needed services

Margaret Sanger made statements on eugenics nearly a century ago that were wrong and are
completely unacceptable. They have never represented the values of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood's mission is to provide preventive health care to everyone — in every community — regardless of their race, ethnicity,sex, religion, sexual orientation, or ability to pay.

Planned Parenthood provides needed services

Pro-life adopts racism

Cynthia Tucker: Pro-life groups adopt 'racism'

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Perhaps members of the anti-abortion movement are growing a bit desperate. Though they’ve managed to crimp women’s reproductive rights through decades of legislative maneuvering and extra-legal harassment, they still cannot overturn Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 Supreme Court decision. Nor have they moved public opinion much: A majority of Americans still believe that current law should stand.

Perhaps that’s why some factions in the “pro-life” crusade are professing a newfound concern for the well-being of black children. Perhaps that’s why “racism” has become the battle cry of anti-abortion groups whose members like to think that racism no longer exists.

Georgia’s largest anti-abortion group, Georgia Right to Life, is presenting itself as the last line of defense against a widespread plot to wipe out black people — a pogrom of sorts. The group has mounted billboards throughout black Atlanta neighborhoods, claiming that “Black children are an endangered species” because of abortions.

While anti-abortion activists have long derided Margaret Sanger, considered the mother of modern family planning, for her endorsement of eugenics, they have more recently taken aim at such mainstream organizations as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, claiming it, too, is run by bigots. Two years ago, a faith-based group with ties to black clergy sent a letter to the Congressional Black Caucus denouncing Planned Parenthood for its “racist and eugenic goals.”

If conservatives are sincere about curbing abortions — among all women: white, black and brown — they should support efforts to broaden women’s health care, which includes reproductive health care. Easy access to contraceptives would encourage their use, thereby reducing unintended pregnancies — and abortions.

“The health disparities for low-income women and women of color are enormous,” noted Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, which provides full-service reproductive health care — including non- controversial procedures such as annual pelvic exams — to women who cannot get it elsewhere.

But social and religious conservatives have been fighting health care reform, which would broaden access to reproductive health care, with the passion they normally reserve for bashing Roe v. Wade. That’s why it’s hard to believe they really care about black women — or their children.

Cynthia Tucker is a Washington-based columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Black Genocide

Anti-Choice Campaign Aims to Undermine Support for Reproductive Rights by Falsely Claiming 'Black Genocide'

By Michelle Goldberg, Religion Dispatches
Posted on March 16, 2010, Printed on March 20, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146044/

For several years now, the religious right has been trying to appropriate the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s an audacious strategy, given that Christian conservative politics were forged in the white Southern backlash to school integration. But it’s had some successes, particularly in rousing black churches against the gay rights movement. Now, the anti-abortion movement is making a push to enlist African Americans in their cause by framing abortion as a tool of eugenics and genocide.
The campaign is already having an impact. As the New York Times reported late last month, the overwhelmingly white Georgia Right to Life has spent more than $20,000 erecting 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species.” The group has created a Web site, Too Many Aborted, with excellent production values, designed to portray legal abortion as a plot against the black community. Meanwhile, according to the Times, the new documentary Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America, which purports to “trace connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion,” is finding an audience among black organizations nationwide. The Times quoted Markita Eddy, a sophomore at the historically black Morris Brown College, who had turned against abortion rights after seeing the film.
As propaganda, Maafa 21 is fairly ingenious, incorporating just enough truth to provide a surface plausibility. The word “Maafa” is a Swahili term to describe the period of black enslavement. In the film, narrator Markus Lloyd argues that the Maafa “did not end when the slaves were freed... a hidden racial agenda is keeping the Maafa alive into the 21st century.” That sounds true enough, though Lloyd isn’t talking about poverty, or educational disparities, or the legacy of Jim Crow—he’s talking about family planning and abortion rights.
What follows is a highly selective, distorted history of the reproductive rights movement. To be sure, that movement has some dark corners, and not everything in Maafa 21, which was directed by the white Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Crutcher, is untrue. Overall, though, it’s an exceedingly dishonest propaganda exercise, one that aims to convince African Americans that both family planning and evolutionary theory are part of a massive conspiracy against them.
There’s no denying that Margaret Sanger, the heroine of the American birth control movement, made alliances with eugenicists and eventually adopted some of their rhetoric; her oeuvre is full of language that sounds shocking to modern ears. Maafa 21 quotes from a letter in which she wrote of the need for a “simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.”
These words are noxious, but it’s also important to put them in context. As Sanger’s biographer, the historian Ellen Chesler, has written, in the 1920s (when Sanger’s career took off), eugenics “had become a popular craze in this country—promoted in newspapers and magazines as a kind of secular religion... The great majority of American colleges and universities introduced formal courses in the subject, and sociologists who embraced it took on what one historian has called a ‘priestly role.’”
Both supporters and opponents of birth control deployed eugenic arguments, and there were unregenerate racists on both sides. Debating Sanger, one Catholic bishop argued that “the races from northern Europe,” who he called “the finest type of people” needed to have at least four children per family to avoid “extinction.” Maafa 21 includes ugly quotes from the eugenicist Charles Davenport, but doesn’t mention that he opposed birth control. Later, we see an image of Hitler and the words “Natural Allies.” Naturally, the movie doesn’t mention that, upon gaining power, Hitler, eager for more German babies, moved quickly against legal abortion and birth control clinics.
Meanwhile Sanger, for all her flaws, was no racist. Yes, she wanted to curb the reproduction of the mentally “unfit,” a noxious idea. But contrary to what Maafa 21 claims, she didn’t target African Americans—she believed that intelligence and ability varied among individuals rather than among ethnic groups. One of her ardent supporters was W.E.B. DuBois, who echoed her eugenic ideas. As Chesler wrote, DuBois “condemned what he called ‘the fallacy of numbers’ and deemed the ‘quality’ of the black race more important to its survival.” When Sanger opened a clinic in Harlem in 1930, it “was endorsed by the powerful local black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, and by established political and religious leaders in Harlem,” wrote Chesler. Sanger was even invited to address Harlem’s largest Baptist church.
Maafa 21 moves from distortion to outright deception in its treatment of Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who, with his wife, Alva Myrdal, championed family planning and pioneered Sweden’s social democracy. In the film, Connie Eller, who is identified only as a “St. Louis community organizer,” but who is actually the founder of Missouri Blacks For Life, discusses Myrdal’s 1944 book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Myrdal, says Eller, “believed that not only could blacks not help themselves, he felt that nobody could help them, and the only solution in his eyes was to get rid of them.”
This is an outrageous distortion. Myrdal was initially commissioned to undertake a large-scale study of race in America by the Carnegie Corporation, whose leaders wanted the fresh eyes of a foreigner. He was horrified by segregation and by the conditions African Americans were forced to endure. He concluded that racism was a “problem in the heart of the American,” one that pitted the American creed of freedom and equality against American reality. An American Dilemma was an anti-racist opus; it was cited in the Brown v. the Board of Education decision; one of Myrdal’s collaborators on the project was Ralph Bunche, who later worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. Maafa 21 quotes descriptions of the mindsets of white racists in a way that implies that they’re Myrdal’s own views. It’s an ugly trick, and a mendacious one.
There are, of course, very good reasons for minorities to be suspicious of population control. Black people have indeed been subject to involuntary sterilization and reproductive coercion. Maafa 21 recapitulates anti-contraception arguments made by male Black Power leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, African-American militants were behind some of the earliest instances of clinic violence. As Elaine Tyler May writes in her forthcoming book, America and the The Pill (Basic Books, April 27, 2010), one Cleveland family planning center was burned down after accusations of “black genocide,” while in Pittsburgh, the militant leader William “Bouie” Haden threatened to firebomb a clinic.
And yet African-American women have always favored family planning by wide margins. “Many in the Black liberation movement rejected their brother’s charge to them to bear more children,” wrote Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty. She quotes Toni Cade’s 1970 essay “The Pill: Birth Control or Liberation?”: “I’ve been made aware of the national call to Sisters to abandon birth control... to picket family-planning centers and abortion-referral groups and to raise revolutionaries,” she wrote. “What plans do you have for the care of me and my child?”
Martin Luther King Jr., it’s important to point out, was a champion of family planning. Indeed, in 1966, King won Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award. His wife, Coretta Scott King, delivered his acceptance speech on his behalf. “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts,” said King, adding:

She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist—a nonviolent resister… At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions… Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.

Like others trying to turn abortion into a racial wedge issue, Crutcher, the director of Maafa 21, points out that black women have a far higher abortion rate than white women. He’s right that this is a result of discrimination, though not in the way he believes. Thanks in part to the anti-abortion movement, poor women have far inferior access to sex education and reproductive health services than middle class women do. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 69% of pregnancies among African-American women are unplanned, compared to 40% for white women. This is an injustice, because black women deserve the same control over their reproductive lives that white women enjoy.
Opponents of abortion would like to set themselves against the most callous eugenicists, but in fact the two sides have a lot in common: both see women as incapable of making their own choices, and so resort to coercion.
Michelle Goldberg, a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches, is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World (Penguin, 2009), and the New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.

© 2010 Religion Dispatches All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146044/

white stuff

Racist and eugenicist ideas informed the imperialistic notions and adventures of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge and resulted in the involuntary sterilisation of tens of thousands of American women. (Painter quotes the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notorious opinion in support of the sterilisation law: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”) These ideas served as the impetus for the Immigration Act of 1924, (which throttled back immigration rates until 1965,) and inspired Nazi theoreticians and policymakers. Eugenicist ideas also, as Painter acknowledges, played a role in the battles for birth control waged by the feminist activist Margaret Sanger and her circle. Plainly racist ideas motivated the first instances of widespread intelligence testing in the army and at Ellis Island (where 60 per cent of all Jews were found to be “morons”).

it is about:
The History of White People
Nell Irvin Painter
WW Norton & Company
Dh104
The white stuff

Is abortion a racist plot?

статья в ajs блоге
об использовании белым республиканским пролайфом расизма в античойчсе

ResearchGATE – scientific network

Helen Keller

“No one has ever given me a good reason why we should obey unjust laws.” Helen Keller, 1914.
“Only by taking the responsibility of birth control into their own hands can they roll back the awful tide of misery that is sweeping over them and their children.”

Some of the other ways the lives of these two remarkable women were connected included:

• Both joined the Socialist Party and Industrial Workers of the World within a year of each other.
• Both were outspoken pacifists and wrote for New York Call (a leading Socialist paper).
• FBI kept files on both women.
• Hitler burned both of their books in the mid-1930s.
• Both saw birth control as a way to liberate women.
• Both named in Time Magazine’s “Most Important People of the Century.”
• Both women had offices on the same block, just a door away from each other. Despite this, the women did not meet until 1944 when a mutual friend introduced them in upstate New York.

 After they finally met in 1944 the two remained close friends, socializing often and constantly making public tributes to each other. The women died two years apart, Sanger in 1966 and Keller in 1968.

source

eugenics

This Isn’t Eugenics . . . No, Wait!

от Disability Matters автор: Dr. Mark Mostert

Any allusion to present day biomedical practices as being eugenic usually leads to quite hysterical denials and the accusation that one sees everything one disagrees with as being painted with the inappropriate Nazi brush.
I’ve heard all the arguments, so please spare me: The only people who were Nazis were the Nazis. The only things that are eugenic are what the Nazis did in the interests of breeding a more superior race. Genetic research in this day and age is an absolutely cutting edge, wonderful, and very necessary ethical endeavor.
The howling eugenics deniers will even concede that eugenics didn’t originate in Nazi Germany (the US and the UK have that distinction), and, if pressed, that some prominent historical figures supported eugenics (Margaret Sanger and Winston Churchill among them). But that’s as far as it goes. The prevailing zeitgeist holds that eugenics was a terrible thing in a time gone by. It doesn’t happen any more. We learned from our collective social mistakes.
The thinking behind eugenics isn’t very difficult to understand. People are different in many ways. Some of these differences are socially and medically acceptable, others are not. We need more people with socially acceptable traits, fewer people with undesirable traits. There are two ways to do this. One, we passively encourage people with undesirable traits not to reproduce, but this takes a long time to reduce the undesirable population. Two, we actively take steps to eliminate those with undesirable traits by whatever means we can. Historically, that has meant sterilization, abortion, laws banning people with undesirable traits from marrying or reproducing, and the killing of so-called defectives.
Which brings us to an AP story that surfaced yesterday.
Essentially, the article makes the case that advances in genetic screening are reducing the incidence of children born with a wide range of genetic anomalies, so much so that several genetically-induced disabilities are close to being completely eliminated. However, the AP is, unintentionally but clearly, an exemplar of the spin that has morphed eugenics from a reprehensible horror to a heroic and loving social responsibility with predictable results. Eugenics is now called preventive medicine.
As increasing numbers of women undergo prenatal testing at the behest of their physicians, genetic counselors, and medical organizations, more and more unborn children with genetic anomalies are being detected. The result? A genetic sorting that makes some unborn children (and human embryos) second-class citizens fit only for death.
What you think of this state of affairs depends on your views about the exceptional nature of human life. However, there are two undeniable certainties. One, unborn children with genetic anomalies are now much more likely to be aborted than their more perfect peers. Two, abortion cures genetic anomalies 100% of the time.
I have no argument with parents who are genetically tested and decide not to take the risk of reproducing children who might have some form of genetic disability. This is preventive genetic screening used appropriately and ethically. The turning point emerges when a human life is created and decisions are then made that some should live because they are more genetically perfect while others are destroyed because they are genetically less perfect. This genetic discrimination is already a matter of policy of several major medical associations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. ACOG, for example, strongly recommends that all white women be genetically tested for cystic fibrosis and that in-utero testing for Down syndrome be extended to all pregnant females, not only older women who are most at risk.
While lip-service is often paid to presenting the pregnant women whose fetuses are genetically disabled with all possible options, including giving birth, there is evidence suggesting that in the real world of the doctor’s or geneticist’s office the pressure is much more likely to be for abortion than anything else. Most commonly, health professionals convince parents that their child will have a lower quality of life, be subject to expensive and possibly painful medical procedures, and that the child will have a limited lifespan.
The AP piece reports the inevitable results. For example, in Massachusetts the instances of live births with cystic fibrosis dropped from a relatively high of 29 in 2000 to 10 in 2003 as mothers opted for abortion over delivering a genetically disabled infant.
There are similar trends in California where in 2006-2008 Kaiser Permanente offered genetic screening for cystic fibrosis. Of the 87 volunteer pregnant couples genetically predisposed to producing offspring with the anomaly, 64 fetuses were anomaly-free, while 23 were found to have cystic fibrosis. 16 of the 17 who were more severely afflicted were aborted. Of the 6 with milder forms of the disease, four were aborted.
Easy math: 23 unborn children singled out only and exclusively because they were genetically disabled, 21 disposed of. The other 64 genetically nondisabled unborn children were allowed to live – only because they were of purer genetic makeup.
How is this not eugenics?

статья из источника исчезла :(

Maafa 21

creates a highly selective, distorted history of the reproductive rights movement and frames abortion as a tool of eugenics and genocide.

As propaganda, Maafa 21 is fairly ingenious, incorporating just enough truth to provide a surface plausibility. The word “Maafa” is a Swahili term to describe the period of black enslavement. In the film, narrator Markus Lloyd argues that the Maafa “did not end when the slaves were freed... a hidden racial agenda is keeping the Maafa alive into the 21st century.” That sounds true enough, though Lloyd isn’t talking about poverty, or educational disparities, or the legacy of Jim Crow—he’s talking about family planning and abortion rights.

Законы Джима Кроу (англ. Jim Crow laws) — неофициальное широко распространённое название законов о расовой сегрегации в некоторых штатах США в период 1890—1964 годов.

it’s an exceedingly dishonest propaganda exercise, one that aims to convince African Americans that both family planning and evolutionary theory are part of a massive conspiracy against them.

Debating Sanger, one Catholic bishop argued that “the races from northern Europe,” who he called “the finest type of people” needed to have at least four children per family to avoid “extinction.” Maafa 21 includes ugly quotes from the eugenicist Charles Davenport, but doesn’t mention that he opposed birth control. Later, we see an image of Hitler and the words “Natural Allies.” Naturally, the movie doesn’t mention that, upon gaining power, Hitler, eager for more German babies, moved quickly against legal abortion and birth control clinics.

Sanger believed that intelligence and ability varied among individuals rather than among ethnic groups. One of her ardent supporters was W.E.B. DuBois, who echoed her eugenic ideas. As Chesler wrote, DuBois “condemned what he called ‘the fallacy of numbers’ and deemed the ‘quality’ of the black race more important to its survival.” When Sanger opened a clinic in Harlem in 1930, it “was endorsed by the powerful local black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, and by established political and religious leaders in Harlem,” wrote Chesler. Sanger was even invited to address Harlem’s largest Baptist church.

There are, of course, very good reasons for minorities to be suspicious of population control. Black people have indeed been subject to involuntary sterilization and reproductive coercion. Maafa 21 recapitulates anti-contraception arguments made by male Black Power leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, African-American militants were behind some of the earliest instances of clinic violence. As Elaine Tyler May writes in her forthcoming book, America and the The Pill (Basic Books, April 27, 2010), one Cleveland family planning center was burned down after accusations of “black genocide,” while in Pittsburgh, the militant leader William “Bouie” Haden threatened to firebomb a clinic.

Martin Luther King Jr., it’s important to point out, was a champion of family planning. Indeed, in 1966, King won Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award. His wife, Coretta Scott King, delivered his acceptance speech on his behalf. “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts,” said King, adding:

She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist—a nonviolent resister… At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions… Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.

Like others trying to turn abortion into a racial wedge issue, Crutcher, the director of Maafa 21, points out that black women have a far higher abortion rate than white women. He’s right that this is a result of discrimination, though not in the way he believes. Thanks in part to the anti-abortion movement, poor women have far inferior access to sex education and reproductive health services than middle class women do. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 69% of pregnancies among African-American women are unplanned, compared to 40% for white women. This is an injustice, because black women deserve the same control over their reproductive lives that white women enjoy.

читать целиком

thinking behind eugenics

some prominent historical figures supported eugenics (Margaret Sanger and Winston Churchill among them). But that’s as far as it goes. The prevailing zeitgeist holds that eugenics was a terrible thing in a time gone by. It doesn’t happen any more. We learned from our collective social mistakes.

The thinking behind eugenics isn’t very difficult to understand. People are different in many ways. Some of these differences are socially and medically acceptable, others are not. We need more people with socially acceptable traits, fewer people with undesirable traits. There are two ways to do this. One, we passively encourage people with undesirable traits not to reproduce, but this takes a long time to reduce the undesirable population. Two, we actively take steps to eliminate those with undesirable traits by whatever means we can. Historically, that has meant sterilization, abortion, laws banning people with undesirable traits from marrying or reproducing, and the killing of so-called defectives. 

advances in genetic screening are reducing the incidence of children born with a wide range of genetic anomalies, so much so that several genetically-induced disabilities are close to being completely eliminated. However, the AP is, unintentionally but clearly, an exemplar of the spin that has morphed eugenics from a reprehensible horror to a heroic and loving social responsibility with predictable results. Eugenics is now called preventive medicine.

more

Reproductive justice for all

вменяемая статья, даром, что Гардиан
истерия расистских абортов впечатляет :(

If African-American women have more abortions it is not down to a conspiracy but because basic needs are not being met

• 
• 
  
  • Latoya Peterson
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 March 2010 10.30 GMT
  • Article history

Anti-abortion activists have found a new weapon to wield in the war on choice: drawing comparisons between black abortion rates and cultural genocide. However, their claims distort the truth.
As the New York Times reports, in recent years, anti-abortion organisations have changed tactics, now specifically targeting African Americans. While black women make up less than 10% of the US population, we account for more than a third of the demand for abortion services. Now, organisations like Georgia Right to Life have decided to spend more money on minority outreach, taking the fight to colleges and churches, and peddling the message that black women are being swept up in a large scale conspiracy to eliminate black people. The Times points out:

"A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Texas, meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organisations."

The ideas propagated by the pro-life movement are based in some truths. Margaret Sanger, a major birth control advocate who shepherded the founding of birth control clinics was a staunch advocate of eugenics, the belief that selective breeding could eliminate undesirables from society. On her list were racial minorities, those in poverty, the mentally ill and disabled people. While Sanger was against abortion, she was in favour of forced sterilisation and segregation. (Her Scottish counterpart, Marie Stopes, was also a proponent of eugenics and believed sterilisation should be compulsory for what she termed "unfit" parents.)
However, anti-choice protesters seem to forget that the women seeking abortions are doing so voluntarily, for many different reasons. If black women have a disproportionately high number of abortions, it is not because of a grandiose conspiracy theory, but that the basic needs of women in our society are not being met. Additionally, many women of colour have begun organising outside of the pro-choice/pro-life framework, looking instead to a solution based in reproductive justice. The idea behind the reproductive justice movement isn't simply abortion rights, but a multitude of other issues. As activist Kimala Price explains:

"Reproductive justice is not just about the individualistic right to have an abortion (ie, the right not to have children) but to include the right to have children and to raise them in healthy and stable families. Accordingly, these activists have broadened reproductive rights and freedom beyond abortion rights, the rights to privacy and "choice" which are normally associated with the movement. In sum, reproductive justice encompasses many other issues such as economic justice, immigration rights, housing rights, and access to healthcare."

Loretta Ross, current national director and one of the founding members of SisterSong – the women of colour reproductive justice collective – has tackled this issue often, revealing that black women have been on the frontlines of the reproductive justice debates for years, and actively advocated for birth control. When it was discovered that large numbers of black women were dying from illegal, back alley abortions, our community organised to earn the right for a safe way to terminate pregnancies. As Ross writes in her definitive piece on African American Women and Abortion (pdf):

"Despite the fact that much of the decline in the fertility rates of African Americans since the civil war resulted from the activism and determined choices of African-American women, our contributions to the birth control and abortion movements in the United States have been obscured by racist and sexist assumptions about us, our sexuality, and our fertility. Distilling fact from myth is difficult because so many accounts of African-American and women's history are written from perspectives that fail to acknowledge our impact. This omission distorts the contemporary views of African-American women about the reproductive freedom movement and our ownership of it."

And there are dozens of other issues involved in why women make the choices they do, far more than the mainstream anti-abortion movement prefers to acknowledge. Miriam Perez, a radical doula and Latina activist discusses how healthcare and access change the discussions on "choice" for the women she works with:

"These days, the abuses are less obvious and more insidious. When I worked with pregnant Latina immigrants in Pennsylvania, I saw their options limited by the technicalities of their emergency Medicaid coverage. They could get sterilised, for free, right after their deliveries. But if they wanted the pill, the shot, or some other short term birth control? They were out of luck. But what we know is that reproductive justice isn't just about freedom from coercive sterilisation. It's also about access to a full range of reproductive technologies, whether that's birth control, sterilisation, abortion or even childbirth."

However, these issues never seem to make it to the agenda of the pro-life movement, which has expressed interest only in ending abortions; not in improving the lives of women. Perhaps the pro-life community would make more inroads with women of colour if they appeared to care more about easing the conditions leading women to seek abortion and less about flexing political might.

ещё одна статья в Гардиан о кампании в Джорджии и техасском фильме

Pro-Life Campaign in Poland Links abortion to Nazi Occupation

reproduced in full from here

By Thaddeus M. Baklinski
POZNAN, February 17, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new billboard campaign by the Polish branch of the U.S.-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) links the introduction of abortion in Poland to the Nazi occupation of the country during the Second World War.
The English translation of the sign says: “Abortion for Polish women introduced by Hitler on March 9, 1943.”
A 1942 Nazi policy statement on “racial hygiene” said, “In view of the large families of the Slav native population, it could only suit us if girls and women there had as many abortions as possible. We are not interested in seeing the non-German population multiply.
“We must use every means to instill in the population the idea that it is harmful to have several children, the expenses that they cause and the dangerous effect on woman’s health.
“It will be necessary to open special institutions for abortions and doctors must be able to help out there in case there is any question of this being a breach of their professional ethics.”

Israeli doctor Dr. Tessa Chelouche has done a major academic study, titled “Doctors, Pregnancy, Childbirth and Abortion during the Third Reich,” on the Nazis’ use of abortion in their “final solution” and writes, “Abortion was used as a weapon of mass destruction in Eastern Europe,” where “it has been estimated that tens of thousands of Polish and Russian women were compelled to abort not because of health reasons, but because of Nazi dogma.”
Mariusz Dzierzawski of the Polish CBR told LifeSiteNews (LSN) that he hopes to have the huge billboard (22.5m x 10m) in place in the center of the large city of Poznan by February 26th.
“March 8, which used to be the official Women’s Day in communist countries, is a special day for feminists in Poland,” Dzierzawski said. “Each year they organize ‘Manifa’ marches and demand abortion without limits.”
Dzierzawski said that a smaller version of the “Hitler billboard” will be displayed at a demonstration in front of the Appeals Court in Katowice on February 19 during an appeal trial by “Gosc Niedzielny” Catholic weekly magazine.
The magazine had made a comparison of abortionists to Nazis and said that abortion was “killing,” and was subsequently ordered to publish a court-dictated apology and fined $11,000. It has refused to publish the apology.
Gregg Cunningham, Director of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform in California, said the Polish billboard campaign is a “brilliantly inspired idea.”
Commenting on the probable reaction to the campaign by pro-abortion advocates, he observed, “It will get the political left in a terrible uproar because of their anger over any attempt to link abortion with Hitler.
“But you aren’t merely making a comparison between abortion and the Holocaust. You are recalling an historical fact. Hitler brought abortion to Poland, and you are linking contemporary feminists with Hitler. The conflict it will provoke will focus much attention on the horror of abortion,” Mr. Cunningham said.
See related LSN articles:
Polish Magazine Fined for Calling Abortion “Killing” becomes #1 Weekly
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10020206.html
Cutting Edge Media Campaign Links Abortion to Racism
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10021502.html

Liberal Facism: The Secret History of the American Left

From Mussolini to the Politics of Change
by Jonah Goldberg

pt 1
pt 2
pt 3

episteme

Sharon Sebastian and Raymond G. Bohlin (http://www.DarwinsRacists.com), reveals startling parallels between the evolutionist, Marxist, and Progressive mind-set that is entrenched deep into the platform of America’s political left. 

Evolution is an elitist, God-denying, class-and-race bating theory that was quickly seized upon by the likes of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and reported avid abortionist Margaret Sanger. It provided them a false scientific justification to treat some people as inferior and, indeed, whole groups as lesser humans.

source 

relations MS-HGW

I came upon this article about author H.G. Wells. Towards the end....we learn of his relationship w/ M.S.

история пилюли (Katherine McCormick)

Human reproduction was understood only in the 1800's when the scientists of that time discovered the female egg and its importance in reproduction. Earlier it was considered that men were the life creator while women were just the nest.

Katherine McCormick, Margaret Sanger, Dr. John Rock and Gregory Pincus are the names to reckon with, without their zeal and hard work the birth of contraceptive in the form of a pill would not have been possible. I would especially want to give kudos to Katherine McCormick.

Katherine McCormick was born in 1875 in a wealthy family in Dexter, Michigan. In 1904, she became one of the first women to graduate in a degree of science (biology) from Massachusetts institute of technology. She got married to Stanley McCormick, heir to the International Harvester Company fortune, who later suffered from schizophrenia. Believing that schizophrenia is hereditary Katherine McCormick vowed not to have any children. Therefore, contraceptives became her prime concern. She was involved in many philanthropic works and was also a women's right activist. McCormick believed that as much as the right to vote for women is important so is the right to control her body. She helped Margaret Sanger, a birth control activist by supporting her cause in many ways.


When her husband died in 1947, she became the sole inheritor of his property and a wealthy widow; she was 75 years of age then. Along with Sanger she envisioned a birth control method which could be taken in the pill form. Accordingly they met a scientist called Gregory Pincus who was equally interested in developing a birth control pill. Gregory was researching on progesterone and believed that it could be used as an anti-ovulent and could be developed as a contraceptive. He had already tested and proved progesterone to work on animals but could not move further with the research due to lack of funds. McCormick asked him to immediately restart the research and handed him a check of $40,000 which was quite a fortune that time.


Wanting the pill to be developed in her life time, McCormick moved from her Santa Barbara home to the east where the research lab was located. She time and again asked the scientist to hurry up the project. Dr. John Rock joined Pincus and together they did their first trial on human beings. The progesterone pills were tested on 50 women who administered them for 21 days with seven days break for menstruations. The human trial was a success, not even one out of the 50 women tested ovulated while on the pill. This laid the foundation of the birth of Enovid, the first contraceptive pill. In 1960 FDA approved Enovid as a birth control pill.



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Elaine Tyler May

Her latest book, America and the Pill, about the advent and impact of the birth control pill, comes out in May. As she explained to me, she feels that the Pill is a crucial part of women's history, but it's also a part of her own personal history - both her parents were involved in the development of the Pill. Professor Tyler May, a Fulbright scholar and the President-elect of the Organization of American Historians, is a perfect example of how to study women and feminism in a range of disciplines, all of which are connected - intersectionality is the name of her game.

I have some personal favorites that come from my work in women's reproductive rights. Some of them are obviously very well known, people like Margaret Sanger, but some of them are less well known, people like Katherine McCormick, who along with Sanger was a mother of the Pill. She was quite an amazing woman: a feminist early on in the early twentieth century, and one of the major activists involved in the women's suffrage movement. She was one of the first women to graduate from MIT, so she was a scientist at a time when very few women were.
She married into a huge amount of wealth, and shortly after her marriage her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and she used a lot of those resources to invest in research into mental illness. After he died, she turned her attention to reproductive rights, because she and Margaret Sanger had known each other for decades. It was a time when nobody, literally nobody, would put a penny into contraceptive research. In the 1950s the government wouldn't touch it, the pharmaceuticals wouldn't touch it - it was considered some kind of scandalous exercise and they were afraid of public opinion. So Sanger and McCormick got together and launched the research for the Pill: Sanger had the connections and McCormick had the scientific knowledge and the money. So really, it was Catherine McCormick's money and energy that brought us the birth control pill.

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