Woman of Valor (67 page)

The skillful use of sonograms to distort fetal images created a false reality about abortion procedures, 90 percent of which take place early in pregnancy when only a barely discernable embryo is at stake, with late interventions most often a consequence of tragic fetal anomalies or significant maternal health problems. State and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have consistently rejected as unconstitutional repeated so-called partial birth abortion laws camouflaged as addressing limited circumstances, but actually so encompassing that they threaten all abortion procedure from the twelfth week of pregnancy. But legal setbacks have provided no deterrent to those emboldened by the success of their strategies and by their power as a Republican political base given credit for providing essential margins of victory. They just keep introducing the same legislation and going to court again and again.

The relentless stigmatizing of abortion, along with campaigns of intimidation and violence against Planned Parenthood and other clinics, has had a chilling effect on doctors and politicians, both generally shy of social controversy. And Bill Clinton's vulnerability to charges of sexual misconduct left his administration and the Democrats even more defensive than usual.

Since 1996, as is now well documented, not just abortion suffered, but funds for family planning programs at home and abroad have been capped, and hundreds of millions of dollars allocated instead for the teaching of sexual abstinence, rather than more comprehensive and reliable approaches to sex education in the public schools which a substantial majority of Americans support, according to most polls. Even more tragically, U.S. programs addressing the crisis of HIV-AIDS abroad have counseled abstinence and undermined the use of condoms and other safe sex strategies, especially among women and youth who are most vulnerable to the ravages of the epidemic.
¹⁵

With the recent appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, two more hard-liners on abortion joined the Supreme Court. And despite repeated confirmation hearing promises to the contrary, they were willing to ignore precedent and join Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas in upholding the federal abortion ban passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by George W. Bush in 2003. The decision in the cases
Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood
and
Gonzales v. Carhart
criminalizes the intact dilation and evacuation (or so-called partial birth) abortion procedure, even though physicians from the major medical societies testified that in many circumstances it is the safest procedure in the second and third trimesters to protect women's health.

In an impassioned dissent, Justice Ruth Ginsburg called the decision “alarming,” “bewildering,” and “irrational” in its disregard for both legal precedent and medical authority on what constitutes appropriate safeguards for women's health and rights. She further decried the decision's having invoked a common antiabortion “shibboleth” for which there is no reliable evidence—that women who have such abortions come to regret their choices and suffer from depression and loss of self-esteem. Rather than require doctors to inform women accurately of different procedures and their risks, however, the court, in her view, simply deprived them of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of safety. Ginsburg accused the newly constituted majority of “an effort to chip away” at abortion rights altogether.
¹⁶

There is new hope, however, in the fact that conservative excesses seem to have finally provoked their own backlash. A 2006 state-level effort to repeal abortion rights and provide a clear test case for
Roe v. Wade
was soundly defeated by a public referendum in South Dakota, one of the country's most conservative states, and proposed restrictions on abortion for teenagers were also overturned by voters in Oregon and California. The return of Democrat leadership to Capitol Hill, though no guarantee, also reduces the likelihood that another zealously conservative nominee to the Supreme Court could be confirmed, if more vacancies occur during the Bush presidency. Bipartisan consensus is also developing in both houses of Congress for an omnibus legislative package put together with the help of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America that would restore full funding of federal programs for family planning, demand equity in private health insurance coverage for oral contraceptives, restore integrity to sex education programs, and fund public education about emergency contraception—the new morning-after pill that holds the promise of reducing unwanted pregnancy and abortion if widely available—and offers common ground in an abortion debate long defined by a clash of absolutes.
¹⁷

The credit goes in large measure to activists in reproductive health and rights organizations around the country, energized by the intensity of the assaults on them, who are now using traditional grassroots strategies along with the Internet to educate and activate a progressive citizenry to take action on the issues they care about. No institution may be more important in this effort than Planned Parenthood, Sanger's own legacy. With affiliates in fifty states and the District of Columbia, and with 860 clinics serving more than five million women and teens a year (one in every four American women today has used its services at some point in her life), Planned Parenthood has also returned to its roots as a powerful force for advocacy. In recent years, it has identified over three million individual supporters and is keeping many of them in regular communication with elected officials in Washington and in the states.

The impact of this grassroots network has already been politically significant. The organization's robust Web site is also receiving about a million and a half visitors a month, many of them young people seeking information, and has become a valuable educational resource and outreach tool not just in the United States but internationally. In partnership with many smaller organizations now focusing on women of color, young women, religious groups, physicians, public health personnel, and other targeted constituencies, Planned Parenthood is rebuilding public and political resolve in support of reproductive health and rights and finally matching the huge and strategic investments made over many years by its zealous and well-funded opponents.
¹⁸

 

Without doubt the most critically controversial dimension of this book has been its attempt to understand more clearly Margaret Sanger's engagement with eugenics, the popular movement of her era that addressed the manner in which biological factors affect human health, intelligence, and personality. At many points the narrative veers away from Sanger at length to explain the appeal of eugenics across a broad spectrum of politics and culture during the progressive era and into the 1930s, as research on heredity captured the attention of intellectual elites, found its way into crowded college classrooms, became standard fare of fashionable magazines, and even reached the masses through contests for “better babies” or “fitter families” at state fairs across the country.

An unquestioning confidence in the potential of science to help alleviate human suffering fueled an interest in biology and heredity among modernists in the early years of the twentieth century who rejected the myth and mystery in which traditional theologies shroud—and to which most orthodox religion even today still consigns—so many aspects of life, especially sexuality and reproduction. Many well-intentioned social reformers of Sanger's day took away from Darwin the essentially optimistic lesson that man's common descent in the animal kingdom makes us all capable of improvement, if only we apply the right tools. That is how standard intelligence testing became such a rage at the time and, for better or worse, one of the most enduring legacies of the eugenics movement. It held the promise that merit would replace birthright and social status as the standard for mobility in a democratic society. Eugenics engaged many feminists, who saw women as its chief enforcers. It also engaged advocates for preventive public health investments, such as the British sexual and social theorist Havelock Ellis, another important mentor of Sanger's, who early on formulated ideas about state obligation for social medicine on the grounds that poor health has debilitating impacts and must be prevented to equalize opportunity. Ellis acknowledged, however, that disease has roots in biology as well as the environment and endorsed interventions to stem the transmission of inheritable defects through voluntary birth control but also, in some circumstances, through sterilization.

The dark potential of eugenics was thus present from the start. In the United States and Europe eugenics discourse captured the imagination of social reformers but also, more problematically, it informed the thinking of social Darwinists who assumed the inherent superiority of white Nordic races above all others and worried endlessly about what they perceived to be a growing differential fertility between native and immigrant and black and white, despite census data that showed only a brief lag in overall conformity to prevailing small-family norms. For this reason many eugenicists initially opposed birth control and encouraged educated women in the middle and upper classes to have more children, not fewer. Their unfortunate influence on public policy was also firmly established in the 1920s with the passage of laws that long remained in effect restricting immigration from southern and Eastern Europe and other parts of the world deemed less desirable by many elites in positions of political power. Equally problematic eugenic assumptions also led to the passage of sterilization laws enacted in a number of states that were upheld in 1929 by a nearly unanimous Supreme Court decision in the now infamous case of
Buck v. Bell
, which authorized the compulsory sterilization of a poor young woman with an illegitimate child on grounds of feeblemindedness that were never clearly established.

Sanger has been harshly criticized for embracing prevailing theories of human betterment through eugenics as a rationale for birth control. The subject has long been mired in controversy. Prominent historians, including David Kennedy and Linda Gordon, first accused her of wholesale political conversion in abandoning her youthful associations among radicals and reformers in favor of an alignment with social and professional elites. They claimed that she transformed a movement first animated by concerns for social justice and women's equality into one that promoted harsh doctrines of class and race hegemony and population control. I pointed out many misrepresentations of fact in their books and argued for the continuity of Sanger's thinking, if not always her political alliances, and for a more nuanced understanding of the far greater complexity of the politics of birth control at that time. Never one to romanticize the poverty of her own youth, Sanger may have been quick to jettison the socialist catechism after World War I, but not her hope for reform achieved through different means.
¹⁹

One defining example of the confusion that surrounds Sanger's actual positions on eugenics involves the false attribution to her of something she never said: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.” The quote comes from an editorial in a professional medical journal, which Sanger reprinted in 1921 in
The Birth Control Review
and then emphatically refuted. Another misrepresentation involves a review she published by Have-lock Ellis of Madison Grant's best-selling book of this era,
The Passing of the Great Race
, a pseudoscientific screed that warned of the potential threats to the country of racial intermixture with inferior breeds, which had a profound impact on subsequent U.S. immigration policy. Though Ellis strongly condemned the book, the review is widely cited as an example of Sanger's shifting loyalties.
²⁰

I argued that Sanger had little choice but to engage with eugenic discourse in the 1920s, since hard as it may be to fathom today, eugenics then enjoyed a degree of respectability that birth control did not. She did so, however, to insist that concern for public health and welfare ought to begin with birth control, which she offered not as a panacea, but as a piece of a broader package of health and social welfare policies that would also provide essential economic and social safety nets. This line of argument became central to her lobbying efforts during the New Deal. She spoke out against immigration prohibitions and other ethnic and racial stereotypes and instead preached an ethic of individual self-improvement. She disdained what she called a “cradle-competition” between rich and poor, native and immigrant. She wrote that “the initiative for individual and racial regeneration must come from within…it must be autonomous, self-directive and not imposed from without.” She framed poverty as a matter of differential access to resources, including birth control, not as the immutable consequence of low inherent ability or intelligence or character, which is the view that orthodox eugenics embraced.
²¹

There is no denying, however, that Sanger supported what she called “negative” eugenics, or the sterilization of the so-called feebleminded or mentally unfit, the issue raised in
Buck v. Bell
. She endorsed not only sterilization but also the payment of pensions or bonuses to women of low intelligence who would agree to the procedure. Her speeches often addressed sterilization, a topic of considerable media attention in the 1920s, as a way of highlighting the country's continued failure to legalize contraception, which she saw as a much more important tool of achieving progress. Still, she never considered the fundamental rights questions raised by the practice of sterilization or the validity of the standard aptitude assessments on which determinations of so-called feeblemindedness were based. These compromised views placed her squarely in the intellectual mainstream of her time and in the good company of many other progressive reformers of her day, whose standing has suffered far less than hers as a result, including Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who concurred in
Buck v. Bell
, not to mention Sanger's own longtime friend, Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, or W.E.B. DuBois of the NAACP, whose organizations also did not oppose the decision. Distinguishing between worthy and unworthy individuals was all too common at the time, but even if Sanger was not alone in doing so, the practice cannot be condoned.