Birth control does not mean abortion

By George J. Marlin Wednesday, 14 December 2011

Excerpt:
Yet despite her harangues against the Church and her insistence that “for the welfare of children, for the happiness of husbands and wives, and for the full realization of Women’s rights, birth control by scientific methods of contraception [should] properly and wisely be exercised,” she did make one exception to an otherwise thorough pro-choice agenda: abortion.

That’s right. Margaret Sanger actually stated that: “Birth control does not mean abortion.” Here are her exact words:

“The real alternative to birth control is abortion,” wrote Dean Inge, [Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London]. It is an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn. Although abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious. [Emphasis added] I bring up the subject here only because some ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not. Abortion destroys the already fertilized ovum or the embryo; contraception, as I have carefully explained, prevents the fertilizing of the ovum by keeping the male cells away. Thus it prevents the beginning of life.

I bet you never heard that Sanger considered abortion “dangerous and vicious.” You can take it to the bank that there are no posters hanging on the walls of Planned Parenthood clinics quoting those particular words of the founder.

Margaret Sanger actually believed that abortion destroys an innocent life because she was honest enough to recognize that life begins at the moment of conception (without reference). Hence, she would have disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court’s conclusion in Roe v. Wade.

the rest

voice of Russia

вральная статья на голосе России
с упоминанием участия Сэнгер в программе стерилизации

likely nice facts, but badly interpreted

Eugenics - the science of improving the human population via selective breeding or reproduction - is not a concept confined to past centuries and decades, nor to locales outside the United States.

That's the finding of recent research by University of Cincinnati historian Wendy Kline, who will present a case study on the topic - a case study that examines the use of the controversial contraceptive injection, Depo-Provera, as a eugenic tool - on Nov. 11 at a conference titled "The Study of Eugenics: Past, Present and Future" to be held in Uppsala, Sweden. Her presentation is titled "Bodies of Evidence: Activists, Patients, and the FDA Regulation of Depo-Provera."

It's research that is particularly timely given that recent national news coverage has featured North Carolina's current plans to compensate surviving victims of forced sterilizations that took place there from the 1920s to the 1970s.

UC HISTORIAN'S CASE STUDY ON 1983 DEPO-PROVERA HEARINGS

Kline's research into the debate surrounding Depo-Provera in the 1970s and 1980s began when she was visiting the Smith College Women's History Archive where she found a large box of materials still unprocessed and not yet catalogued. This was among 50 to 60 boxes from the National Women's Health Network.

She recalled, "The box contained hundreds of individual files, each detailing a woman's difficulties with the side effects of Depo-Provera or detailing how she had not been informed of those side effects or detailing how she had been given the injection without her consent or by means of manipulation. This coercion, lack of informed consent and testing of the drug has obviously been gathered together in preparation for a class-action suit by the National Women's Health Network that had never gone forward."

But the collection did provide Kline with a rich source of material of examining the history of this contraceptive and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's public board of inquiry on Depo-Provera held in 1983.

"The use of Depo-Provera captures all of the controversy of this century regarding controlling fertility and who's ultimately making the decision about who gets to reproduce. My research looks at coercion, risks not fully understood and how arguments were made for and against Depo-Provera at the time," she explained.

For instance, it was in the Depo-Provera hearings in Washington that the manufacturer and those in favor of the drug had to first contend with the greater organizational powers and force of the feminist movement - but where that feminist movement had to argue its case by focusing narrowly on the flaws in the scientific research methodology applied when testing Depo-Provera.

In other words, those combating the use of Depo-Provera could not make a case against the drug based on morality or sentiment even though it could easily have been argued that this was a case of eugenics since the testing of the drug in the 1970s at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital Family Planning Clinic involved mostly black women in public assistance.

Instead, because of FDA strictures related to evidence supplied at its board of inquiry hearings, opponents of the drug had to channel their arguments on the science then available on Depo-Provera.

"Of course," said Kline, "It was and is very difficult to separate science from the society that produced it. There was a reason, given the understood risks of Depo-Provera, that its testing was done on poor women in the U.S. and on women in developing countries."

Still, at the Depo-Provera hearings of 1983, those against the use of Depo-Provera were able to introduce the concept that the FDA's established cost/benefit analysis of a drug should include quality of life issues and that dismissing female patient's complaints about crippling side effects was not just "sexist," it was bad science.

Another outcome of the FDA 1983 inquiry into Depo-Provera and the publicity surrounding the hearings was the first national conference on black women's health held in Atlanta in 1983.

The larger message, according to Kline, is that eugenics is more than simply an embarrassing mistake of the past. The popular belief that technology and regulation of sexual fertility (?) would lead to healthier, stronger, more self-reliant population carried over in the 1970s, '80s and even today.

source:
Coercive Birth Control Used As A Form Of Eugenics

it is a salad of arguments ;( 

Planned Parenthood in the Archives

the American Birth Control League (ABCL) over leadership issues in 1928. In 1938, the Clinical Research Bureau (the first doctor-controlled, legal birth control clinic) which she opened in 1923 merged with the ABCL to become the Birth Control Federation of America. In 1942, its name was changed to the less feminist, more family-friendly Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a name Sanger loathed.

E Katz correction to Birth Control in the Cabinet: Planned Parenthood in the Archives Posted by Jill Lepore

contains a nice slide show

How Birth Control And Abortion Became Politicized

audio

Jean H. Baker book

As for her connection with the eugenics movement, Baker examines Sanger’s beliefs (along with others who espoused eugenics, such as Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes) and concludes that she “embraced eugenics as a female cause with a female solution,’’ focusing primarily on a woman’s right to bring only healthy and wanted children into the world. However one parses this, Sanger’s insistence that, as she wrote, “[a] woman’s body belongs to herself alone’’ still sounds revolutionary.

MARGARET SANGER: A Life of Passion By Jean H. Baker Hill and Wang, 349 pp., illustrated, $35

upg:

Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger

A Woman with a Plan: The Real Story of Margaret Sanger

by Ellen Chesler, 

The Roosevelt Institute

Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is back in the news this week thanks to GOP presidential candidate and abortion rights opponent Herman Cain, who claimed on national television that Planned Parenthood, the visionary global movement she founded nearly a century ago, is really about one thing only: “preventing black babies from being born.” Cain’s outrageous and false accusation is actually an all too familiar canard -- a willful repetition of scurrilous claims that have circulated for years despite detailed refutation by scholars who have examined the evidence and unveiled the distortions and misrepresentations on which they are based (for a recent example, see this rebuttal from The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler).
It’s an old tactic. Even in her own day, Sanger endured deliberate character assassination by opponents who believed they would gain more traction by impugning her character and her motives than by debating the merits of her ideas. But when a presidential candidate from a major U.S. political party is saying such things, a thoughtful response is necessary.
So what is Sanger’s story?
Born Margaret Louisa Higgins in 1879, the middle child of a large Irish Catholic family, Sanger grew into a follower of labor organizers, free thinkers, and bohemians. Married to William Sanger, an itinerant architect and painter, she helped support three young children by working as a visiting nurse on New York’s Lower East Side. Following the death of a patient from a then all-too-common illegal abortion, she vowed to abandon palliative work and instead overturn obscenity laws that prevented legal access to safe contraception.
Sanger’s fundamental heresy was in claiming every woman’s right to experience her sexuality freely and bear only the number of children she desires. Following a first generation of educated women who had proudly forgone marriage in order to seek fulfillment outside the home, she offered birth control as a necessary condition to the resolution of a broad range of personal and professional frustrations.
The hardest challenge in introducing Sanger to modern audiences, who take this idea for granted, is to explain how absolutely destabilizing it seemed in her own time. As a result of largely private arrangements and a healthy trade in condoms, douches, and various contraptions sold under the subterfuge of feminine hygiene, birth rates had already begun to decline. But contraception remained a clandestine and delicate subject, legally banned under obscenity statutes, and women were still largely denied identities or rights independent of their relationships with men, including the right to vote.
By inventing the term “birth control,” Sanger brought the practice -- and by implication, women’s entitlement to sexual pleasure -- out into the open and gave them essential currency. She went to jail in 1917 for opening a clinic to distribute primitive diaphragms to immigrant women in Brooklyn, New York, and appeal of her conviction led to a medical exception that licensed doctors to prescribe contraception for reasons of health. Under these constraints she built a network of independent local women’s health centers that eventually came together under the banner of Planned Parenthood. She also lobbied for the repeal of federal obscenity statutes that prevented the legal transport of contraception by physicians across state lines, which were struck down in federal court in 1936.
Sanger sought and won scientific validation for various contraceptive methods, including the birth control pill, whose development she supported and found the money to fund. In so doing, she helped lift the religious shroud that had long encased reproduction and secured the endorsement of contraception by physicians and social scientists. From this singular accomplishment, which some still consider heretical, a continuing controversy has ensued.
Sanger always remained a wildly polarizing figure, which clarifies the logic of her decision after World War I to jettison “birth control” and adopt the more socially resonant term “family planning.” This move was particularly inventive but in no way cynical, especially when the Great Depression brought attention to collective needs and the New Deal created a blueprint for bold public endeavors.
Some have falsely charged that Sanger defined family planning as a right of the privileged but a duty or obligation of the poor. To the contrary, she showed considerable foresight in lobbying to include universal voluntary family planning programs among public investments in social security. Had the New Deal incorporated basic public health and access to contraception, as most European countries were then doing, protracted conflicts over welfare and health care policy in the U.S. might well have been avoided.
Having long enjoyed the friendship and support of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Sanger also had ample reason to believe the New Dealers would fully legalize and endorse contraception as a necessary first step to her long-term goal of transferring responsibility and accountability for voluntary clinics to the public health sector. What she failed to anticipate was the force of opposition family planning continued to generate from a coalition of religious conservatives, including urban Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants, that held Roosevelt Democrats captive much as today’s evangelicals have captured the GOP.
The U.S. government would not overcome cultural and religious objections to public support of family planning through its domestic anti-poverty and international development programs until the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court protected contraceptive use under the privacy doctrine created in Griswold v. Connecticut. At this time, Planned Parenthood clinics became major government contractors, since there were few alternative primary health care centers serving the poor. Today, one in four American women funds her contraception through government programs, many of them still run by Planned Parenthood -- a number likely to rise under the Affordable Care Act.
Sanger’s eagerness to mainstream her movement explains her engagement with eugenics, a then widely popular intellectual movement that addressed the manner in which human intelligence and opportunity is determined by biological as well as environmental factors. Hard as it is to believe, eugenics was considered far more respectable than birth control. Like many well-intentioned reformers of this era, Sanger took away from Charles Darwin the essentially optimistic lesson that humanity’s evolution within the animal kingdom makes us all capable of improvement if only we apply the right tools. University presidents, physicians, scientists, and public officials all embraced eugenics, in part because it held the promise that merit would replace fate -- or birthright and social status -- as the standard for mobility in a democratic society.
But eugenics also has some damning and today unfathomable legacies, such as a series of state laws upheld in 1927 by an eight-to-one progressive majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Their landmark decision in Buck v. Bell authorized the compulsory sterilization of a poor young white woman with an illegitimate child on grounds of feeble mindedness that were never clearly established. This decision, incidentally, was endorsed by civil libertarians such as Roger Baldwin of the ACLU and W.E.B. Dubois of the NAACP, both of whom Sanger counted among her supporters and friends.
For Sanger, eugenics was meant to begin with the voluntary use of birth control, which many still opposed on the grounds that the middle class should be encouraged to have more babies. She countered by disdaining what she called a “cradle competition” of class, race, or ethnicity. She publicly opposed immigration restrictions and framed poverty as a matter of differential access to resources like birth control, not as the immutable consequence of low inherent ability or character.
As a nurse, Sanger also understood the adverse impacts of poor nutrition, drugs, and alcohol on fetal development and encouraged government support of maternal and infant health. She argued for broad social safety nets and proudly marshaled clinical data to demonstrate that most women, even among the poorest and least educated populations, eagerly embraced and used birth control successfully when it is was provided.
At the same time, Sanger did on many occasions engage in shrill rhetoric about the growing burden of large families of low intelligence and defective heredity — language with no intended racial or ethnic content. She always argued that all women are better off with fewer children, but unfortunate language about “creating a race of thoroughbreds” and other such phrases have in recent years been lifted out of context and used to sully her reputation. Moreover, in endorsing Buck v. Bell and on several occasions the payment of pensions or bonuses to poor women who agreed to limit their childbearing (many of whom enjoyed no other health care coverage), Sanger quite clearly failed to consider fundamental human rights questions raised by such practices. Living in an era indifferent to the obligation to respect and protect individuals whose behaviors do not always conform to prevailing mores, she did not always fulfill it.
The challenge as Sanger’s biographer has been to reconcile apparent contradictions in her beliefs. She actually held unusually advanced views on race relations for her day and on many occasions condemned discrimination and encouraged reconciliation between blacks and whites. Though most birth control facilities conformed to the segregation mores of the day, she opened an integrated clinic in Harlem in the early 1930s. Later, she facilitated birth control and maternal health programs for rural black women in the south, when local white health officials there denied them access to any New Deal-funded services.
Sanger worked on this last project with the behind-the-scenes support of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council for Negro Women and then a Roosevelt administration official. Their progressive views on race were well known, if controversial, but their support for birth control was silenced by Franklin’s political handlers — at least until he was safely ensconced in the White House for a third term, when the government rushed to provide condoms to World War II soldiers.
Sanger’s so-called Negro Project has been a source of controversy first raised by black nationalists and some feminist scholars in the 1970s and later by anti-abortion foes. Respecting the importance of self-determination among users of contraception, she recruited prominent black leaders to endorse the goal, especially ministers who held sway over the faithful. In that context, she wrote an unfortunate sentence in a private letter about needing to clarify the ideals and goals of the birth control movement because “we do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” The sentence may have been thoughtlessly composed, but it is perfectly clear that she was not endorsing genocide.
America’s intensely complicated politics of race and gender has long ensnarled Sanger and all others who have sought to discipline reproduction. As many scholars of the subject in recent years have observed, much of the controversy proceeds from the plain fact that reproduction is by its very nature experienced individually and socially at the same time. In claiming women’s fundamental right to control their own bodies, Sanger remained mindful of the dense fabric of cultural, political, and economic relationships in which those rights are exercised.
In most instances the policies Sanger advocated were intended to observe the necessary obligation of social policy to balance individual rights of self-expression with the sometimes contrary desire to promulgate and enforce common mores and laws. She may have failed to get the balance quite right, but there is nothing in the record to poison her reputation or discredit her noble cause. Quite the contrary.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. may have put it best in 1966, when he accepted Planned Parenthood’s prestigious Margaret Sanger Award and spoke eloquently of the “kinship” between the civil rights and family planning movements. Here is what he said, since it bears repeating:

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts. 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. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning.

Eugenics, or Scientific Racism, in American Education

One of the evil fruits of the tree of evolution is the idea of eugenics, the notion that human beings can be bred to perfection by the same methods used to breed perfect cattle. Since evolution itself reduces man to the level of animal, it is not surprising that eugenics was adopted by many leaders among the educational elite as the means of solving man’s social problems. But eugenics itself poses a problem: what does one mean by human perfection, and whose definition of perfection should be adopted?
The founder of the eugenics movement, Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), cousin of Charles Darwin, found his model of perfection in the British elite. But he was painfully aware that the birthrate of the elite was far lower than that of what he considered to be the inferior classes. In this he saw a great danger to civilization. He concluded that ways had to be found to encourage the fertility of the superior stock and to discourage the fertility of the inferior stock.
In order to determine which individuals had superior traits, Galton created an anthropometric laboratory in 1884 for the measurement of man, with the hope that by means of tests he could single out those individuals who should survive. However, Galton realized that physical measurements alone were not enough to determine the criteria he needed. He began searching for ways to investigate psychological differences.
In 1886, he was introduced to James McKeen Cattell, a young American who had just completed two years of study in the laboratories of Prof. Wilhelm Wundt, the world’s leading experimental psychologist, at Leipzig University in Germany. It was there that Cattell conducted his reaction-time experiments which became the “scientific” basis for teaching children to read by the whole-word method. Cattell spent the next two years working in Galton’s lab at Cambridge University where he used experimental techniques to investigate the mental differences among normal individuals. He coined the term “mental test.” Cattell used Galton’s framework of physical and physiological anthropometry in which to conduct his experiments on individual differences.
Born in 1860, Cattell graduated in 1880 from Lafayette College (Easton, Penn.) where his father, a Presbyterian minister, was president. While at college, Cattell studied the ideas of Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who stressed the authority of scientific knowledge over religious or metaphysical forms of thought. This philosophy, known as Positivism, led Cattell to adopt a new “religion” of science.
In 1882-83 Cattell studied at Johns Hopkins University where his classmate was John Dewey and their professor was psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Hall was the first American to study at Leipzig under Prof. Wundt, and he encouraged Cattell to get his doctorate under Wundt at Leipzig.
After completing his studies in Germany and his experiments at Cambridge, Cattell returned to the United States where he became professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1891, Cattell moved to Teachers College, Columbia University, where as professor of experimental psychology he built the nation’s leading department of psychology. He trained many young psychologists who then fanned out across American academia to teach the new gospel of psychology. In 1904, Cattell arranged for his friend John Dewey to come to Columbia as professor of philosophy.
At Teachers College, Cattell’s star pupil was Edward L. Thorndike, who espoused the principles of eugenics and became America’s leading educational psychologist. He devised a new theory of learning based on conditioning techniques used in animal training. His book, Animal Intelligence (1898) laid the groundwork for the school of behaviorism.
Both Cattell and Thorndike were active in applying the principles of eugenics to education. Like Dewey, they held an organic view of society. Socialist Dewey wrote in his famous My Pedogogic Creed:
“I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals…. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child’s fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of most service and where he can receive the most help.”
This was clearly the educational philosophy of a collectivist state, not a Constitutional republic in which the purpose of government is to secure the God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the individual. The purpose of education in a free society is to provide the individual with the skills needed to make his way in the adult world, not to determine where he can be ”of most service.”
Inherent in Dewey’s creed is the notion that individual human worth is determined by social usefulness, a concept that is taught today in the lifeboat and fallout shelter survival exercises in which students must decide who to throw out of the lifeboat or kill in the fallout shelter. Dewey also wrote in that Creed:
“[T]he teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life....In this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”
It was inevitable that those who believed in eugenics would see society in racial terms and impose racist ideas on American education. The veneer of science made racism respectable among the social-radical progressives who were supposedly only interested in the future good of mankind.
Eugenics conferences were held in the United States to spread the new spirit of scientific racism within academia. G. Stanley Hall, who had become president of Clark University (Worcester, Mass.) in 1889, encouraged his students to develop tests to assess mental capacity. One of his students, Lewis Terman, devised a mental test that was to become the most famous of them all, one that measured the I.Q., or Intelligence Quotient. The I.Q. expressed the ratio of a child’s mental age to his chronological age, multiplied by one hundred. Terman believed that intelligence was a matter of genetic inheritance and that genetic superiority could therefore be determined by this test.
The Anglo-American eugenics movement grew in influence on both sides of the Atlantic. In England it was embraced by Fabian socialists because they believed that an ideal society could be produced only by “superior” people. In America, it drew such progressives as Margaret Sanger, Gifford Pinchot, David Starr-Jordan, Charles M. Eliot, Emma Goldman, and such conservatives as Herbert Hoover and Charles Davenport. Sanger was motivated by her belief in eugenics to start the birth-control movement.
The eugenics movement persuaded Congress to pass new immigration laws to curtail the influx of "inferior" peoples from Eastern and Southern Europe. In 1921, the Second International Congress of Eugenics was held at New York’s Museum of Natural History. Its president was Henry Fairfield Osborn, who wrote in the program:

The right of the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of the state to safeguard the health and morals of its people. As science has enlightened government in the prevention and spread of disease, it must also enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society, the spread of feeble-mindedness, of idiocy, and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical diseases.

It was this philosophy of government which enabled Congress to pass Prohibition, which made it illegal to drink alcoholic beverages. And we all know what a social disaster Prohibition turned out to be. Likewise, Mayor Bloomberg of New York believes that it is government’s highest duty to determine what people should be allowed to eat. It sounds benign and sensible to a statist. But nothing in our Constitution gives government such powers.
However, there was nothing benign about scientific racism which affected more important aspects of life than just eating habits. To eugenicist Thorndike, blacks were inferior and had to be treated differently in education, and he was responsible for changing “certain schools for Negroes from a predominantly literary to a predominantly realistic and industrial curriculum.”
In other words, as a result of “scientific research,” pupils were now no longer being judged as individuals, but as members of different racial groups. Scientific racism became an integral part of progressive education policy.
In 1933, Hitler’s new National Socialist (Nazi) government adopted a Eugenic Sterilization Law that resulted in the compulsory sterilization, within three years, of 275,000 people judged “unfit” by Hereditary Health Courts. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the Nazi regime inaugurated a policy of euthanasia for the mentally diseased or disabled. Some 70,000 patients were shot and gassed to death. All of this was prelude to the mass extermination of Jews that would take place during the war years.
But all of that is in the dim past. In America today, eugenics has been replaced by multiculturalism, affirmative action, new liberal programs to help minorities advance economically, and special education in the public schools to help the mentally challenged (once dubbed "useless human beings") get a government education. The schools are now dumbing-down everyone, and functional illiteracy is now epidemic. In other words, we’ve gone from one evil to another. Scientific racism rejected Biblical religion, and today’s progressives reject the supernatural. American culture is in a state of total philosophical chaos. The future of America is uncertain because of the raging battles among competing philosophies. Only by repudiating the statists and returning to the sane political philosophy of the Founding Fathers will this nation be able to reconstruct an American future in liberty and economic freedom for all.

Written by Sam Blumenfeld

1 ocean - 1 method

Margaret Sanger Papers in the national spotlight by erialcp

Although Margaret Sanger died in 1966, debates about her legacy still shape how politicians talk about the important issue of abortion rights. On Sunday, October 30, Republican candidate for president Herman Cain gave an interview on CBS's "Face the Nation". He claimed that if voters wanted to understand the real meaning of abortion in America, they needed to "go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger's own words." But Cain's knowledge of Sanger seems more rooted in convenient myth than in historical fact. The phone has been ringing off the hook today at the Margaret Sanger Papers with journalists and commentators calling to find out the real history.
Cain claimed that early Planned Parenthood clinics were build predominately in black neighborhoods as part of a plan of racial extermination. He said, "So if you go back and look up the history--secondly, look at where most of them were build, 75 percent of those facilities were built in the black community-- and Margaret Sanger's own words, she didn't use the word 'genocide' but she did talk about preventing the increasing numbers of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born."
Although Sanger advocated the politics of eugenics that were popular in her era, Planned Parenthood in no way encouraged abortion among black communities. In fact, none of Sanger's clinics performed abortions before Roe v. Wade in 1973.  Racism in the world of family planning tended to express itself in the reverse: blacks were sometimes excluded from clinics offering birth control services. Here at the Sanger papers, we frequently write about the issue of race in our newsletters and publications. Cathy Hajo, associate editor of the Margaret Sanger papers, has recently addressed this in her book, Birth Control on Main Street (2010)< /em>. There were a handful of clinics that serviced specifically black communities, but these received little assistance from white activists. Cain's suggestion that 75% of clinics were in black neighborhoods is completely unfounded. "Whatever the activists' personal beliefs about race may have been," writes Hajo, "there was no grand program to exterminate nonwhites or the poor."
This is not the first time Cain has distorted the history of birth control in this way in order to advance his political views. In April of 2010, Cain made claims about Planned Parenthood's alleged genocide plan that earned PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" status, meaning that they found no truth to the claim whatsoever. In fact, PolitiFact said, "Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card."
Sunday's interview is no different. In the Washington Post today, Glenn Kessler decries Cain's rewriting of birth control history, relying on the research of Hajo and others to discredit this misuse of the past for politically expedient ends. CNN and Factcheck.org have also called the Sanger Papers looking for more informati on, and we expected to see pieces from them soon.

erialcp

Pavlov's letter to Molotov

Академик И. П. Павлов- В. М. Молотову: 

"...Пощадите же родину и нас..." 

В СОВЕТ НАРОДНЫХ КОМИССАРОВ СССР

Революция застала меня почти в 70 лет. А в меня засело как-то твердое убеждение, что срок дельной человеческой жизни именно 70 лет. И потому я смело и открыто критиковал революцию. Я говорил себе: «чорт с ними! Пусть расстреляют. Все равно, жизнь кончена, а я сделаю то, что требовало от меня мое достоинство». На меня поэтому не действовали ни приглашение в старую чеку, правда, кончившееся ничем, ни угрозы при Зиновьеве в здешней «Правде» по поводу одного моего публичного чтения: «можно ведь и ушибить...»

Теперь дело показало, что я неверно судил о моей работоспособности. И сейчас, хотя раньше часто о выезде из отечества подумывал и даже иногда заявлял, я решительно не могу расстаться с родиной и прервать здешнюю работу, которую считаю очень важной, способной не только хорошо послужить репутации русской науки, но и толкнуть вперед человеческую мысль вообще. Но мне тяжело, по временам очень тяжело жить здесь – и это есть причина моего письма в Совет.

Вы напрасно верите в мировую пролетарскую революцию. Я не могу без улыбки смотреть на плакаты: «да здравствует мировая социалистическая революция, да здравствует мировой октябрь». Вы сеете по культурному миру не революцию, а с огромным успехом фашизм. До Вашей революции фашизма не было. Ведь только нашим политическим младенцам Временного Правительства было мало даже двух Ваших репетиций перед Вашим октябрьским торжеством. Все остальные правительства вовсе не желают видеть у себя то, что было и есть у нас и, конечно, во время догадываются применить для предупреждения этого то, чем пользовались и пользуетесь Вы – террор и насилие. Разве это не видно всякому зрячему! Сколько раз в Ваших газетах о других странах писалось: «час настал, час пробил», а дело постоянно кончалось лишь новым фашизмом то там, то сям. Да, под Вашим косвенным влиянием фашизм постепенно охватит весь культурный мир, исключая могучий англо-саксонский отдел (Англию наверное, американские Соединенные Штаты, вероятно), который воплотит-таки в жизнь ядро социализма: лозунг – труд как первую обязанность и ставное достоинство человека и как основу человеческих отношений, обезпечивающую соответствующее существование каждого – и достигнет этого с сохранением всех дорогих, стоивших больших жертв и большого времени, приобретений культурного человечества.

Но мне тяжело не оттого, что мировой фашизм попридержит на известный срок темп естественного человеческого прогресса, а оттого, что делается у нас и что, по моему мнению, грозит серьезною опасностью моей родине.

Во первых то, что Вы делаете есть, конечно, только эксперимент и пусть даже грандиозный по отваге, как я уже и сказал, но не осуществление бесспорной насквозь жизненной правды – и, как всякий эксперимент, с неизвестным пока окончательным результатом. Во вторых эксперимент страшно дорогой (и в этом суть дела), с уничтожением всего культурного покоя и всей культурной красоты жизни.

Мы жили и живем под неослабевающим режимом террора и насилия. Если бы нашу обывательскую действительность воспроизвести целиком, без пропусков, со всеми ежедневными подробностями – это была бы ужасающая картина, потрясающее впечатление от которой на настоящих людей едва ли бы значительно смягчилось, если рядом с ней поставить и другую нашу картину с чудесно как бы вновь выростающими городами, днепростроями, гигантами-заводами и безчисленными учеными и учебными заведениями. Когда первая картина заполняет мое внимание, я всего более вижу сходства нашей жизни с жизнию древних азиатских деспотий. А у нас это называется республиками. Как это понимать? Пусть, может быть, это временно. Но надо помнить, что человеку, происшедшему из зверя, легко падать, но трудно подниматься. Тем, которые злобно приговаривают к смерти массы себе подобных и с удовлетворением приводят это в исполнение, как и тем, насильственно приучаемым учавствовать в этом, едва ли возможно остаться существами, чувствующими и думающими человечно. И с другой стороны. Тем, которые превращены в забитых животных, едва ли возможно сделаться существами с чувством собственного человеческого достоинства.

Когда я встречаюсь с новыми случаями из отрицательной полосы нашей жизни (а их легион), я терзаюсь ядовитым укором, что оставался и остаюсь среди нея. Не один же я так чувствую и думаю?! Пощадите же родину и нас.

Академик Иван ПАВЛОВ. Ленинград 21 декабря 1934 г.

На машинописной копии письма резолюция: «т. Сталину. Сегодня СНК получил новое чепуховое письмо академика Павлова. Молотов»

АПРФ. Ф.3. Оп.33. Д.180. Л.47–50. Автограф.

source 
one thing is unclear to me: Sanger was in SPb exactly in 1934, but she did not met Pavlov. I supposed he died before her visit, but the letter dated Dec, and she was in Summer

Happy World Contraception Day!

Sanger and other family planning leaders at the IPPF's founding meeting, theThird International Conference on Planned Parenthood, held in Bombay in 1952.

From the International Planned Parenthood Federation: today, September 26, is World Contraception Day.
On the WCD2011 website, specifically targeting youth, you can learn more about contraception and your rights when it comes to sexual and reproductive health.
The WCD2011 website includes a drop-down menu where you can select your country of residence (from a limited list) in order to get more information about where you can access contraception, background information on puberty and anatomy, types of contraception, and STIs, and other resources for teens and youth.
The other major facet of WCD2011 is their release of the results of a multinational survey of youth touching on topics of sexual and reproductive health and education, including access to and use of contraception. Some of the results, including a staggering statistic that

“42% of respondents in Asia Pacific and 28% in Europe who could not get hold of contraception when they needed it claimed it was because they were too embarrassed to ask a healthcare professional,”

are available in the press release for WCD2011. The full report is available here.
Income, location, language barriers, legal status within a country, religious/social/parental pressures, and a host of other factors can have an impact on young people’s access to contraception. The fact is that there are any number of ways which infringe upon one’s right to access safe, affordable, accessible, and non-judgmental health care, especially regarding sexual health and even more so as a minor. In the face of such inequality of access, the work that individuals and organizations in the field of sexual and reproductive health advocacy and research do is as important now as it was when Margaret Sanger was alive.
On World Contraception Day, then, it seems appropriate to both celebrate the advances – scientific and social – that generations of sexual and reproductive health pioneers have worked for, and to continue to agitate for truly equal access. So once again, Happy WCD and let’s continue the good work that Sanger began.

repost from MSPP

No More Babies

they cut the video, but it is not too often when you meet Sanger on youtube

death and birth days linx

Как известно Сэнгер не дожила несколько дней, чуть больше недели до своего 87го дня рождения, умерла 6 сентября (я родился 3-его, когда умру не знаю, мб, тоже в сентябре:)

Поскольку я подписчик на блоги и новости про Сэнгер к этим дням подошло кое-что позитивное в мутном потоке заурядного ежедневного дерьма, рыться в котором уже изрядно надоело :(

Итак полезные линьки (некоторые оччъ хороши):

• credoreference.com о Сэнгер
• очень хорошая незаезженая фотка
• просто позитивная заметка 
• No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother (с обсуждением на menstruationresearch.org)
• рисованый портрет со ссылкой на фликр, где есть ещё
• Небольшая статейка про Пинкуса и МС
• epilawg про МС со ссылками
• A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. -- цитатник МС. Имеет смысл обратить на словоуптребление, а то всё свистят про расизьм, в начале века слово было совсем другим :)
• про комстоковщину и первого кандидата в презики США женского пола
• This article is about the birth control pill as a means of contraceptive :)

Russian Republic

Любопытно: если верить этому источнику, 14 сентября Россия была провозглашена республикой
в чём любопытство?
это день рождения МС

more movie or what?

Then came one more summer break: after an editorial changeover at the magazine, I started writing on books, TV and movies for the thriving alternative weeklies (first The Real Paper in Cambridge, then The Boston Phoenix). In the summer of 1976, Joe Morgenstern, now the Pulitzer-prize-winning film critic for the Wall Street Journal, was in Boston with his then-wife, Piper Laurie, who was acting in a film about Margaret Sanger for PBS’ “Nova.” Unbeknownst to me, Joe started reading my stuff. When, nearly two years later, editor Jim Bellows offered him the movie critic slot at The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Morgenstern didn’t want it himself – but he thought this guy he’d read in Boston just might. I flew to L.A. and I got the job.

source = baltimor blog

yes-to-day

Is Barbara Harris Today’s Margaret Sanger?

a lively and entertaining writer wrote about Wells

The life of H.G. Wells is, in many ways, a gift to a novelist: He was a self-made man who became famous and wealthy, who knew practically everybody (Shaw! Gorky! Lenin!) and had sex with many of them (Rebecca West! Elizabeth von Arnim! Margaret Sanger! a Russian spy!), provoking no shortage of scandal....
If Wells had not existed, an enterprising novelist might have had to invent him. An outspoken champion of socialism and free love (and a formidable practitioner of the latter), Wells is already a larger-than-life character, to the point that only his intelligent, forbearing second wife can begin to match him....
Jane, the second wife, who failed to share Wells’s sexual appetite, but who not only tolerated his dalliances but offered frequent advice to all concerned, is the quiet star of the book.

The Globe&Mail: fiction review

Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility

Margaret Sanger, the American birth-control and population-control advocate who founded Planned Parenthood, stands like a giant among her contemporaries. With her dominating yet winning personality, she helped generate shifts of opinion on issues that were not even publicly discussed prior to her activism, while her leadership was arguably the single most important factor in achieving social and legislative victories that set the parameters for today’s political discussion of family-planning funding, population-control aid, and even sex education.

source

Sex research in America

From here to eternity

When the United States thought sex was as dangerous as communism

Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America. By Christopher Turner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 544 pages; $35. To be published in Britain in August as “Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex” by Fourth Estate; £25.


“TREAT yourself”, the advertisements say. “You’re worth it”. The image may be a woman bending over or a man with a seductive grin. As for the product, it hardly matters whether it is soap or a car: sex is being used to sell, and latent desires will move consumers to buy—or at least feel titillated by the prospect.

What a darkly ironic epilogue for the sexual revolution, observes Christopher Turner in “Adventures in the Orgasmatron”. Progressive attitudes were meant to free society from the dangers of conformity. Yet some of the most radical ideas about our primal urges have been harnessed by those who want everyone to drink the same brand of beer.

Wilhelm Reich, a charismatic and gifted psychoanalyst who trained with Sigmund Freud, coined the phrase “sexual revolution” in the 1930s. Reich had high hopes for sex. He spent his life insisting that a bone-rattling orgasm was the best way to ensure personal health and a more humane society. Human desires are natural, he argued; it is only when society represses these instincts that problems arise.

As the hero of this erudite and engaging work of social history, Reich is a fascinating subject. He was arrogant and influential, tyrannical and abusive. He fell out with Freud and alienated his peers by insisting not only that orgasms were a panacea, but also that psychoanalysis should be a tool for social change. In his mid-30s when the Nazis came to power, he saw fascism as an inevitable product of repressive social structures, such as the patriarchal family. If the instincts of children weren’t repressed, he argued, then adults wouldn’t crave being told what to do. Reich wanted to apply the revelations of psychoanalysis to reforming sex laws (by, for example, lifting bans on abortion and prostitution) and updating social mores about marriage and children. Free sex, he believed, was the best check on totalitarianism.

Freud found this naive, maintaining that psychoanalysis was not about changing the world, but about helping people to adapt to it. Repression wasn’t something to throw off, but a part of the human condition. “To Freud, misery came from within; to Reich, it was imposed from without.”

Time, however, made Reich’s grasp on reality more tenuous, particularly after he fled to America in 1939. Like a mad scientist, he grew convinced that sexual electricity was quantifiable. His big invention was something called an “orgone energy accumulator”, a box about the size of a telephone booth which collected good atmospheric energy. Time inside the box would not only improve one’s “orgastic potency”, Reich claimed, but also treat cancer, among other maladies (including his own psoriasis). Scientists refused to confirm Reich’s orgone theories, but a generation of young progressives heralded these boxes as sources of sexual liberation, something Woody Allen parodied with his “Orgasmatron” in his 1973 film, “Sleeper”. Norman Mailer had one (though he later described it as “kind of crap”). William Burroughs claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in the wooden shack he built.

These pleasure-seeking bohemians gave Reich pause. He rued that they were hijacking his Utopian concepts to unleash “a free-for-all fucking epidemic”. Post-war America was an all too fertile ground for his radical ideas, it seems, as leftist intellectuals flailed about for a new language of opposition to replace Marxist dogma. Reich’s theories about sex made promiscuity seem rebellious and self-affirming.

In 1947 Reich was accused in the press of starting a “new cult of sex and anarchy”. A year later Alfred Kinsey published his explosive report about sexuality, which found that American Puritanical mores were out of sync with reality. The McCarthy trials—which sought links between sexual liberation and communism—added to the hysteria. The Food and Drug Administration began a crackdown on Reich’s work, finding it menacing. The government ultimately demanded that all of Reich’s orgone boxes be incinerated along with his books, and then sent him to prison, where he died of a heart attack in 1957.

Why was Reich considered so dangerous? Though possibly a paranoid schizophrenic, who spent the last years of his life convinced that the world was under attack by UFOs, he offered an intellectual rationale for the sexual revolution. But he also came to regret opening this Pandora’s box. Reich predicted that America’s liberated excesses would be countered by repression, just like in Stalin’s Russia.

Yet Mr Turner suggests a different legacy, one that haunted Herbert Marcuse. The German sociologist, disillusioned by the sexually omnivorous 1960s, came to believe that liberated sexual desires had been co-opted to serve capitalism; advertisers had figured out how to exploit libidinal urges to inspire “false needs”. But this overlooks the benefits. The sexual revolution may not have yielded a neurosis-free Utopia soundscaped with the glorious yelps of orgasms. But a more open society and greater sexual tolerance (at least in the West) means fewer people are looking for pleasure in a funny wooden box.
from The Economist

Her aims

In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL). (Eventually, in 1942, this is the organization that became known as Planned Parenthood.)

In her book, “The Pivot of Civilization,” Margaret Sanger herself listed the goals of the ABCL:

(1) “Research: To collect the findings of scientists, concerning the relation of reckless breeding to the evils of delinquency, defect and dependence;

(2) “Investigation: To derive from these scientifically ascertained facts and figures, conclusions which may aid all public health and social agencies in the study of problems of maternal and infant mortality, child-labor, mental and physical defects and delinquence in relation to the practice of reckless parentage.

(3) “Hygienic and Physiological: Instruction by the Medical profession to mothers and potential mothers in harmless and reliable methods of Birth Control in answer to their requests for such knowledge.

(4) “Sterilization of the insane and mentally retarded and the encouragement of this operation upon those afflicted with inherited or transmissible diseases, with the understanding that sterilization does not deprive the individual of his or her sex expression, but merely renders him incapable of producing children.

(5) “Education: The program of education includes: The enlightenment of the public at large, mainly through the education of leaders of thought and opinion–teachers, ministers, editors and writers to the moral and scientific soundness of the principles of Birth Control and the imperative necessity of its adoption as the basis of national and racial progress.

(6) “Political and Legislative: To enlist the support and cooperation of legal advisers, statesmen and legislators in effecting the removal of state and federal statutes which encourage dysgenic breeding, increase the sum total of disease, misery and poverty and prevent the establishment of a policy of national health and strength.

(7) “Organization: To send into the various States of the Union field workers to enlist the support and arouse the interest of the masses, to the importance of Birth Control so that laws may be changed and the establishment of clinics made possible in every State.

(8) “International: This department aims to cooperate with similar organizations in other countries to study Birth Control in its relations to the world population problem, food supplies, national and racial conflicts, and to urge all international bodies organized to promote world peace, the consideration of these aspects of international amity.”

from her read-between-the-lines opponent

+ how a woman respected by so many in my mother's generation could be reviled by so many today.