“Birds do it, bees do it, Liberal Street Fighters do it, let’s do it, lets fall in love!”
Alexander Sanger was in town recently for a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the WI Chapter of Planned Parenthood, and is interviewed by Lisa Kaiser in the latest issue of Milwaukee’s independent paper, the Shepherd Express:
Shepherd: What aspects of your grandmother’s legacy are still alive in Planned Parenthood today?
Sanger: Her legacy is everywhere. She was a fighter who had to face down fundamentalist Protestants and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. She was intrepid and fearless and an advocate for those who were in desperate need of her services, who were disenfranchised, poor, girls who weren’t part of the system, who were immigrants, uninsured. These women’s needs are as great today as they were in my grandmother’s time. The services provided by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin as well as in the rest of the country are vital to the well-being of women.
Shepherd: Have we made progress since her time?
Sanger: No, which is why I wrote the book. I think my grandmother would not be surprised by the state we find ourselves in. She always knew that resistance would be there fighting back, that we would have to fight to stand our ground and fight even harder to get ahead. She fought for the use of birth control. She had nothing to do with abortion.
Hmmm, I thought, where is he going with this? Well:
Shepherd: You talk about reproductive freedom, not reproductive rights or being pro-choice.
Sanger: I am suggesting that we start the conversation by asking why there should be reproductive freedom in the first place. The debate on our side has been in terms of women’s autonomy, the right to privacy, occasionally public health, the role of government. This is versus a very monolithic argument from the other side saying you’re killing children, or that it’s against one’s faith. The two arguments are two ships passing in the night. There’s no connection between the two. …
We haven’t convinced Americans of the rightness of our argument that it is a better thing for people to make their own decisions about childbearing, but neither has the other side.
You see this politically. Wisconsin is almost as bad as Utah or Missouri. Things have been going backwards politically in Wisconsin, and around the country, too. The count is over 450 laws passed at the state level to restrict abortion.
I’m suggesting in addition to the other framing [about reproductive freedom] that we add a biological, scientific and evolutionary reproductive framing to show the benefit to humanity of family planning, birth control and abortion.
In other words, find ways to show EVERYONE has a stake in this fight. It’s a point worth exploring:
Shepherd: We’re also used to talking about abortion over here and birth control over here and you don’t separate the two.
Sanger: This is probably the hardest to take for a lot of supporters. Because the mantra, from Bill and Hillary Clinton on is that abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Or they say the primary goal is to prevent abortion. But the problem with us in this movement is that we have not gotten rid of the shame of abortion, which is what my grandmother did with birth control. Even though 40% of women are going to have an abortion. We have to show that abortion and birth control are part of our humanity and not separate the two. They are all about the decision not to give birth. …
I love to talk on colleges with the so-called pro-life students. One out of two fertilized eggs will not implant. One out of two implanted eggs will not survive. So left to nature one out of four fertilized eggs will make it to nine months. So I ask the rhetorical question, what is so holy and sacred about a fertilized egg? Others have said before and I say that God is the greatest abortionist on the planet.
We can see that some of grandma’s fire lives on. I’ve probably copied far too much of this article, so follow the link above and give them the page hits. It’s a good paper. I wanted to make sure as many people as I could expose to them read what Mr. Sanger had to say. We need to figure out a way to advance our cause, because right now the wingers are winning. I’ll leave this with his last question and answer:
Shepherd: How do we include men in the movement?
Sanger: You have to start by understanding that they are reproductive beings, just like women. They want to have children, too. The whole battle of the sexes is a battle for control of reproduction. Women actively control reproduction so that they can provide for the children that survive childbirth. Men try to control reproduction to increase the chances that they’re raising their own children. That’s why they pass restrictive laws on abortion and adultery, invented the chastity belt and so on. They wanted to punish women for having sex outside of marriage.
Reproductive freedom is caught right in the middle of that. For all of human history, up to about 10 years ago, men couldn’t really know who their children are, what’s known as paternity uncertainty. Even Aristotle wrote about it. But we can give men paternity certainty. That’s what DNA testing is all about. The testing rate for paternity is going up about 10% a year. It’s now 350,000 tests a year.
Provacative thoughts, and they could drive a discussion we need to have if we’re to move forward. What do you think?
I’m glad to see Mr. Sanger going around the country talking about these issues. The level of understanding of some very young adults is appalling, if the college freshmen and sophomores that I teach are in any way representative. Many have been told nothing about sex or birth control except what they have learned from their friends. They know about sex, but they do not know about reproduction, or how birth control works. And they don’t know the history of access to birth control (or lack of access, which is a better description) in this country.
And Sanger is dead on: many of them think that once an egg is fertilized, that a baby will result 9 months later in the vast majority of cases (they guess over 95% of fertilized eggs will eventually be infants born mostly full term.)
As a kid who grew up partly in Missouri, I am horrified at the changes that have taken place there. A girl just a little older than my big sister died trying to end her pregnancy using a knitting needle and rat poison. She was about 14 at the time. Now we are going to see kids like her dying again.
I don’t know what it’s going to take to get our political leaders to see that most Americans don’t want a repeat of this terrible history. At a minimum, they need reminding.
Back in the 90s when my daughter was in HS they had ‘health classes’ and the students were asked how many talked about sex with their parents? My daughter told me she was the only one that raised her hand. I was stunned, back then.
Parents Smarten UP.
And I would bet the parents that don’t discuss it are mostly the church going, pro-life group.
I grew up catholic, family of 8 kids and my mom told me NOTHING about sex. I first heard about it from a 10 yr old neighbor-and she had it all wrong LOL- but nobody talked about it in the 50s.
No wonder the world is spinning backwards, the ‘majority’ stopped growing.
I’m sure that Booman will have some stern words for him.
All that framing is just BAD! BAD! BAD! Booman will set him straight!
Changing how people see the world is for used car salesmen and wusses. All we need to do is Fight! Fight! Fight!
Right, Booman?
What do I think? I think Amen, Sister. Get rid of the shame of abortion by ending the idolization of the fertilized egg.
Others have said before and I say that God is the greatest abortionist on the planet.
Damn skippy. Miscarriages, or spontaneous abortions, happen all the time.
The whole battle of the sexes is a battle for control of reproduction.
This is a very provocative statement. I won’t go so far as to say it’s the whole battle, but it’s a huge part. And it’s not only being fought over the right to choose abortion. There are men who oppose abortion because they think women should be baby factories. There are men who try to force women to abort so that they won’t have to be responsible for progeny. The leading cause of death among pregnant women is murder, and usually by a boyfriend or husband. I got into a lengthy debate with man, who swore he was a feminist, who felt that women who choose to carry a pregnancy to term, against the father’s wishes, have no right to expect child support, because only women get to choose abortion. I told him to take it up with God, because it wasn’t my decision that the bulk of reproductive equipment was in female bodies. The battle over women’s bodies and wombs is massive and life threatening for women on many, many levels.
men like that make me sick.
When a man chooses to have sex, the man is choosing the possibility of being a father, and if he has any honor and decency he damned well better step up.
I’m with you there. But, there are some men who weigh every advance in women’s rights against any perceived erosion of their own. God forbid that women should have one choice available to them that men don’t, even though women, by nature, have always incurred the greatest cost and risk, physically, emotionally, and even financially, from pregnancy. All men like that can see is that women are in control of something — their bodies — that they are not, and it makes them crazy.
never understood that way of thinking. Freedom isn’t a zero-sum game.
Power and control are, though…. and it’s only about freedom for the folks on the down side. Funny how often it works out that way…
This is exactly the talk I gave my 18-year-old son, about a year ago.
I said, just remember, every time you have potentially reproductive sex, you are actually signing on for supporting a child for 19 years. If your partner gets pregnant, and wants to have an abortion, she gets to, and you get no say. But if she wants to have the baby and keep it, you get no say over that, either, and you’re responsible for supporting that child.
He looked a little shaken, and very thoughtful, and just said, yeah, you’re right. I don’t think he’d thought about it quite that way before.
too few boys get that talk. I got mine from my father, at a much younger age, around 12 or 13.
Stuck w/ me, and one of the best gifts he ever gave me.
Thanks.
What great points.