Post by Fingerplucked on Mar 7, 2016 19:49:21 GMT -5
Just finished this book. I was thinking about posting a thread in the Cafe section, but I don’t see any point in starting a new Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, or abortion argument. So I’m posting it here instead, where it’s safe, because nobody comes in here.
I searched the Soundhole for “Sanger.” I see misunderstandings if not outright lies about her going back at least four years. There’s one guy in particular who’s holding onto his beliefs no matter how many times he’s corrected.
This book looks at her life, her accomplishments, her views and her faults. If you read it you’ll find that Sanger did not advocate abortion, rather she advocated contraception as a remedy to abortion, to poverty, to overpopulation, to war, to death-by-childbirth, and to infanticide.
You’ll find that she was indeed a believer in eugenics, as was a full two-thirds of the U.S. population. 30 states had eugenics or forced sterilization laws on the books. 40 universities taught eugenics. The scientific community at large supported eugenics. America was the largest practitioner of eugenics in the world. The Nazis took what we were doing and then escalated it.
She was not a racist as some on the right believe. She advocated for blacks and their rights, particularly their right to control their birthrate.
Sanger spent her adult life in pursuit of one goal: birth control. Although she wanted all women to be able to control when and if they became pregnant, the focus of her campaign was securing rights for married women. She was not, as those on the right would have you believe, promoting promiscuity. It was a fundamental right. Married women at the time did not know how to stop becoming pregnant outside of complete abstinence.
This book puts today’s battles over defunding Planned Parenthood and Obamacare funded contraception in perspective. Those issues are nothing but an extension of a 100+ year old fight for morality. Also looking at it from today’s issues, you’ll see that “The War on Women” is nothing new.
Condoms were legal as a prophylactic against venereal disease. Male troops were given condoms because so many of them were coming home from overseas and then spreading disease to their wives and girlfriends. Condoms could be bought in a corner drugstore as a prophylactic. They were not and could not legally be sold or even discussed as a contraceptive. Contraception was deemed obscene per the 1873 Comstock laws. People couldn’t talk or write about it. Neither could doctors.
Sanger, born into relative poverty, noticed that women in the more affluent neighborhoods had few children, while ten or more children in rapid succession up until menopause were common in her part of town. Her own mother had 22 pregnancies, although only about half of them lived through infancy. As she got older she realized that more affluent families were using contraception and/or the husband was using prostitutes. The main benefit of contraception as Sanger saw it, was to alleviate poverty, to prevent bring more children into the world that families could not afford.
The Catholic Church was all powerful in the early 20th century. Police were dispatched to shut down and arrests all participants in a meeting that Sanger hosted on the orders of the New York Archbishop. I don’t know if this was official Catholic policy, but that same Archbishop, after first denying that he was involved in the police crackdown, a few weeks later issued a statement that included his views that contraception was more evil than abortion. He had some kind of mumbo jumbo about an aborted fetus loses its physical body, but its soul still exists, whereas interrupting God’s plan via contraception does not even allow the soul to be created. I think official Church policy equated contraception and abortion, with one no better or worse than the other, but I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, the book is interesting, maybe mostly for the continued counterproductive resistance from the self appointed guardians of morality.
