February 28, 2011

Summer internships at the Margaret Sanger Papers, New York City

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project is pleased to announce its summer
internship program for 2011. We seek applications from graduate or
undergraduate students to work with the editorial staff at the Project’s
offices in New York City. This is a wonderful opportunity for students to
become proficient in primary and secondary source research, the process of  editing historical documents for publication, and the application of
digital technologies to historical research.

BOOK EDITION INTERNSHIP: Interns will be working on Volume IV of the
Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, covering the years 1920-1966 and
focusing on Sanger’s efforts to create a global birth control movement.
Interns will conduct research under the supervision of editors on specific
topics, tracing people, places, events and issues covered in the
documents. The research will be used to produce annotation and
introductory material for the volume. Research will be conducted in the
Project’s offices, using the comprehensive microfilm edition and other
primary sources, as well as at local libraries and with resources
available on the Internet. Those with an interest in the histories of 20th
century China, India, Japan, Germany, and the Soviet Union are
particularly encouraged to apply.

DIGITAL INTERNSHIP: Interns will work on our digital edition of Sanger’s
speeches and articles, focusing on texts written by Margaret Sanger in the late 1930s. Interns will proofread the texts, add XML encoding, and draft subject index entries for the documents. Interns will conduct research as needed to verify dates, titles, and publication information, or to identify the names of people, organizations and books mentioned in the documents.

WEB OUTREACH INTERNSHIP: Interns will work on strengthening the Project’s  growing web presence, our facebook page, website, and research blog, to draw more attention to the project’s work and connect with our audiences. For this internship, familiarity with both history and web-based technologies is required.

More information and an application can be found at the project’s website,  http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/about…

The deadline for applications for summer internships is March 1, 2011.
Internships during the academic year can be arranged on a case by case
basis.

Cathy Moran Hajo, Ph.D.
Associate Editor/Assistant Director
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project
Department of History, New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
(212) 998-8666
(212) 995-4017 (fax)
 cathy.hajo at nyu.edu
Visit our website at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger

February 27, 2011

Abortions make up only 3% of the services provided by PP.

There’s certainly no reason the House of Representatives should stop funding it altogether.

February 25, 2011

Western Feminism in a Global Perspective

из статьи под назвой (сабж)

Margaret Sanger led the battle for reproductive rights, founding the American Birth Control League which would become Planned Parenthood in 1921. Sanger was a nurse working in New York City’s east side who witnessed many women either unable to care for their children or dying from failed abortions. She discovered that the poorest women who were most in need of a means to limit their reproduction were the least likely to have information about their options. She made it her life goal to provide contraception to all women and challenged the Comstock Law of 1873 banning the spread of information about contraception in the United States. Her work eventually resulted in the ability for physicians to prescribe contraceptives over the counter to women (Lind, 41). In many developing countries, contraception and reproductive choice are still not available to women. The poorest of women with the fewest resources who would benefit the most from contraceptives are those who are least likely to gain access to them.

February 23, 2011

TV abortion debate

February 22, 2011

альбом Сэнгер на фликре

Margaret H. Sanger (LOC)

February 19, 2011

Legalized abortion saves lives

This billboard is not a reflection of reality.  Legalized abortion saves lives.  As Linda Greenhouse points out in her recent Opinionator Column, anti-abortion activists have at times tried to sow seeds of doubt in minority communities where legalized abortion plays an important role in family stability and minimizing the effects of poverty by suggesting that abortion is an intentional movement on the part of whites to limit the number of black and latino babies born in this country.  Greenhouse also rightly pairs this fact with the historical figures showing the danger of illegal abortions to those same communities.
Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman in Congress and once an honorary president of Naral, called the comparison of abortion and family planning to genocide “male rhetoric, for male ears.”  Greenhouse says of Chisholm, “She cited a study of women who died in pregnancy. Illegal abortion was the cause of 25 percent of the white women’s deaths, 49 percent of the black women’s, and 65 percent of the Puerto Ricans’. She also observed that 90 percent of the “therapeutic” abortions in New York City — the safe and legal ones during the regime of criminalization — were performed on white women.”
Chisholm fought for the legalization of abortion, to make the procedure safe and on-demand for women in New York and around the country.  After New York legalized elective abortion, “[m]aternal mortality in New York City dropped by more than half during the first year, to an all-time recorded low. Infant mortality also dropped to a new low, which the New York City Health Services Administration attributed to the availability of abortion to women most likely to give birth to babies at the greatest risk of dying, including very young women and poor women who had not received adequate prenatal care. The number of births to unmarried women dropped for the first time. As knowledge spread of the availability of abortion, more and more women terminated their pregnancies in the first trimester — from 67 percent during the first two months of legalization to 86 percent 10 months later. (The figure today is 88 percent.)”
Greenhouse’s piece brings to the forefront of the abortion issue the fact that whether or not abortion is available as an option to women is about more than the moral implications for the fetus.  There are moral, social, medical, and other implications for the mothers and for the society of which they are a part.  As the House continues to try to use legislative tactics to throw up obstacles in front of women seeking abortions, advocates for safe and legal abortion need to read critiques like Greenhouse’s and be prepared to confront abortion opponents with the realities of prohibition.

source +
на десерт :
Wells, Hitler And The World State

Эмма Голдман

надо бы про неё написать статейку
исходнег и весьма неплохой тут -- см.


When Margaret Sanger, an advocate of access to contraception, coined the term "birth control" and disseminated information about various methods in the June 1914 issue of her magazine The Woman Rebel, she received aggressive support from Goldman. Sanger was arrested in August under the Comstock Law, which prohibited the dissemination of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles"—including information relating to birth control. Although they later split from Sanger over charges of insufficient support, Goldman and Reitman distributed copies of Sanger’s pamphlet Family Limitation (along with a similar essay of Reitman’s). In 1915 Goldman conducted a nationwide speaking tour in part to raise awareness about contraception options. Although the nation’s attitude toward the topic seemed to be liberalizing, Goldman was arrested in February 1916 and charged with violation of the Comstock Law. Refusing to pay a $100 fine, she spent two weeks in a prison workhouse, which she saw as an "opportunity" to reconnect with those rejected by society.

February 18, 2011

Пилюля 2му ватиканскому собору

How the Pill Explodes the Mythology of Vatican II

I realized today something I should have realized a long time ago, something that makes it easy to explode the myth that the decline in Catholic faith and life since the 1960's is directly attributable to the Second Vatican Council. That myth can be debunked in many ways, but perhaps most tellingly with just two words: The Pill.
As artifical means of birth control became increasingly common throughout the 20th century, the development of an oral contraceptive was frantically sought by many, including Margaret Sanger in the United States. In the 1950's, a researcher working with Planned Parenthood funding was instrumental in developing a hormone-based pill to prevent conception. This was approved by the FDA in 1957 for treatment of severe menstrual disorders. Over the next two years, millions of women mysteriously developed such disorders so that they could have “the Pill” prescribed for contraceptive use. By 1960, the FDA approved the Pill for long-term use by healthy women for the sole purpose of preventing conception. The same process was going on in Europe.
The growth in popularity of the Pill was so rapid throughout the affluent, secularized West (this was true even in Catholic circles, so please, let us entertain no illusions about the pre-Vatican II Catholic laity), that it was taken up equally rapidly as a kind of cause celebre by Catholic moral theologians who had already largely slipped free of a proper Catholic understanding of the natural law. I’ve said again and again that Modernism had deeply affected the Catholic academy long before the Council, including the formation of priests and bishops, and that this rot emerged into the open in the 1960’s only because it became culturally fashionable at that time to be frank about dissent from traditional Catholic teachings. The treatment of the contraception question is one of many examples of this phenomenon.
As I indicated a few days ago in my review of the new historical materials posted on Germain Grisez’ web site detailing the battle against contraception, Pope Paul VI was aware of the challenge of widespread contraception even before the Council, when he was still a cardinal, but when he became Pope after the Council opened, he thought that the Council itself would be an unwieldy forum for addressing it. That’s why he chose to have a commission study it and, ultimately, to issue an encyclical on the subject (Humane Vitae).
It is, I think, self-evident that the premier moral crisis of the modern West is a crisis of sexual morality, and that this crisis is particularly tied to easy, pre-meditated, long-term, effective contraception, which has so thoroughly undermined the connection between sex and reproduction. This is as true within the Catholic Church as elsewhere in society. Thus sexual issues are the number one source and motive for dissent, just as they are the number one source and motive for the general desire to secularize Catholicism and render it compatible with worldly values.
All of this began before the Second Vatican Council. All of this developed rapidly independently of the Council. The Council caused none of it; in fact the reality is quite the reverse. It was the growing secularization of the theologians and other leaders within the Church, all strongly influenced by the trends in the surrounding culture, which caused them to seize upon the work of the Council and twist it to their own purposes. This strong secular cultural agenda led directly to a deformed implementation of the Council throughout the West.
I don’t mean to argue that the only factors at work were sexual, but it is inescapably true that the problem of so-called “sexual liberation” is at the center of the crisis of Western culture and, along with it, Catholic culture in the Western world. It is important to get a basic grasp of cause and effect in these matters. So let me say once again to anyone who will listen: We must stop blaming the Second Vatican Council for the Catholic problems which have manifested themselves in the West over the past fifty years. The seeds of these immense problems were sown both elsewhere and earlier.
The Second Vatican Council did not undermine either the Church or the culture. It was rather the deteriorating culture that undermined the Church, and with it the effort to implement the renewal outlined by the Council. For the Council necessarily operated under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Western culture, while seemingly a greater and a stronger thing, sadly had no such guarantee.

By Dr. Jeff Mirus | February 08, 2011 5:34 PM

теоретическая евгеника живее всех живых

In painstaking detail, Glad explains how eugenics was a robust, respectable scientific movement in the early 1900s, an “interdisciplinary conceptualization of the genetic consequences of social practices…” which strove to “replace natural selection with scientific selection”. Of course, Glad is right. At one time the ranks of the eugenics movement in the United States and Europe included a remarkable number of eminent figures—university presidents, such as Stanford President David Starr Jordan and Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell; Anglican priest William Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral; population geneticists Ronald A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane; inventor Alexander Graham Bell; economist John Maynard Keynes; Leonard Darwin; H. G. Wells; George Bernard Shaw; Arthur Balfour; Vernon Kellogg (of the prominent cereal family); the Carnegie Institute; Havelock Ellis; Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger; Nobel laureates Herman Muller and William Shockley; award-winning physiologist Dwight J. Ingle, founding editor of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine; Yale University Geographer Ellsworth Huntington;  and scores of other names from the social, biological, and medical sciences.
Glad even reminds readers that Winston Churchill, the much-lionized British Prime Minister during World War II, was an avid eugenicist—a particular irony, given that Marxist-leaning Jewish critics have used guilt-by-association tactics to smear the eugenics movement as crypto-Nazi.

подробнее тут

February 2, 2011

Important Moments in Condom History

Condoms have been used for centuries. Since the 19th century, they have been one of the most popular methods of contraception in the world. Below you'll find a few important dates in the history of condoms

  • 1564 Gabriel Fallopius invents a linen sheath and tests it on 1100 men. The goal was to prevent syphilis, which proved successful! Having been found useful for prevention of infection, it was only later that the usefulness of the condom for the prevention of pregnancy was recognized.
  • 1605 The first indication that these devices were used for birth control, rather than disease prevention, is the 1605 theological publication De iustitia et iure (On justice and law) by Catholic theologian Leonardus Lessius, who condemned them as immoral.
  • 1700s In addition to the linen sheaths already used, condoms made from animal intestines became available. However, they were quite expensive and the unfortunate result was that they were often reused.
  • 1706 The first published used of the word appears in the poem "The Scots Answer to a British Vision" by John Hamilton, Lord Belhaven.
  • 1855 The first rubber condom was produced. The earliest rubber condoms had a seam and were as thick as a bicycle inner tube.
  • 1861 The first advertisement for condoms was published in an American newspaper when The New York Times printed an ad for Dr. Power's French Preventatives. In 1873, the Comstock Law made illegal the advertising of any sort of birth control.
  • 1920 Trojan brand condoms introduced, manufactured by Young’s Rubber of New York. Young's Rubber became the first company to produce a latex condom. Condoms made of latex, also invented in 1920, were both stronger and thinner than their rubber counterparts and also has a longer shelf life.
  • 1950s Two improvements are made to the condom: lubrication (DUREX instroduces the first lubricated condom) and the reservoir tip.
  • 1975 While the National Association of Broadcasters Code of Conduct prohibited condoms ads on televison in the 1960s and 1970s, station KNTV in San Jose broadcast a carry a condom commercial for Trojan in 1975. The first broadcast TV network in this country to air a paid condom commercial was Fox in 1991.
  • 1980s The emergence of HIV and the AIDS epidemic results in strong encouragement to use condoms. Latex condoms are promoted to prevent infection with HIV.
  • 1993 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the female condom for use in the US. The female condom is a polyurethane (plastic) pouch that fits inside a woman's vagina.
  • Today The U.S. Agency for International Development encourages condom use in developing countries to help solve the "world population crises. Worldwide condom use is expected to continue to grow. One study predicted that developing nations would need 18.6 billion condoms by 2015. Condoms have become an integral part of modern societies.
dates are linx to use them visit here