Woman of Valor (64 page)

Within a year, Planned Parenthood clinics in the United States would be serving nearly 200,000 patients, a gain of more than 30 percent. With the introduction of the pill, caseloads expanded so fast that some facilities had to impose limitations on service because of lack of funds. About 20 percent of this clientele was on public assistance, and the need for expanded distribution of services to indigent women through tax-supported hospitals and welfare agencies quickly became apparent. In many areas of the country, however, there were no public institutions in place providing the sustained preventive health care that medical contraception required, so Planned Parenthood had no choice but to expand its services to fill in the gaps, a situation that continues today. To this end, the politically skillful and diplomatic Guttmacher announced his determination to eliminate the movement's elitist reputation by broadening the base of its constituency to include better representation from organized labor, ethnic groups, and racial minorities.
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Meanwhile, from a political standpoint, the publication in 1963 of John Rock's book,
The Time Has Come, A Catholic Doctor's Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control
, was also especially important. Though the church hierarchy did not accept Dr. Rock's inventive defense of the pill as a natural contraceptive, a deliberate effort was made at conciliation in public comments on the book by Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, who also met privately with Alan Guttmacher. Even more important, in Rome, Pope Paul VI appointed a commission of clerical and lay Catholics to review the subject. Its ostensible aim was to reconcile Catholic theology with the most current scientific expertise in family planning. Three years later, American newspapers would report rumors that the commission was struggling with a recommendation to leave the matter of choosing a specific birth control technique to individual Catholic conscience. These stories could never be confirmed, however, and the Vatican made no official announcement until the publication in 1968 of the papal encyclical
Humanae Vitae
, which suddenly reconfirmed the immutability of natural law doctrine. Because the commission had never been able to reach a consensus, the Pope simply reiterated the doctrine that “every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.” Only natural laws and rhythms of fecundity might constrain fertility. Man does “not have unlimited dominion over his body in general…or over his creative faculties.” The statement also expressed concern that artificial birth control was making men especially vulnerable to “infidelity and the general lowering of morality” and to the use of women as a “mere instrument of selfish enjoyment.”

From a theological standpoint nothing had changed, but as a practical matter, no significant efforts would be made to enforce this reiteration of Catholic orthodoxy about contraception on secular social policy in America or elsewhere in the world. The situation politically would revert to quiet acquiescence, just as in the nineteenth century, the church-state battleground shifting, instead, to the debate over legalizing abortion.
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Undoubtedly aware of the internal debate going on within the church, President Kennedy, in his last statements on population, hinted at the potential for a change of his administration's policy when he finally acknowledged the seriousness of population growth and a willingness to have the United States make better “information” about it available to the world. In July of 1963, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, William Fulbright of Arkansas, insulated from Catholic intimidation by his largely Protestant constituency, seized the initiative from the executive branch and added an amendment to the foreign aid bill specifically authorizing programs in population research and technical assistance. Within months, Adlai Stevenson, who was serving as ambassador to the United Nations, went before a Planned Parenthood audience to talk about the issue, and Dwight David Eisenhower publicly disavowed the position he had taken as President that family planning was not the government's business. Together with his predecessor Harry Truman, he then accepted the honorary chairmanship of a Planned Parenthood fund-raising campaign.

On Dec. 16, 1963, only weeks after the Kennedy assassination, Pres. Lyndon Johnson signed the historic Fulbright bill into law. It was less than four years following Kennedy's prediction that the possibility of a President's ever having to authorize funds for family planning was remote.
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Just several weeks earlier, the journalist Lloyd Shearer of
Parade
magazine had interviewed Margaret in her room at the House by the Side of the Road, a convalescent home in Tucson, where she had been living for the past year. He found her bedridden, but still spirited and “irrepressibly pedagogic,” as he put it. She talked mostly about the past:

By Shearer's account, Margaret was happy to observe the change in the tide of international opinion about population and deeply satisfied that the American government had finally authorized the funding of family planning assistance abroad. He praised her for “having fearlessly faced imprisonment, condemnation and ostracism” and concluded: “To many persons, both her name and her views are still objectionable. But in the eyes of many she has lived to become a respected prophet in her own time.”
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Stuart Sanger sat in on the interview with his mother. It was one of her better days. She had been confined to a wheelchair or to bed since her return from Christmas dinner the previous year. That had been an especially festive occasion, because young Margaret Sanger, who married her second cousin, Olive Byrne Richard's son, Dom Marston, had just given birth to her first child, a little girl. Born on November 5, 1962, the baby was named Margaret but called Peggy after the child who would have been her great-aunt.

The matriarch of the family spent most of the day quietly reposing in bed, but when her great granddaughter was brought to her, she suddenly became animated and kept repeating: “Peggy's come back. Peggy's come back.” She then ran her hands over the infant's head to discern her personality from its shape and contour, as Michael Higgins's phrenology books had instructed her to do so long ago. Observing this compelling but strange behavior, Margaret Marston despaired that her grandmother was growing more and more disoriented and confused. She did not then understand that her new baby had been born nearly forty-seven years to the day of little Peggy Sanger's death. She did not then know that her grandmother had stood by her own daughter's deathbed all those many years earlier actually believing she saw the light of Peggy's tiny soul ascending to the heavens, nor that she had kept up imaginary conversations with the dead child for years, fully anticipating that one day they would be reunited.

This extraordinary reunion with little Peggy Marston and her family turned out to be Margaret's last journey outside the nursing home. As they were driving back that day, Margaret Marston also remembers that her grandmother became quite agitated and began to cry, protesting that she wanted to go back to her own bed in her own home. It was an especially difficult moment. Stuart stopped the car and after a silence that seemed interminable told his mother firmly that she simply could not go home again, because her bed there was no longer made. The elementary reasoning quieted her down, but Stuart was distraught for days thereafter. It was the only time his daughter ever remembers seeing him express any visible emotion.
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For the remainder of her life, Margaret was most often too tired to read or talk and had only infrequent visitors. She was only coherent some of the time, and was able to remember the distant past far more clearly than anything recent. Old colleagues from the birth control movement and several friends from Tucson were deeply distressed that she had been placed in an institution by her family, and bending to criticism of the particular facility, Stuart had her transferred to a different one nearby called the Valley House and Convalescent Center. He then retired and moved with his wife to Mexico. Occasionally someone would come by to see Margaret, bearing a plate of her favorite chicken sandwiches, a birthday cake, or some other treat, but she had little appetite and seemed almost to waste away. Unable to sit up on her own any longer, she nonetheless had the presence to request that a nurse bring her a paper cup and straw so she could drink the champagne that Grant and Edwina brought when they came out to visit for Christmas in 1964. Young Anne Sanger admired one of the paintings she had done that hung on the wall of her little room, and she gave it to her as a gift with this message: “H. G. Wells says I was the greatest woman who ever lived.” Yet when all six of Margaret's New York grandchildren lined up against the wall of her room so she could see them together, she couldn't keep track of their names.
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Several months later the Planned Parenthood Center of Tucson sponsored a testimonial dinner in Margaret's honor and hailed her as “the woman of the century.” She was unable to be there, of course, but 1,000 guests attended, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the former New Dealer and American ambassador to England, Lewis Douglas, who lived in Tucson, and the wife of the Arizona Senator and Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. They heard Dr. John Rock praise Margaret's remarkable ability to combine “practical action with idealism,” while Mrs. B. K. Nehru, wife of the Indian ambassador to the United States, declared that she had “single-handedly carried the torch of responsible motherhood” to the women of India and all over a crowded world. The celebration received extensive news and editorial coverage in local papers, where embittered organizers called attention to the fact that neither Planned Parenthood-World Population in America nor the International Planned Parenthood Federation had sent an official representative. Nonetheless, there was some good news. Margaret's old friend Grace Sternberg had been campaigning for years to have her awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Arizona and finally succeeded over the protest of several Catholics on the board of trustees. Announcement was made of the degree to be granted at commencement ceremonies in May.
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In conjunction with the dinner, Ambassador Douglas and other leading Democrats in Arizona, including the United States Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, also attempted to have President Johnson award Margaret Sanger a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Since the honor was intended to be nonpartisan, they lined up Republican support for the nomination from the conservative Gold-waters and the more liberal New York Senator, Jacob Javits. The publisher of Tucson's newspaper and many other prominent Arizonans wrote to the White House and to the members of the Distinguished Civilian Service Awards Board of the United States Civil Service Commission, which handled the awards process. Pointing out that Margaret was terribly old and ill, they argued that she deserved to be honored before she died for the freedoms she had struggled for so long to win for the world's women and families.
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As a political issue, family planning had been put on hold because of the Kennedy assassination, the initiation of the Johnson administration, and the contentious election campaign of 1964. The White House was embroiled in historic civil rights legislation, and in the dramatic escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam, yet federal agencies were quietly beginning to address the matter. On the international front, the Agency for International Development assigned Dr. Leona Baumgartner, a former New York City health commissioner with a long-standing interest in birth control, to meet with government personnel and outside policy experts in anticipation of putting together practical programs, and at the State Department population officers were being assigned through the Alliance for Progress initiative to desks in every major country in Latin America. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy, then chief White House foreign policy adviser, had also met with population activists, following the election. They rejected a proposal for the creation of a special commission but did see that a pledge was incorporated into President Johnson's State of the Union Message in 1965 to “seek new ways to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources.” Four more specific references to the international population problem were made by the President that year, representing what the activists understood to be a “calculated escalation” to test public opinion and encourage government officials to act.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front there was even more demonstrable progress. During 1965, a dozen pilot projects were jointly developed by the new Office of Economic Opportunity and various Planned Parenthood affiliates around the country to bring contraceptive services to married indigent women as part of the Johnson administration's emerging War on Poverty. Only one major condition for this initiative was set by OEO administrator Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of the late President: that there be absolutely no publicity.