[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 110 (Tuesday, July 21, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1866-E1868]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        HONORING MARGARET SANGER

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. NITA M. LOWEY

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 21, 2009

  Mrs. LOWEY. Madam Speaker, I rise today to submit an article 
highlighting the life and work of Margaret Sanger authored by Dr. Ellen 
Chesler, distinguished lecturer at Hunter College of the City 
University of New York and Director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative 
on Women and Public Policy.

[[Page E1867]]

  Margaret Sanger, who lived from 1879 to 1966, was a nurse, educator, 
birth control pioneer, women's health activist, and founder of the 
American Birth Control League which eventually became Planned 
Parenthood.
  Her commitment to improving the health and lives of women was a 
testament to her belief that all women are entitled to basic health 
care and the ability to plan their pregnancies, and ultimately control 
their own destiny.
  Madam Speaker, I am proud to recognize Margaret Sanger for her 
tireless efforts on behalf of women and for fighting for those unable 
to fight for themselves.

              Margaret Sanger--Setting the Record Straight

                           (By Ellen Chesler)

       Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 
     for distributing simple contraceptives to immigrant women 
     from a makeshift clinic in a tenement storefront in the 
     Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. When she died 
     nearly fifty years later, the cause for which she defiantly 
     broke the law had achieved international stature, and she was 
     widely eulogized as one of the great emancipators of her 
     time.
       A visionary thinker, relentless agitator, and gifted 
     organizer, Sanger lived just long enough to savour the 
     historic 1965 US Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. 
     Connecticut, which established privacy protections as a 
     framework for legalizing basic reproductive rights. Elderly 
     and frail, she watched Lyndon Johnson finally incorporate 
     family planning into US public welfare and foreign policy 
     programs. She saw the birth control pill developed and 
     marketed by a team of doctors and scientists she had long 
     encouraged and found the money to support. She saw a global 
     family planning movement descend from her own international 
     efforts.
       The years since have not been as good to Sanger's 
     reputation, even as they have witnessed measurable progress 
     for women in achieving reproductive freedom. Today, outside 
     of a small minority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in 
     parts of the Muslim world that are now high-profile 
     exceptions to the global norm, a typical woman bears no more 
     than two children over the course of several years and spends 
     another 30 to 40 years avoiding pregnancy. More than 60 
     million women around the world use oral contraception daily, 
     a dramatic increase since organized interventions began. The 
     right of women to plan their families remains at least for 
     the time being enshrined in the US constitution and in 
     international human rights law, where it is widely recognized 
     as a necessary condition to improve women's status, and in 
     turn to sustain democratic institutions, promote social and 
     economic progress, and help sustain fragile environments.
       Still, universal standards for women's human rights offer 
     no sure cure for violations that persist with uncanny 
     fortitude and often unimaginable cruelty in so many places 
     around the world. Harsh fundamentalisms are resurgent in many 
     countries, where women's bodies remain an arena of intense 
     political conflict, as a perhaps predictable response to the 
     social dislocations resulting from changing gender roles and 
     to the larger assaults on traditional cultures from the many 
     real and perceived injustices of modernization 
     and globalization. Even back at home in the United States, 
     decades of substantial progress by women have fuelled a 
     fierce backlash.
       Wih an intensity that few would have predicted in 1992 when 
     Bill Clinton was elected as America's first pro-choice 
     president, a powerful conservative minority has eroded 
     abortion rights along with funding for family planning at 
     home and abroad, while dollars have surged instead for 
     abstinence programs known to be ineffective and often 
     harmful. We have tolerated the impunity of daily campaigns of 
     intimidation and outright violence against courageous 
     providers of contraception and abortion, culminating most 
     recently in the tragic assassination of Dr. George Tiller of 
     Kansas. Planned Parenthood affiliates have been repeatedly 
     targeted, and Sanger herself has become a collateral victim 
     of this frenzy, her reputation savaged by opponents who 
     deliberately misrepresent the history of birth control and 
     circulate scurrilous, false accusations about her on the 
     Internet.
       A particularly harsh example of this campaign of distortion 
     and outright misrepresentation came in response to recent 
     Congressional testimony by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary 
     Rodham Clinton. Secretary Clinton was chastised for her 
     unwavering support of comprehensive sexual and reproductive 
     health rights and services for women and for having accepted 
     with pride the highest honour of the Planned Parenthood 
     Federation of America, its Margaret Sanger Award, a prize 
     bestowed in the past on some of this country's most 
     distinguished supporters of reproductive justice, beginning 
     with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
       This statement is offered in response to false accusations 
     about Margaret Sanger made on that occasion. It investigates 
     Sanger's core beliefs and major contributions and reexamines, 
     in the face of so much continued controversy, her 
     unquestioning confidence in the power of medicine and science 
     to shape human conduct and alleviate suffering, a confidence 
     that fuelled her interest in trying to make birth control 
     serve as a tool of both individual liberation and social 
     betterment.


                    Sanger's contribution and legacy

       Margaret Sanger's fundamental contribution was in claiming 
     every woman's right to experience her sexuality freely and 
     bear only the number of children she desires. Following in 
     the footsteps of a first generation of educated women who had 
     proudly forgone marriage in order to seek fulfilment outside 
     the home, she offered birth control as a necessary condition 
     to the resolution of a broader range of personal and 
     professional satisfactions. The hardest challenge in 
     introducing her to modern audiences, for whom this claim has 
     become routine, is to explain how absolutely destabilizing it 
     seemed in her own time.
       Even with so much lingering animus toward changes in 
     women's lives around the world, it is difficult to inhabit an 
     era in our own history when sexuality was considered more an 
     obligation of women than an experience from which to derive 
     contentment, let along pleasure. It is hard to remember that 
     well into Sanger's own time motherhood was accepted as a 
     woman's principal purpose and primary role. It is even harder 
     to fathom that American women just a century ago, were still 
     largely denied identities or rights of their own, independent 
     of those they enjoyed by virtue of their relationships 
     with men, and that this principle was central to the 
     enduring opposition they encountered in seeking access to 
     full rights of inheritance and property, to suffrage, and 
     most especially to birth control. This unyielding 
     principle of male ``coverture'' defined women's legal 
     identities even with respect to physical abuse in the 
     family, which the U.S. Supreme Court condoned in 1910, 
     denying damages to a wife injured by violent beatings on 
     the grounds that to do so would undermine the peace of the 
     household.
       Re-examining this history in the context of the recent 
     expansion of civil and human rights to incorporate women's 
     rights underscored Sanger's originality as a feminist 
     theorist who first demanded civil protection of women's 
     claims to reproductive liberty and bodily integrity, in and 
     outside of marriage. As a result of private arrangements and 
     a healthy trade in condoms, douches, and various contraptions 
     sold largely under the subterfuge of feminine hygiene, the 
     country's birth rate began to decline long before she came on 
     the scene. But it was she who invented ``birth control'' as a 
     comfortable, popular term of speech, and in so doing gave the 
     practice essential public and political currency. It was she 
     who first recognised the far-reaching consequences of 
     bringing sexuality and contraception out in the open and 
     claiming them as fundamental women's rights. She won legal 
     protection for birth control, and by winning scientific 
     validation for specific contraceptive practices, she also 
     helped lift the religious shroud that had long encased 
     reproduction in myth and mystery, thereby securing medical 
     and social science institutions--as much as houses of 
     worship--as arbiters of sexual behaviours and values. And 
     from this accomplishment, which many still consider 
     heretical, a continuing controversy has ensued.
       When Sanger opened her clinic and deliberately staged an 
     arrest in 1916, she challenged anachronistic obscenity laws 
     that remained on the books as the legacy of the notorious 
     anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock, whose evangelical 
     fervour had captured late 19th century Victorian politics and 
     led to the adoption by the states and federal government of 
     broad criminal sanctions on sexual speech and commerce, 
     including all materials related to contraception and 
     abortion. Her critique, however, was not just of legal 
     constraints on obscenity, but also of legal constraints on 
     women's place. In this respect, she also helped inaugurate a 
     modern women's rights movement that moves beyond traditional 
     civil and political claims of liberty to embrace social and 
     cultural ones. She understood that to advance women's rights 
     it is necessary to address--and the state has an obligation 
     to protect--personal as well as public spheres of conduct. It 
     must establish broad safeguards for women and intervene to 
     eliminate everyday forms of discrimination and abuse.


                      from the past to the present

       Observing the contorted politics of sexuality in recent 
     years only reinforces one's sympathy for Margaret Sanger's 
     predicament as a wildly polarizing figure in her own day and 
     clarifies the logic of her decision after World War I to 
     mainstream her movement by identifying reproductive freedom, 
     not just as a woman's right, but also as a necessary 
     foundation for broader improvements in public health and 
     social welfare. Her decision to adopt the socially resonant 
     content of ``family planning'' over birth control, when 
     the Great Depression encouraged attention to collective 
     needs over individual ones and when the New Deal created a 
     blueprint for bold public endeavours, was particularly 
     inventive, and in no way cynical. Nor as some of her 
     harshest critics have since have charged, did she ever 
     define family planning as right of the privileged, but as 
     a duty or obligation of the poor, any more than we do so 
     today when we call for increased public expenditure on it 
     as a matter of simple justice.
       To the contrary, Sanger showed considerable foresight in 
     lobbying for voluntary family planning programs to be 
     included among the benefits of any sound public investment in 
     social security. Had the New Deal included public health and 
     access to contraception in its social welfare package, as 
     most

[[Page E1868]]

     European countries were then doing, protracted conflicts over 
     welfare and healthcare policy in the years since in the 
     United States might well have been avoided. Where she went 
     wrong was only in failing to anticipate the force of the 
     opposition her proposal would generate from a coalition of 
     religious conservatives of her own day, including urban 
     Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants to whom 
     Roosevelt Democrats became captive, much as Republicans have 
     become in recent years.
       What is a good deal harder to deconstruct and understand is 
     Sanger's engagement with eugenics during these years, the 
     then still widely respectable and popular intellectual 
     movement that addressed the manner in which biology and 
     heredity affect human intelligence and ability. Like many 
     well-intentioned secularists and social reformers of her day, 
     Sanger took away from Charles Darwin the essentially 
     optimistic lesson that men and women's common descent in the 
     animal kingdom makes us all capable of improvement, if only 
     we apply the right tools. Eugenics, in the view of most 
     prominent progressive thinkers of this era, from university 
     presidents, to physicians and scientists, to public 
     officials, held the promise that merit would replace 
     birthright and social status as the standard for mobility in 
     a democratic society.
       In this respect, the most enduring bequest of eugenics is 
     standard IQ testing. Its most damning and unfathomable legacy 
     is a series of state laws upheld by a 9 to 1 progressive 
     majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1929, including 
     Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who in the 
     landmark decision of Buck v. Bell authorised the compulsory 
     sterilisation of a poor young white woman with an 
     illegitimate child, on grounds of feeble-mindedness that were 
     never clearly established. This decision, incidentally, was 
     also endorsed by civil libertarians such as Roger Baldwin and 
     civil rights advocates, including W.E.B. Dubois of the NAACP, 
     both of whom Sanger counted among her supporters and friends.
       For Sanger eugenics was meant to begin with the voluntary 
     use of birth control, but many conservative eugenicists of 
     the day actually opposed the practice on the grounds that the 
     fit should procreate. Sanger countered by disdaining what she 
     called a `cradle competition' of class, race or ethnicity. 
     She publicly opposed immigration restrictions which grew out 
     of conservative interpretations of a eugenics that reinforced 
     racial and ethnic stereotypes she opposed. She framed poverty 
     as a matter of differential access to resources, including 
     birth control, not as the immutable consequence of low 
     inherent ability or poor character, a view some 
     conservative eugenicists embraced. She argued for broad 
     government safety nets for social welfare and public 
     health, including access to safe and reliable 
     contraception. And she proudly marshalled clinical data to 
     demonstrate that most women, even among the poorest and 
     least educated populations, embraced and eagerly used 
     birth control voluntarily, when it was provided them.
       At the same time, however, Sanger did on occasion engage in 
     shrill rhetoric about the growing burden of large families 
     among individuals of low intelligence and defective heredity. 
     Her language had no intended racial, ethnic, or class 
     content. She argued that all women, no matter where they are 
     situated, should be encouraged to bear fewer, healthier 
     children, but her words have since been lifted out of context 
     and tragically misquoted to provoke exactly the kind of 
     intolerance she opposed. Moreover, in endorsing the Supreme 
     Court's decision about compulsory sterilization, and also on 
     several occasions the payment of pensions or bonuses to women 
     of low intelligence who would with this inducement agree to 
     the procedure, Sanger quite clearly failed to consider the 
     fundamental rights questions raised by such practices or the 
     validity of the aptitude assessments on which determinations 
     of low intelligence were based. Living in an era indifferent 
     to the firm obligation to respect and protect the rights of 
     individuals whose behaviours do not always conform to 
     prevailing mores, she did not always fulfil it.
       The challenge for historians has been to reconcile these 
     apparent contradictions in her views. Sanger was actually an 
     unusually advanced thinker on race for her day, one who 
     condemned discrimination and encouraged reconciliation 
     between blacks and whites. She opened an integrated clinic in 
     Harlem in the early 1930s and then facilitated birth control 
     and maternal health programs for rural black women in the 
     south, when local white health officials denied them access 
     to the New Deal's first federally funded services . . . She 
     worked on this project with the behind the scenes support of 
     Eleanor Roosevelt, whose progressive views on race were well 
     known but whose support for birth control was silenced by her 
     husband's Catholic political handlers, at least until he was 
     safely ensconced in the White House for a third term. 
     Historically specific circumstances of this complexity, 
     however, are hard to untangle and convey, and this in large 
     part explains why Sanger's legacy has been so easily 
     distorted by contemporary abortion opponents who believe they 
     can advance their own ideological and political agendas by 
     undermining her motives and her character.
       America's intensely complicated politics of reproduction 
     has long ensnarled Margaret Sanger and all others who have 
     tried to discipline it. Birth control has fundamentally 
     altered private and public life over the past century. No 
     other issue has for so long captivated our attention or 
     polarized our thinking. As the psychologist Erik Erikson once 
     provocatively suggested, no idea of modern times, save 
     perhaps for arms control, more directly challenges human 
     destiny, which alone may account for the profound social 
     conflict it tends to inspire.
       As many scholars of the subject in recent years have also 
     observed, much of the controversy around birth control 
     proceeds as well from the plain fact that reproduction is by 
     its very nature experienced individually and socially at the 
     same time. In claiming women's fundamental right to control 
     their own bodies, Sanger always remained mindful of the dense 
     fabric of cultural, political, and economic relationships in 
     which those rights are exercised. And almost, if obviously 
     not always, the policies she advocated were intended to 
     facilitate the necessary obligation of public policy to 
     balance individual rights of self-expression with the 
     sometimes contrary social and political obligation to 
     promulgate and enforce common mores, rule, and laws.
       That Margaret Sanger failed to get this balance quite right 
     in one important respect is certainly worthy of respectful 
     disagreement and commentary, but it is no reason to poison 
     her reputation or to abandon the noble cause of reproductive 
     freedom to which she so courageously and indefatigably 
     dedicated her life.

                          ____________________