I admire Margaret Sanger, the radical feminist who founded Planned Parenthood.
She opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in Brooklyn in 1916, and nine days later was arrested, because it was illegal to promulgate information about contraceptives. In 1921 she founded the National Birth Control League, which in 1929 became Planned Parenthood.
Sanger made modern life possible. I cannot imagine a world without contraceptives.
Few of my college friends opted to have children: one wonders what happened. Was it something in the water, or was it growing up in the ’70s in a university town, with feminist mothers and political activist friends telling us it was impossible to get anything done for years and years if you had kids, at least until they learned to read?
I couldn’t sleep in graduate school: it was a rigorous program and I was vulnerable to stress. It was one of my main reasons for not wanting to have children. I was an insomniac, able to sleep six or seven hours only every three days or so: the rest of the time I quietly attended classes or work, went to the library, and just hoped I’d sleep at night. EVERYBODY knew I needed quiet. Friends would send me home if the circles under my eyes grew too dark and pronounced. I passed the Ph.D. language exam and then ran home to sleep while I was relaxed: I figured I had a window of about fifteen minutes before I started studying for the literature exam. One of my professors sent me home one day, telling me not to be a square peg in a round hole and to to sleep all afternoon and not touch my homework till night. (He was the most brilliant professor we ever had, we all agreed, but he left his tenured job, so I suppose he was a square peg, too).
All that because I couldn’t sleep in graduate school.
Why? Because I’m middle-class? The world is overpopulated anyway.
Recently I yanked Sanger’s autobiography off my shelf as a gesture of protest against the Republicans’ campaign to shut down Planned Parenthood, and against pressure in general.
It is a good read, and there’s plenty of non-political stuff, too. Did you know she had an affair with H. G. Wells? And he also helped her with her birth control work.
Then I read on because I missed the Planned Parenthood Action Fund Rally.
I got a phone call in August. The caller said she had my name from a Planned Parenthood list, that there would be a national Planned Parenthood bus rally “next Thursday,” and they needed my support. I said I’d go, I had always been a Planned Parenthood supporter, but which Thursday? She didn’t have the date, so I suggested some dates and we decided on one. Where? She told me vaguely, in front of the State house, on the west side, I think.
I’d probably be equally bad on the phone, but when I’ve done volunteer work the calls have been scripted. So I was a little taken aback.
I called the local Planned Parenthood office for information about the rally. The receptionist knew nothing about it, so she transferred me to someone who, it turned out, was a phone counselor, and he knew nothing about it. He said tiredly, like someone who disliked his job, that someone would call me back.
No one called me back.
There was no information at the Planned Parenthood website. I learned that an anti-choice bus tour group of fanatics had breezed through town: the group was trying to destroy Planned Parenthood. When you google Planned Parenthood rally, the anti-choice groups come up first. They’re fanatics, and somehow have rigged it. Google should repair that. It’s annoying.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund Rally
So who had called me about the rally? And then I forgot about it.
When I read about the national Planned Parenthood bus tour rally in the paper 10 days later, I was very sorry I missed it. I LIKE rallies. And I loved the photo in the paper of a woman with a sign that said, Keep Your Mitt off My Lady Parts.
This is such a strange campaign year. Planned Parenthood is a fairly innocuous do-gooder organization–birth control, cancer screenings, women’s health care, abortion counseling. There’s nothing new or radical about any of these issues. What DO the Republicans intend to do to help women who need contraceptives, who can’t afford or don’t want children, and who need to protect themselves against STDs or cancer? They’re certainly not going to let any of them go on the dole.
There wasn’t a Planned Parenthood office in my hometown–we went to the local women’s clinic or Student Health. A radical friend told us NOT to take the pill, because the hormones were dangerous and cancer-causing, so we all threw away our pills and used diaphragms. Read Our Bodies, Ourselves. We were a well-informed generation.
And we all worked for abortion rights. We stood behind tables, saying “Keep abortion safe and legal,” and asking people to sign petitions and postcards. I dressed up in a suit to confuse the priggish anti-choicers, who had a table across the hall, and didn’t quite know who I was, but I wasn’t supposed to dress like them. The anti-choice group was giving away doughnuts. We didn’t give away any food.
There is much about birth control and abortion in literature. To quote from my own blog about the birth control scene in Mary McCarthy’s The Group:
“In my favorite scene, Kay and Dottie go together to be fitted for diaphragms (still the best form of birth control). Dottie has researched the history of contraception, from plugs used by the ancient Egyptians to Margaret Sanger’s discovery of the diaphragm in Holland.
“But practicing the insertion isn’t easy for Dottie.
Her bad moment came when she was learning how to insert the pessary by herself…. As she was trying to fold the pessary, the slippery thing, all covered with jelly, jumped out of her grasp and shot across the room and hit the sterilizer. Dottie could have died. But apparently this was nothing new to the doctor and the nurse. “Try again, Dorothy,” said the doctor calmly, selecting another diaphragm of the right size from the drawer.
So we must elect Democrats to keep Dottie’s diaphragm safe and legal. Good luck, future generations. We’re menopausal now, and the onus is on you.
My older daughter has no children and is 34; she probably will not have any; of her close friends, 4 have had no children. She probably has altogether 6; one who has children, has twins through artificial insemination by her husband.
I find it horrendous that anyone could send anyone else a card needling the other person for not having children. Underlying this idea is no individual woman has value in and of herself.
The republicans and their quiescent allies want to prevent women from having control over their reproductive functions. By stopping access to contraceptives, they also make sex risky so the woman can no longer have an adult sex life of her own choosing. They want to subject women to men. I shall later today (tonight) write a companion blog to yours on my Ellen & Jim website: Riddle’s Eve’s Herbs where he does demonstate that from the first records we have women have desperately tried to control and shape their reproduction functions (sometimes to have children, sometimes to give birth earlier, but mostly to prevent contraception, and when that didn’t work cause miscarriages or abort a fetus, both of which were very dangerous. I know I had a miscarriage in my late twenties which before the discovery of blood transfusion would have been fatal.
Beyond that the republicans and their allies don’t want to pay any taxes for anyone else’s need. Every one on their own, everyone keep every penny he or she earns and the hell with everyone else. Poor people deserve whatever happens to them; they too are being served with discipline and punishment this way.
i admire Sanger terrifically. She sacrificed enormously personally. I too have had trouble with these do-good organizations when it comes to them giving out information and some help or clear instructions. Partly they don’t have enough money and staff. But as with so many establishments each person individually is so concerned with the immediate job and in the public media we have so little reinforcement of social helping and harmony (quite the opposite) that I’m not surprised at all you didn’t make it there. Think how individuals in the medical establishment treat patients on the phone.
Planned Parenthood is still enormously important. Both my daughters availed themselves of its health services – which go well beyond contraceptive advice and help and advice on access to abortion. I did too in the 1970s. To kill it, is to harm countless women innumerable ways.
Ellen
There must be a whole demographic of childless women , but I rarely hear anything about them. Perhaps it will be easier for your daughter to escape the pressure. For long, weary years, people (mostly women I didn’t know well in the workplace) tried to convince me that I must have children, that time was running out… and then there were the TV shows and movies… I certainly respect others’ decisions to have families, and found it difficult to understand why they couldn’t accept difference.
Yes, it is terribly sad that the Republican anti-choicers don’t want to spend money on health care. And, yes, it is hard to get information from health organizations, as you say. They’ve got their own jobs, and can’t keep up with the rest.
It’s great that Planned Parenthood has its own Women Are Watching bus tour.
I’ll read your blog tonight!
I am with you. It is difficult for me to understand why this issue is an issue…again. Don’t we have other things to focus on besides a woman’s body parts? I agree with Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; “I can’t understand why any woman would want to vote for Mitt Romney, except maybe Mrs. Romney.”
Yes, all this was settled years ago, and it is very silly that it keeps coming up.
Albright is brilliant!
Great post & responses.
There *is* a large demographic of childless women. I personally know several childless by choice, and an equal number of unable-to-conceive, some of whom chose to pursue IVF but gave up because of the grueling difficulty of the regime, hormone treatments etc. plus the expense. (In most of Canada, fertlity treatments are generally not covered under our health care plans.)
I personally never particularly wanted children. My husband and I were 12 years into our relationship (5 “living in sin” & 7 married) before we decided to “give it a try”, being at a place in our lives where children seemed an interesting addition. We had two, both now into their late teens. It was a grand idea for us and has been a glorious experience for the most part, but it is not something I would ever foist on or promote to anyone else. Such a tremendously personal decision.
We had the luxury of choosing both if and when to have children, something not even within the realm of possibility for women throughout past history.
I am immensely grateful for the easy access to birth control my generation – I’m a “baby boomer” – grew up with. Prior to the advent of AIDS, one of the biggest worries of the sexually active young woman was pregnancy; In my high school years I personally had a scare and well remember the desperate “what NOW?” panic. Several friends “got caught”, were either unwilling or unable to have abortions, and had their babies. Society was not kind.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Thank heaven for PP and like organizations, and a more enlightened time that did indeed make choice more of a truism and not so much of a pipe dream. The resurgence of the political right and their hatred of independent women (and the very worst are the strident, self-righteous women railing against their “sisters”) is a terrifying trend, both here in Canada, and, much more blatantly and played out dramatically with prime time coverage, in the USA.
Yes, timing and choice are so important! It’s interesting that the backlash is happening in Canada, too: I think immediately of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Yes, most of the childless couples I know are childless by choice, but those who went through IVF and other processes were often devastated. No idea if those are covered by insurance in the U.S.: all I know is that you don’t hear the Republicans raving against that.
[...] I read a thoughtful questioning blog by a friend who maintains a journal of her reading online: Margaret Sanger and the Planned Parenthood Rally. I got all fired up, felt strong emotion as I have before when it’s pointed out that, hard as [...]