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which legalized birth control for married couples in the U.S., the top of its 50-year-old days.
Sanger books include Woman and the New Generation “(1920), Pivot Civilization (1922), Happiness in Marriage (1926), my struggle for birth control (1931) and autobiography (1938).
The book, Motherhood in Bondage, a large collection of actual letters that were written by Margaret Sanger in desperation, thousands of women who have requested to receive information on how they can prevent pregnancy for a large number of different reasons
Although Sanger was greatly influenced by her father, her mother left her with a deep sense of dissatisfaction with respect to its own understanding of society and women’s health and childbirth. She also criticized the censorship of her message about sexuality and contraception, civil and religious authorities as an attempt by men to keep women in subjection. Atheist, Sanger attacked Christian leaders against her message, accusing them of obscurantism and insensitivity to women’s issues. Sanger was particularly important in the lack of awareness about the dangers and lack of opportunities for the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases among women. She argued that these social problems are the result of male institutions deliberately keep women in ignorance. Sanger also deplored the lack of modern rules requiring registration of people with sexually transmitted diseases (which she contrasted with mandatory registration of persons with communicable diseases such as measles).
Psychology Of  Sexuality :
Aware of Sanger and practical approach to human physiology were progressive for its time, her thoughts on the psychology of human sexuality place her right in the pre-Freudian nineteenth century . Contraceptives, it would seem, was to her more money to limit unwanted side effects of sex than a way to release the men and women to enjoy it [original research?]. In what every girl should know, she writes: “Every normal man and woman has the right to control and direct his sexual impulse. The man and woman, which he controls and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, never sensible.” Sexuality for her a kind of weakness, and he said, breaking the force.
Sanger also affects psychologist Havelock Ellis, in particular in relation to his theories about female sexuality and its importance.  His views have inspired Sanger to expand their arguments for birth control, arguing that in addition to the already large number of reasons, it would also fulfill a critical psychological need, allowing women to fully enjoy a sexual relationship, free from fear of unwanted pregnancy.   After Sanger and her husband divorced later, Sanger had an affair with Ellis, and reportedly a close relationship with HG Wells  .
Although the germ cells located in parts of the anatomy for the main purpose of easily expelling them into women to reproduction, there are other elements in the sexual fluids, which are the essence of blood, nerves, brain and muscles. When redirected to building and strengthening of these, we find that men and women of the greatest endurance highest magnetic energy. A girl can waste the creative forces of love to ponder the extent of the exhaustion of its system, and the results do not differ from the effects of masturbation and debauchery.
Eugenics And Euthanasia :

Margaret Sanger was an advocate of negative eugenics, social philosophy, which asserts that human hereditary traits can be improved through social action. Sanger in hereditary politicians ran to the removal of immigration policy, free access to birth control methods, and complete autonomy in family planning for the able-minded, as well as a mandatory separation or sterilization for deeply depressed. It specifically condemned euthanasia as a tool of eugenics.
The plan of the world (1932), for example, Sanger suggested Congress Department:
Keep doors closed to immigration entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to endurance races, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, others in this class barred by immigration laws in 1924 .
And, the following:
Best stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already outdated, or whose inheritance is such that undesirable traits can be transmitted to the offspring .
Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent “dysgenic” children from birth in a disadvantaged life, and dismissed “positive eugenics” (which promoted greater fertility “fitter” upper classes), and inappropriate. While many leaders in the negative eugenics movement calling for active euthanasia “is not suitable,” Sanger spoke out against such methods. She believes that women have the power and knowledge of birth control was in the best position to produce “fit” children. She rejected any of eugenics that would take control in the hands of those actually giving birth.
Sanger believes that the responsibility for birth control, should remain in the hands of a skilled minded individual parents, not the state, but independent of motherhood was the only unshakeable foundation for improving the race, she wrote:
“The campaign for birth control not only of eugenic value, but practically coincides with the ultimate goal of eugenics …. We are convinced that racial regeneration, like individual regeneration, must come from within. That is, it must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from outside. ”
We believe that a woman has sufficient knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of time and conditions under which the child should be brought into the world. In addition, we believe that it is right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she would bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she wants to become a mother … Only in the case of a free, self-determining motherhood can be any unshakable structure of racial improvement.
Freedom Of Speech :
Margaret Sanger was an ardent defender of freedom of speech had been arrested at least 8 times to express their views at a time when public speaking in favor of birth control was illegal. She said in an interview that she was under the influence of an agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll, who spoke in his native town, when she was 12 years old.

Read more: http://www.dalimunthe.com/2010/07/life-story-of-margaret-sanger.html#ixzz0v4T454yp

Christians Reexamine Morality of Birth Control

July 28, 2010
(RNS) -- Is contraception a sin? The very suggestion made Bryan Hodge and his classmates at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute laugh.
As his friends scoffed and began rebutting the oddball idea, Hodge found himself on the other side, poking holes in their arguments. He finished a bachelor's degree in biblical theology at Moody and earned a master's degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Now, more than a decade later, he is trying to drive a hole the size of the ark through what has become conventional wisdom among many Christians: that contraception is perfectly moral.
His book, "The Christian Case Against Contraception," was published in November. Hodge, a former Presbyterian pastor who is now a layman in the conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church, realizes his mission is quixotic.
In the 50 years since the birth-control pill hit the market, contraception in all its forms has become as ubiquitous as the minivan, and dramatically changed social mores as it opened the possibilities for women.
No less than other Americans, Christians were caught up in the cultural conflagration. In a nation where 77 percent of the population claims to be Christian, 98 percent of women who have ever had sexual intercourse say they've used at least one method of birth control.
The pill is the most preferred method, followed closely by female sterilization (usually tying off fallopian tubes).
"People are no longer ... thinking about it," says Hodge, 36, who had to agree with a Christian publisher who rejected his book on grounds that contraception is a nonstarter, a settled issue. "People don't even ask if there is anything possibly morally wrong about it."
For more than 19 centuries, every Christian church opposed contraception.
Under pressure from social reformers such as Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, the Anglican Communion (and its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church) became the first to allow married couples with grave reasons to use birth control.
That decision cracked a door that, four decades later, was thrown wide open with the relatively safe, effective birth-control pill, which went on the market in this country in the summer of 1960. Virtually every Protestant denomination had lifted the ban by the mid-1960s.
Even evangelicals within mainline Protestant and nondenominational churches embraced the pill as a way that married couples could enjoy their God-given sexuality without fear of untimely pregnancy.
"It was a reaction to that whole Victorian thing where sex was seen as dirty," says Hodge, who lives in Pennsylvania.
There remains one massive holdout among major Christian churches -- the Roman Catholic Church, which expressed its opposition in no uncertain terms in Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae.
To separate the two functions of marital intimacy -- the life-transmitting from the bonding -- is to reject God's design, Paul VI wrote.
"The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life -- and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman," Humanae Vitae proclaimed.
Janet Smith, a Catholic seminary professor whose writing and talks have been influential for two decades, puts it this way: "God himself is love, and it's the very nature of love to overflow into new life. Take the baby-making power out of sex, and it doesn't express love. All it expresses is physical attraction."
The church's ban on contraception stunned many, including one of the doctors who created the pill, Harvard's John Rock, a Catholic. By and large, Catholics went with the culture rather than the church.
A 2005 Harris Poll found 90 percent of adult Catholics support contraception, just 3 percentage points lower than the general adult population.
"The ban on contraception is completely irrelevant to Catholics," said Jon O'Brien, president of the group Catholics for Choice. "We know the position the hierarchy has on contraception is fundamentally flawed, and that's why it's ignored en masse."
The Rev. Ken Vialpando, pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Ogden, Utah, places much of the blame for Catholics' disobedience on priests who are reticent to talk about church teachings on marriage and sex, or who bought into the 1960s notion that one's conscience was a sufficient guide.
"What if our consciences are not fully informed?" Vialpando asked. "How can we fault the people if they haven't heard about it and recognize the purpose or meaning of marriage?"
Smith, whose recorded 1994 talk "Contraception, Why Not?" has sold more than 1 million copies, says young adult evangelicals and Catholics, including men studying for the priesthood, seem more open to the possibility that contraception is a sin.
The pendulum may yet swing, she said.
"They are going to have a huge impact," says Smith, who holds an ethics chair at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. "They already are."
The Rev. Greg Johnson of Sandy, Utah, who is on the board of the National Association of Evangelicals, says most evangelicals remain firmly in the contraceptive camp, even if some stress that it should not be used frivolously or to avoid children altogether.
A recent Gallup poll of the association, and another of its board, found 90 percent support for contraception.
Such statistics are disheartening for evangelicals such as Hodge and James Tour, a renowned chemist specializing in nanotechnology at Rice University in Houston, who believe contraception is not biblical.
Rather than heeding Christian theology to be "agents of life in the world," Christians have largely adopted culture's philosophic naturalism, which considers sex an itch to be scratched, Hodge said.
"They have the same view of conception that atheists have."
Evangelicals' dearth of understanding about sexuality and marriage explains why they have trouble arguing against gay marriage, he contends. Contracepted sex, in his view, is no different from gay sex: It's not life-giving either way.
Tour, a Jew who converted to evangelical Christianity as a teenager, like Catholics endorses "natural family planning" -- avoiding intercourse during the woman's monthly fertile cycle -- but wonders if Christians ought to forgo even that measure of family planning.
He says young lustful men who have had unfettered access to their wives actually welcome a message of self-restraint.
"The women are looking for relief. The men are looking for relief," Tour says. "They're like, 'I want that. I want to live in peace. I want to live in fulfillment.'"
Throwing out contraception "is more trusting in God. It ultimately lets him decide what is the right number (of children)," Tour said. "Protestants in 30 or 50 years are going to say, `My God. What were we thinking in those generations?'"
Copyright 2010 Religion News Service. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The drug of choice

SOCIETY: America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, by Elaine Tyler May, Basic Books, 171pp, $25.95
IT WAS going to cure everything that ailed us – marital strife, unwanted pregnancies, war. By lowering the birth rate in the developing world, it would create healthy markets and decrease poverty, acting as a “magic bullet” against communism. As the first nearly-one-hundred-percent-effective form of birth control that required neither the co-operation nor the knowledge of men, it would enable women to take control of their lives. It was the pill, and it is celebrating its 50th birthday.
In her new book, American historian Elaine Tyler May traces the pill’s development, reception, and social, political and cultural ramifications. The pill was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1960 for use as an oral contraceptive (it first became available in Ireland in 1963 as a “cycle regulator”). It grew out of the combined efforts of several individuals – scientists Carl Djerassi, John Rock and Gregory Pincus, along with feminist activists Margaret Sanger and Katharine Dexter McCormick (McCormick effectively bankrolled the R&D). Highly controversial, it created unlikely bedfellows on both sides of the divide. Would-be social engineers allied both with feminists and with the Playboy brigade, who celebrated the pill because it liberated female sexuality for men.
The Church was against it. But so were male Black Power leaders (claiming it promoted genocide) and certain Beats. Poet Richard Brautigan equated his girlfriend’s use of the pill with the Springhill mine disaster, in which scores of miners died. Many men felt it undermined masculinity, by nullifying their procreative power.
The pill quickly became embroiled in policy debates. US presidents from Kennedy to Carter supported family planning programmes as part of foreign aid. Reagan reversed the position, suspending government support to any agency at home or abroad that used its own funds to support abortion services, counselling or referral. Clinton reversed the ruling five days into office. George W Bush restored it three days into his term. Four days after his swearing in, Obama reversed it again.
The pill’s safety record was initially troubling. As May points out, it was linked in the early years with blood clots – fatal, in some cases. It carried an increased risk of stroke. (While a minority of women today experience negative side-effects, the lower hormone dosages have resulted in decreased risks.) May also looks at efforts, so far unsuccessful, to develop a pill for men, and asks whether the hurdles are physiological or psychological. She notes that Viagra, a drug that enhances the potential for men to impregnate women, was the most successful prescription drug ever launched in the US.
The pill serves throughout the book as a keyhole through which to view history. “Without the political and cultural upheavals of the last 50 years,” May writes, “ . . . the pill would have been just one more contraceptive . . . Instead, it became a flash point for major social transformation.” Debates around its safety contributed to standards of informed consent in medical research and regulations on consumer information. It disrupted power relationships between genders, and – in light of the Church’s continued ban on artificial birth control – it weakened the power of the official Church and turned many Catholics away altogether.
May’s interesting and accessible history also illuminates how the world has changed around the pill. Once, young women had to pretend that they were married in order to obtain it; now they sometimes complain of being pressured into it when other forms of contraception are more suitable. Women use the pill for reasons their foremothers wouldn’t have dreamed of – to arrest menstruation during military service, for instance. And, what once seemed a boon to women – taking full responsibility for their fertility – now seems to many an unfair burden.

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Molly McCloskey is a novelist, essayist and short story writer

Everything you wanted to know about condoms

NYC condoms. victoriapeckham via flickr.com

By Mark Hay

7:16 am Jul. 14, 2010 | Tweet this article

“Oh, please tell me those aren’t used,” said a frumpy little woman who declined to be named for fear of association with something she considered so unseemly.
She gazed at a shovel full of blacked condoms, most likely used, collected from the trash cans and floors of London’s notorious gay and fetish club, FIST, and encased in resin by Franko B. B’s found-artifact sculpture is one of the first works visible upon stepping through the door to the Museum of Sex’s recent and self-explanatory exhibit, “Rubbers: The Life, History and Struggle of the Condom.”
The exhibit, occupying half of the museum’s second floor, is composed chiefly of curios—half-century-old condom tins and prophylactic propaganda through the ages—and a handful of artistic pieces. Progressing along the wall, the artifacts trace the historical and social evolution of the condom from a Papua New Guinean penis sheath mounted on the wall, through the linen condoms of the 1500s (after the 1493 syphilis outbreak, graphically depicted) and animal intestine wrappers of the 1700s, and straight to the Obama/McCain/Palin novelties of today.
Fittingly, the exhibit features, although not prominently, artifacts that reveal the special resonance of the condom’s history with New York City. A 2006 replica of a brittle pre-rubber sheep-intestine condom is modeled on the process used by Julius Schmid, 46th Street’s late-19th-early-20th-century condom innovator and later father of the Fourex, Ramses and Sheik brands, among others. The display of a frayed copy of Margaret Sanger’s 1915 What Every Girl Should Know recalls her 1916 founding of a Brooklyn family planning clinic, the forerunner to Planned Parenthood.
To reach “Rubbers,” patrons must first walk through “Action: Sex and the Moving Image,” a ground- floor installation with wall- and floor-mounted screens looping clips of mainstream sex scenes and pornographic film stretching back nearly a century. Many patrons do not make it past, their eyes glued to Chloe Sevigney’s non-simulated oral sex scene from “The Brown Bunny,” a couple demonstrating positions from the Kama Sutra narrated by what sounds like a telemarketer, or midcentury “Jungle Quest” films of nude African women suckling small animals.
Patrons must then pass a line of BDSM artifacts, real dolls with their erogenous bits hanging out to be fondled by visitors, and a sketch by Wally Wood of various Disney standards engaged in non-Disney behavior, among other sexual miscellanea.
Past the gamut, last night, 10 or fewer patrons milled around the “Rubbers” exhibit, a third of those in “Action,” and few stayed very long. This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that he exhibit is ... challenging. “Rubbers” is a text-heavy exhibit, with most of the artifacts serving to frame or illuminate a P.S.A.-style narrative. It even includes a P.S.A., one of the only audio-visual components, although it is a unique one. Corners of the exhibit meander into tangential territory, abandoning condoms to discuss H.I.V., S.T.I.s, and sex education.
The dispassionate academic voice of the exhibit fits with the sociological mission of MoSex, scrawled across the second floor wall: "The Museum of Sex is dedicated to the preservation of an ever growing collection of sexually related objects, which support its mission to present the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality." But many patrons come for eroticism as much as edification, even if that is not MoSex’s intent. It is easier to get hot and bothered to “Action” than “Rubbers,” as a forty-something whitebread couple groping in front of a video display of transsexual/transvestite porn demonstrated.
Blatant product placement for the exhibits' sponsor, Trojan, also detracts from the total effect.
“How far is a Trojan required to stretch before breaking? More than seven-and-a-half times its original size!” boasts the narrator on a looping behind-the-scenes Trojan promotional visual. The audio fills at least half of the room.
Among the historical trinkets there lurk a few attempts at fun.
One wall is covered in 60 contemporary euphemisms for the condom. Though many are familiar, favorites include: bishop, blast shield, DNA lounge, English riding coat, French tickler, hazmat suit, Manhattan eel, and zucchini beanie.
Across the room, a series of paintings by Masami Teraoka, especially “Kanzashi Pond,” embody the spirit of the exhibit, designed in the classical ukiyo-e style while encoded with references to AIDS, cultural condom controversy, women’s liberation, and a slew of other themes. Nearby hover mechanical contraptions flapping their inflated condom appendages. A glass case sits at the end of the toy array containing a purple dress meticulously crafted of condoms.
Even the often-dry textual narration has its moments.
“The female condom is longer and wider than a male condom,” explains Douglas Blair Turnbaugh in a quote posted next to his photograph of a man, face down, with a condom protruding from his rear. “Once the condom is inserted, the anus will close over it leaving the outer ring looking rather like the bulls eye of a target. As the entering virile member, or whatever, does its business, in out in out in out, the condom stays in place.”
A footnote of explication reveals that the quote relates to a little-known use for the female condom in gay culture. The condom may be applied at any time, allowing for easy sex without the mood-killing reminder of the AIDS epidemic’s toll on the gay population that so many men feel when applying a male condom.
This is the first sign of nuance to the otherwise peppy pro-condom note of the exhibit. A plaque offers observations from the Kinsey Institute. Many men experience allergic irritation to latex; 37 percent of men lose erections when psychologically fazed by putting on a condom; massive variations in penis girth mean that discomfort can come from a tight fit; and many condoms lose their efficiency when ripped while being unwrapped using a nail or tooth.
One note of caution about this exhibit: whereas viewing erotic objects is often thought of as a solo activity, viewing them as sociological artifacts appears to be a couples’ activity. Patrons move in twos and, although viewing the objects in a sterile museum setting, if you go, either get comfortable with the idea of circulating among pairs of silent, eyes-forward spectators, or bring a partner.

женское голосование в США

women were first allowed to vote in New Jersey in 1776. Women had also been able to vote even earlier than that in some cases, such as in Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War.

n those days, voting rights were usually tied to property ownership because many of the taxes were based on property, and the founders didn’t think it was right for non-property-owning, non-tax-paying people to be able to tell property-owning taxpayers what to do with their own property.

Women had this right in many areas of Colonial America and the new republic, but Barton said it went away in 1809 in New Jersey; New Jersey was the only state that specifically put it in their Constitution.

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http://www.dakotavoice.com/2010/07/women-of-the-american-revolution/

Glenn Beck Demonizes Margaret Sanger

History of Birth Control

By Stacy Lloyd
Created 06/24/2010 - 07:57

Family planning is not a new concept. The practice of birth control has been around a long, long time and in the early days, people made due with what they had. According to some researchers, in 3000 B.C., types of condoms were made from fish bladders or animal intestines.

The history of birth control began when humans discovered the connection between sex and pregnancy. The oldest forms of birth control include coitus interruptus. That’s when a man pulls out prior to ejaculation.

Pessaries, or vaginal suppositories, were other early birth control devices. The earliest record of birth control use is ancient Egyptian instructions on creating a pessary. It was made of various acidic substances and then lubricated with honey or oil.

The first spermicides were introduced around 1500 B.C. Condoms made from linen cloth sheaths were soaked in chemical solutions and dried before using.

Barrier methods have been popular throughout the centuries. Asian women may have used oiled paper as a cervical cap while Europeans are said to have used beeswax. It’s reported that in the 18th century, Casanova used assurance caps to keep from impregnating his mistresses. By the 1830s, vulcanized rubber was the material of choice for both condoms and diaphragms.

The first modern intrauterine device was marketed in a German publication back in 1909. The Grafenberg Ring, the first IUD to be used by a significant number of women, was introduced in 1928.

The rhythm method, a natural form of birth control, gained popularity in the early 20th century. That was when researchers discovered women only ovulate once per menstrual cycle. Couples would avoid intercourse on days identified as fertile ones. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when scientists better understood the menstrual cycle and the hormones controlling it, that methods of hormonal contraception were developed.

Thanks to the famous birth control advocate, Margaret Sanger and her efforts, the first oral contraceptive, Enovid (invented by Frank Colton), was approved by the FDA in 1960.

In the 1980s and 1990s, hormonal birth control methods expanded to implants, injectables and low-dosage pills. By 1992, emergency contraception became more widely available.

Today, we’re seeing a rapid expansion in different birth control methods as well as improvements in safety and effectiveness. New methods include the hormonal patch, vaginal ring, injectables, single rod implants, and transcervical female sterilization.

What does the future hold? Many say research should now focus on methods to protect women against sexually transmitted infections.

Stacy Lloyd is a writer and video producer in Phoenix, Arizona. A former television news journalist, she covered stories around the world. Currently, she produces corporate and non-profit videos and broadcast programming.
Source URL (retrieved on 06/27/2010 - 00:57): http://www.empowher.com/sexual-well-being/content/history-birth-control