Woman of Valor (62 page)

 

Margaret was in Tucson during the many months of the New York City encounter, preoccupied by the prosaic task of keeping herself alive. Her only participation was a telephone interview in which she called the city policy “disgraceful.” She was no longer well enough to remain more than intermittently active. An increasingly constricted flow of blood to her weakened heart muscle was causing more frequent paroxysms of chest pain, and when stricken she required oxygen and extended rest. A New York specialist advised surgery, but her own doctors thought that an open-heart procedure was too risky for a patient of her condition and age.

She was absorbed as well in something of a personal obsession that she blew way out of proportion—the question of who would replace her as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The obvious candidates were Lady Rama Rau of India, who had for a time already shared the title with Margaret, and Elise Ottesen-Jensen of Sweden, who had brought considerable distinction upon herself as the conduit through which her government became the first Western nation to assist family planning programs in the developing world through a joint program with the government of Ceylon. With the United States and the United Nations still uninvolved, the agenda for a well-run and ambitious voluntary organization was pressing. The job would demand strong administrative skills and special sensitivity to the nuances of international diplomacy. On both grounds each candidate had liabilities acknowledged by many of Margaret's correspondents, yet her own reservations were scarcely rational. No one seemed to please her, and other women were especially threatening. Mrs. Rama Rau was too nationally minded, Mrs. Ottesen-Jensen, too temperamental. Fearful of finally having to yield her own authority completely, she promoted the candidacy of her longtime loyal lieutenant, Dr. Abraham Stone, but he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1959, and with international attention focused on India's population explosion, first Rama Rau and later Ottesen-Jensen got the job.
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Margaret also insisted on attending the Sixth International Conference on Planned Parenthood in New Delhi in February of 1959, though her doctors and her family strongly advised her not to go. Grace Sternberg, a friend and Planned Parenthood volunteer from Tucson, agreed to act as travel companion and watched over an extremely frail patient who resolutely made her way from Los Angeles to Honolulu, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok, complaining at each stop that she could not tolerate the fact that everyone thought she was dying, even as she wearily retreated from each festivity tendered in her honor.

Ample reward for her determination and stamina came when Prime Minister Nehru warmly welcomed Margaret to the meetings in New Delhi on February 14, 1959, and then cautiously ushered her on his arm to the podium as the 750 delegates who had assembled from twenty-eight nations put aside their differences to cheer the moving sight. Nehru pledged $10 million in public health funds for family planning, earning Margaret's praise as the world's greatest living statesman, along with a trenchant warning that he be careful to send doctors into the villages who were sympathetic to the “shy, simple woman who comes to them, asking for information as to how to space her pregnancies and how to take care of the children that she has already borne.” It was a final opportunity to reiterate her view that how an individual woman perceives her own self-interest may be as important to her decisions about fertility as larger economic and social conditions. Stories and photographs ran in major newspapers and news magazines throughout the world, and Margaret was given the honor of being named president emeritus of IPPF.

The following day Gregory Pincus dedicated his historic report on field trials with oral contraception to Margaret as “the product of her pioneering resoluteness,” but by then she was too weak to leave her hotel room and celebrated quietly with old friends over a favorite meal of champagne and chicken sandwiches. They presented her with a two-volume testimonial, entitled “Our M.S.,” filled with the often poignant, personal reminiscences that have appeared throughout this book, and dedicated to the woman who “blazed a trail through the Jungle of Man's prejudice and Ignorance and Stupidity.” The surprisingly strident tone of the collection was established by Blanche Ames of Boston, the first of more than a hundred contributors listed alphabetically, who observed acidly that monuments had been erected to the deeds of men since the time of the pyramids, but rarely was the work of a woman ever honored.
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Yet even as Margaret's contemporaries tried to establish her place among history's foremost emancipators of women a newly empowered generation of activists was questioning the fundamental wisdom of her approach to family planning for the very reason that it enlisted women as clients and talked in terms of their self-interest. Dudley Kirk, a demographer on the Population Council staff, reminded his audience at New Delhi that “male” methods of contraception, such as the condom and coitus interruptus (as though neither required female participation) had actually been responsible for the great demographic revolutions of the West, and he advocated a policy for India that placed priority on these simple techniques rather than on expensive medical ones requiring individualized instruction. A proponent of sending convoys of helicopters laden with condoms into rural villages, Kirk was glad to observe the evolution of Planned Parenthood away from “emphasis on family limitation as primarily an interest and responsibility of women,” he said, “toward emphasis on the value and indeed the necessity of joint responsibility in family planning.”

Indeed the view that a “feminist bias” was subverting family planning programs in the developing world, where a medical-clinical approach to the problem was believed to be simply too expensive and likely to fail, would continue to inform the thinking of demographers and policy makers, even as new contraceptive methods for women revolutionized the field. In 1961, Katherine McCormick sadly admitted to Margaret in the last surviving letters between them that no one any longer believed that the pill was the answer to overpopulation. Her letter also said that Gregory Pincus was experimenting with injectable contraceptives but correctly predicted that effective inoculations would take years to develop. Meanwhile, programs offering economic incentives for male sterilization would probably be necessary in places like India, where the Nehru government was already supporting policies that have since engendered widespread controversy and been widely repudiated.

Since 1965, however, the rate of population growth has unexpectedly slowed in almost all countries in the world outside Africa, even as absolute numbers continue to grow precipitously everywhere but in a handful of developed nations. Most baffling, however, have been the extreme cultural variations in reproductive behavior and in the success of organized family planning initiatives. Efforts to understand these patterns, and to analyze alternative strategies for intervention, are finally reawakening interest in the relationship between fertility and the status of women. Contemporary population policymakers are more inclined to concede Margaret's insistent view that women are inherently better motivated to limit their fertility and should be identified as primary agents of change. Programs seem to work best, moreover, when contraception is offered as part of a larger package of maternal and infant health care reforms delivered under paramedical auspices, just as she always intended. Prodded by contemporary feminists in the field, population planners are finally investing in the overall health and welfare of women, because it has been demonstrated that to do so reduces birthrates most effectively.
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Margaret returned from New Delhi in a wheelchair, a rather pathetic sight in Grace Sternberg's memory, except that she good-naturedly wore a straw hat purchased in Honolulu, which was adorned by a chicken whose wings flapped up and down when she pressed air through a bulb. Within months, however, she was feeling strong enough to fly back to Tokyo to meet with the Prime Minister and receive a key to the city from its governor. Accompanied by her teenaged granddaughters and several of their friends, she basked in an official recognition and esteem that had long been denied her at home. But the trip was a struggle, and she confided to Mary Lasker, who graciously underwrote its costs, that “I pray I will be well enough to do all that is expected of me.”

The young girls, meanwhile, were entertained in memorable Japanese style by Sumiko Ohmori, who had married since her visit to Tucson and was anxious to return Margaret's gracious hospitality. Young Margaret and Nancy Sanger were astonished to find that, in Japan, not only family planning activists, but even taxi drivers had heard of their grandmother.

This would turn out to be Margaret's last trip abroad, and just how much it meant to her is apparent not only in her enthusiastic reports to Mrs. Lasker, but in a touching notation in the deteriorated handwriting of Margaret's old age, which remains on a scrap of paper included in the archive at Smith College. It records the wish that she be buried next to Noah in the family plot on the grounds of Willowlake, but only after her heart had been removed for entombment in Japan, the one government in the world that ever granted her a public honor.
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Though birth control remained a politically sensitive issue at home, Margaret came back to a country suddenly paying attention. In response to pressure from Democrats on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pres. Dwight David Eisenhower had appointed a special committee to assess his administration's policies on foreign military and economic aid. The ten-member panel of men who had all served previously in high-ranking government positions was chaired by Gen. William H. Draper, an investment banker and former army commander who had supervised postwar economic recovery programs in Europe. Prompted by a telegram from the ever-resolute population watchdog Hugh Moore—and given explicit authorization to do so from Eisenhower himself—Draper placed world population growth on the committee's agenda. There was considerable rumbling from his staff about potentially explosive political consequences and particular resistance from one especially anxious Catholic member of the panel. But while Margaret herself was still out of the country, Draper decided to recommend that the United States government should, on request, assist foreign governments receiving our economic aid in formulating plans to deal with population growth and with maternal and child welfare problems.

The report's release in July of 1959 received extensive press coverage and an immediate, but reasonably restrained, response from the National Catholic Welfare Conference branding its birth control recommendations “not only immoral [but] also a counsel of defeatism and despair.” Popular interest in the issue built steadily in the months following, however, especially after CBS News in November ran a prime-time documentary on conditions of rural poverty and population growth in India, which would air twice and be seen by an estimated audience of more than 18 million Americans.

At meetings in Washington later that month, the American Catholic hierarchy then released a considerably more vituperative statement, attacking public discussion of the “population explosion” as nothing more than a “smoke screen behind which a moral evil will be foisted on the public” and denouncing efforts to build support for the use of public funds for artificial contraception. The church instead urged greater efforts to feed and uplift “backward peoples around the world,” and in pledging to work actively against population control programs, provoked the immediate condemnation of numbers of Protestant officials, one of whom, James Pike, the Episcopal bishop of San Francisco and a long-time Planned Parenthood supporter, also demanded to know if the church's policy was binding on Catholic candidates for political office.

The question had special resonance, of course, because the first Catholic candidate since the defeat of Al Smith in 1928 was seeking the presidency. Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts immediately told James Reston of
The New York Times
in a telephone interview that it was absolutely not in America's interest to promote birth control overseas—that it would be a “mean paternalism…a great psychological mistake for us to appear to advocate limitation of the black or brown or yellow peoples whose population is increasing no faster than in the United States.” But Kennedy was equally insistent, on this and subsequent occasions, as the issue dogged him through the campaign the following year, that he would act only on the basis of what he considered to be in the public interest, without regard to his private religious views or the public position of his church. Making birth control a condition of foreign aid was never the real issue. When later pressed about what he would do if foreign governments like India affirmatively requested American assistance, or if Congress took the initiative, he retreated somewhat from his initial formulation but insisted that the likelihood of any President ever having to sign a bill authorizing expenditures on birth control was “very remote indeed” and repeated that, whatever he did, his actions would be based solely on his assessment of the national interest. Even Eleanor Roosevelt was willing to endorse this position.

Kennedy could afford to beg the more pointed question of cooperative assistance programs, because President Eisenhower, fearing the potential divisiveness of the matter on the upcoming campaign, then repudiated the Draper Commission recommendations, much to the surprise and dismay of its members. After the Kennedy story broke, the President responded with unusual brusqueness to a reporter's inquiry by saying he could not imagine a less “proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility” than for the United States to promote family planning abroad. He advised instead that concerned foreign governments seek assistance from private groups.
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