Woman of Valor (66 page)

That Sanger remained interested in feminist argument through the 1950s and continued to see herself as part of a long tradition of global women's rights activism is certainly clear from a small but telling incident that I have always regretted not including in this book. She was among a handful of American women asked to endorse the English edition of Simone de Beauvoir's 1949
The Second Sex
, and although the blurb itself is reasonably enthusiastic, her correspondence with Beauvoir's publisher hints that she really didn't understand what all the fuss over the new book was about. She thought she had long been making identical points—that she had already refuted sexual polarities rooted in assumptions about biological essence, rather than in the intractable nature of social arrangements that discriminate against women.
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This biography was the first to position Sanger as an individual of international renown and to document her extensive travels during the 1920s and 1930s, which left rudimentary family planning advocacy and service organizations in her wake. It took seriously her jettisoning of Socialism after World War I in favor of a more reasoned confidence in the ability of education and science to shape human conduct and in the possibility of reform through government regulation of business and through bold and progressive public initiatives. As I explained, her mentor through this passage was H. G. Wells, the renowned British man of letters and influence, who foresaw the development of states that would mix free markets with centralized planning for social welfare. Both became tribunes for the rational, scientific control of the world's population and its resources, with Wells giving Sanger entree to the League of Nations and enhancing her stature. After his death in 1945, just as World War II was ending, she turned her full attention abroad and launched the International Planned Parenthood Federation, headquartered in London but working as a global advocate toward these ends. Today, IPPF is an association of 180 country-based family planning organizations that advance sexual and reproductive health and rights and provide services around the world.

A first generation of scholars had tended to dismiss Sanger's claims for the social, economic, and environmental benefits of birth control in poor countries and her confidence that uneducated women in premodern circumstances would use contraceptives freely. They also blamed her directly for the often racially and culturally insensitive population control efforts that grew out of 1960s concerns about differential fertility between the developed and developing countries, which they fairly criticized for too often adopting rigid demographic targets and for imposing harsh and unwelcome technologies on poor women. U.S. population policy in this period was also driven by anti-Communist frenzy fueled by the adoption by many postcolonial governments of socialist practices and ideals. I instead drew a line between what I saw as Sanger's more humane vision and an alternative prescription for the wedding of population and development goals that was just beginning to achieve global recognition in 1992 when this book was first published—one that correlates positive outcomes in the developing world to an array of necessary improvements in women's status.
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Two years later the United Nations convened an International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo that created a framework for state responsibility to ensure programs allowing women to make free and informed decisions about their bodies, on the one hand, while also guaranteeing them access to quality health-care services, including family planning, on the other. The language incorporates the twin sides of international human rights frameworks. It guarantees freedom to women from unwarranted state intervention in their personal decision-making, but also obligates positive state responsibility to provide women with birth control within the context of a broader set of reproductive and maternal health services. However strong their disagreements with the past practices of often alarmist and heavy-handed population strategies—however serious their commitment to programmatic reforms demanding informed consent and quality of care for women—the activist women at Cairo who gathered from around the world to negotiate these agreements continued to acknowledge the benefits of effective family planning to the well-being of individuals, families, communities, and eventually entire countries—just as Sanger herself had long preached. The American activist and scholar Rosalind Petchesky called this a “double lens” that recognizes the personal and social dimensions of reproductive and sexual rights as mutually dependent, not in conflict. Or as the platform of DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era), an alliance of women largely from the southern hemisphere, put it: “Women's reproductive health must be placed within a comprehensive human development framework that promotes all people's well-being and women's full citizenship.”
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This is a hugely important point that is often overlooked. The political controversies that continue to swirl around the U.N.'s bold provisions for the protection of women's individual rights in population and development programs are actually endangering a long tradition of consensus about the positive social and economic impacts of family planning on the well-being of entire countries. Because American conservatives insist on reading recent human rights provisions that address sexuality as a license for abortion, U.S. support for the entire family planning enterprise has declined markedly during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. As a result, the administration of George W. Bush lays claim to a mantle of activism on behalf of narrowly defined civil, political, and economic rights for women abroad, but willfully refuses to recognize that without more support for birth control, and for protection against the threat of HIV and sexually transmitted disease, these other women's initiatives have little chance of succeeding, however well-meaning they may be. Moreover, Bush policies simply ignore evidence that countries like India and China, once fairly accused of coercive sterilization and abortion policies, have actually now instituted significant reforms, in large measure as a result of their constructive engagement with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), which conservatives in the U.S. nonetheless repudiate. At the same time considerable progress has also been made as a result of U.N.-and European-funded reproductive heath programs in countries in Africa that have struggled to achieve positive outcomes on a variety of health and social indicators including birthrates, maternal and infant mortality, and HIV-AIDS transmission, despite the many strains on their economies and health-care systems.
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It is a considerable irony then that these programs have been made hostage to conservative politics in the United States and are no longer being funded by the American government, just at the point that they have been bound by stronger provisions to guarantee rights. Even more disconcerting is that this is happening just as Americans seem to be repudiating the country's long and sad tradition of isolationism in favor of growing public recognition here of the inevitability and virtue of global interdependence on matters of economic growth, health, environment, and security—and just as many countries are making the progress that Margaret Sanger and H. G. Wells long ago envisioned.

 

My biography of Sanger was also distinguished from earlier work by its sympathy for her predicament as a wildly polarizing figure. Where others had criticized her for abandoning the radical sentiments of her youth and embracing a more centrist politics, I tried to establish the logic of the decision to broaden the base of her support by moving beyond women's rights claims and embracing public health and social welfare rationales for birth control. As the first biographer to utilize Catholic Church archives extensively, I documented how deliberately the church hierarchy set out to undermine Sanger, whom they saw as a serious threat to their influence, especially as the country grew more secular and embraced medicine and science in place of religion as an arbiter of values and behaviors. Having given up some measure of control over men who went to work in industry and organized in labor unions or business and professional associations, the church simply hunkered down when it came to women and families and the always sensitive and therefore easily exploitable matter of sexual practice and belief.

Undermining Sanger's motives and her character proved a powerful tool for those who opposed her message. From the moment she opened her first clinic in 1916, despite her association at that time with the radical labor movement, the Catholic hierarchy attacked her as an opponent of the poor and downtrodden. She had no choice but to try and deflect this opposition by broadening her support.

Moreover, Sanger's decision to move away from earlier rights claims to the more socially resonant content of family planning seemed particularly inventive to me once the Great Depression encouraged attentiveness to collective needs, rather than individual ones, and once the New Deal created a blueprint for government responsibility for economic and social welfare. In so doing she riled up the Catholic Church even more, however ironically, since it initially opposed the government's assumption of responsibility for its humanitarian portfolio and turned around only when the Roosevelt administration cannily agreed to contract out many public services to sectarian charities, thus perpetuating America's long and unique tradition of faith-based health and social welfare provision.

From the political neophyte who had emerged out of several earlier portraits, I tried to reposition Sanger as a reasonably savvy observer of politics, an adept public relations strategist, and a determined grassroots organizer, who took her cues from knowledgeable insiders when she went to Washington in the 1930s to try to overturn the federal Comstock laws as a necessary step in what was her long-term goal of transferring responsibility and accountability for birth control from private clinics to public health programs. Having enjoyed Eleanor Roosevelt's enthusiastic support and friendship in New York, Sanger had good reason to believe that birth control would gain endorsement from her husband's administration. And having spent more than a decade successfully converting Protestant and Jewish religious leaders to the birth control cause, she also did not seem unrealistic to me in anticipating that she might win over the Catholic Church as well, and in failing to predict the intense pressure to oppose legal birth control that the church hierarchy would instead place on the Roosevelt administration, whose political base rested on a precarious alliance of urban Catholics and rural southern Protestants. Many other countries with large Catholic populations but less contorted politics than ours did manage to include support for voluntary contraceptive programs in their social welfare packages during the 1930s, but it took the United States thirty more years to do so.
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In fact, early skeptics about Sanger wrote during the 1970s in the context of great optimism about the second wave of women's rights activism in this country and during a brief detente over contraception and abortion, after the family planning acts of the late 1960s, but before conservatives unleashed the full force of their opposition to
Roe v. Wade
. It may have been easier to find fault with her political strategies in that context than a decade later when I was writing, as a gathering storm of protest unfurled. But even then in those early years of backlash, I failed to predict the relentless effort we have since witnessed to push back the U.S. rights revolution and to dismantle government programs in public health and social welfare blamed for undermining traditional family values and for fostering an unhealthy individualism that conservatives like to identify as the insidious legacy of feminism and of the social and cultural cataclysms of the 1960s. Had I been able to see ahead, I suspect I would have been even more emphatic in my defense of Sanger's many accommodating strategies and in my sympathy for her increasing disillusion with this country's politics.

Woman of Valor's
publication in June 1992 coincided with the historic decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in
Planned Parenthood v. Casey
and had the good fortune of receiving a great deal more publicity than expected as a result. Carefully crafted by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the
Casey
decision, by a narrow vote, preserved the core privacy doctrine of
Griswold
and
Roe
and as noted earlier, further defined women's autonomy of decision-making in these matters. But
Casey
also established a new judicial standard saying that abortion rights may be constrained, so long as the restrictions provide no “undue burden” to women. The ruling in this respect unwittingly opened a legal fissure that opponents quickly seized upon to limit access to abortion, even early in pregnancy, and to wage war on the legitimacy of women's rights doctrines far more broadly.
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The new Comstockery like the old had taken root locally in school boards, state legislatures, and state courts, but it then quickly ascended to national prominence during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. It was most energized, however, when Bill Clinton was elected as America's first pro-choice president, but then lost control of Congress to the Republicans two years later. Exploiting inevitable tensions in the wake of the profound changes occurring across the country as a result of altered gender roles and expectations, the new Republican majorities took special aim at abortion, sex education, and contraception. And as in Margaret Sanger's era, sexual morality became an entering wedge for much broader conservative claims to restrain all civil liberties.

Well supported by foundations and think tanks during the early years of the Clinton administration, conservatives spent millions of dollars on emotional advertising promoting family values and demonizing abortion on major media outlets in America's heartland. They also organized at the grassroots. More than 300 state laws undermining abortion rights have been enacted since the
Casey
decision, including parental notification or consent requirements for minors, mandatory waiting and counseling periods, and numerous arbitrary regulations on abortion providers, placing substantial burdens especially on the most poor and vulnerable women, and tying up the time and resources of progressives who have fought back valiantly and with considerable success in the courts.