Margaret Sanger opened the first Planned Parenthood (PP) clinic in 1916. It was on 46 Amboy Street four blocks from where I spent my childhood. She chose the Brownsville section of Brooklyn because its population of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, Russia and Italy were very poor and had large families. Her mission was to help those families limit their number of offspring because she believed that criminality, prostitution and mental disabilities resulted from poor family’s lacking resources to raise healthy children. She wanted to control the births of the unfit (the poor, disabled and unintelligent)
At the time, birth control measures and abortions were illegal. You couldn’t even talk about them since those topics were considered obscene and violated the federal Comstock Act of 1873. She was driven by three dark beliefs; eugenics, a theory that society can be improved through planned selective breeding for “desirable traits” like intelligence and industriousness. She also believed in ”ableism”, a belief that people with disabilities are inferior and unfit to have children and need “fixing”. In her own words, “birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.”
Being a neo-Malthusian, her third belief, she also saw a world with limited resources heading toward food shortages unless population growth was limited. She felt that some children shouldn’t be born, and she knew exactly which ones. Sanger was so set on her mission that she aligned herself with white supremacist organizations that agreed with her eugenic and ableist beliefs. In 1926, she spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to promote birth control methods. Hitler was probably listening across the pond.
These beliefs may be horrifically racist if judged by today’s standards but were very main-stream in the 1920s and 30s. Every important thinker art the time was a eugenicist including Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, WEB Du Bois, Winston Churchill, Clarence Darrow, George Bernard Shaw and Oliver Wendell Holmes. They all decried the high fertility of “degenerates unfit for normal social life” and advocated compulsory sterilization. Indeed, Sanger endorsed the 1927 Supreme Court ruling that states could forcibly sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge.
Eugenicist ableist neo-Malthusian Margaret Sanger deserves lots of credit for courageously starting a movement that addressed women’s reproductive health at a time when taboos and laws prevented talking about them. A hundred years ago, they were the only ones. That was then and this is now
Ms. Sanger would be surprised that today’s 600 PP clinics provide a lot more than birth control education. PP clinics accept all insurance payments and have a cash fee on a sliding scale. PP clinics do head to toe examinations, pap smears, STD screening, birth control, gender affirming and HIV visits. They also do evaluation and management of vaginal and breast problems. They even see men. As you can see, PP has morphed into a network of primary care clinics with a focus on woman’s health and account for about one third of every first trimester abortion in the country
Most of their abortion seeking patients are poor, straight, white, insured, over 20, had been using a contraceptive method the month they got pregnant, and had, at least, another child at home. Ironically, they are just the people right wing politics claims to support and exactly the women whose healthcare is paid by Medicaid..
Right wing politicians are blind to all except the abortions and try every year to get the government to defund PP. Imagine for a moment what would happen if they succeed. Women seeking abortions in states where they are out-lawed would have to find someone out of their state, probably a Medicaid provider. Facilities currently doing two-thirds of all abortions would assume the remaining third. Abortion pills would have to become more available. The rest of the services would be provided by local Medicaid providers, local HIV clinics and local OB/GYN specialists who are contracted with Medicaid. The role of sex education would rightfully fall to educators. Pro-lifers would have to direct their rage and fury elsewhere,
Planned Parenthood has become a duplicative and needless fragmentary addition to our healthcare mosaic.
So I’m all for defunding PP, not because they do abortions or provide birth control information, but because they offer no unique service. Better funded agencies with more extensive skill sets have appeared in the intervening hundred years that are specifically designed to address those same needs The world has undergone enormous changes since 1916 and PP has become one of many redundant pieces (fragments) in our healthcare.
Give the right-wingers their victory. Let PP go. They were invaluable in their time but this is no longer their time.