We’re Having The Same Birth Control Debates We Had 100 Years Ago

“Preventing women from contraception is inhumane,” said Margaret Sanger in 1916.

 01/08/2016 12:41 pm ET

 

Barbara Goldberg

UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES VIA GETTY IMAGES

Outside the crumbling Brooklyn building where the first U.S. birth control clinic opened 100 years ago, Alexander Sanger reflected on the move that landed his grandmother in jail and fueled a controversy over women's reproductive rights that has raged ever since.

"This is where it all started," said the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in his first visit to the Brownsville, Brooklyn, site where she started her clinic in 1916.

"She threw down the gauntlet and said, 'Preventing women from contraception is inhumane,'" said Sanger, 68, chairman of the International Planned Parenthood Council and a former president of Planned Parenthood New York City.

City records show the desolate building with bricked up windows is not abandoned, although it appears unoccupied, a far cry from the busy clinic shown in historic photographs with baby carriages parked out front.

Some of the reproductive rights battles that Margaret Sanger fought a century ago were remarkably similar to the challenges facing Planned Parenthood today, particularly organized religion's objection to sex education, her grandson said.

"There is a direct correlation," he said. "If the hormones are raging among young people and you don't get them preventive information and preventive methods, they are going to get pregnant."

Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, said the Roman Catholic Church's opposition was rooted in a far deeper philosophical divide.

"It's not just a question of 'Let's teach them sex education so they'll know how to prevent the pregnancy,'" Pavone said. "The fundamental disagreement comes on that basic question of 'What's human sexuality all about?'"

The religious-liberty fight over contraception is back in the U.S. Supreme Court, which will rule by July on whether religious groups deserve a blanket exemption so that they do not have to pay for their employees' contraceptive coverage as mandated under President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act.

Abortion is the flashpoint in other conflicts that are vastly and violently different from those Sanger faced before her death in 1966.

Opponents have waged a decades-long string of attacks on abortion providers, the most recent in November when a gunman killed three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic. Since 1993, there have been 11 murders and 26 attempted murders due to anti-abortion violence, according to the National Abortion Federation, a group of healthcare providers.

Lawmakers continue to tighten restrictions on abortion, with 288 such limits passed by states since 2011, according to Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit that focuses on reproductive health.

The Supreme Court also plans to rule on a Texas law that mandates costly hospital-grade facilities for abortion providers, who say it actually aims to shut clinics and chip away at a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood itself is in the crosshairs, with the Republican-led Congress voting as recently as this week to cut all of its federal funding, although Obama, a Democrat, has vowed to veto the measure when it reaches his desk.

A USA Today poll in December found Americans overwhelmingly oppose cutting off federal funds for Planned Parenthood. Some 59 percent of Republicans and 89 percent of Democrats are against the idea.

The controversy was well under way 100 years ago when Sanger and her sister, both trained nurses whose mother died young after giving birth to 11 children, opened the clinic. They fitted women for diaphragms, which were the most effective birth control available at the time but were illegal under the federal Comstock Law against distributing materials that could be used for contraception.

"The women were lined up and demanding access to birth control," her grandson said. "That said it all."

One patient turned out to be an undercover police officer, and nine days after the clinic opened in the low-income Jewish and Italian neighborhood, it was shut down, and Sanger was under arrest.

Margaret Sanger's holy grail was universal access to birth control for women, whose unplanned pregnancies forced them into what she viewed as sexual servitude.

Sanger, who founded organizations that evolved into Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was a driving force in the early 1950s behind the development of the birth control pill, which today is largely credited with allowing women to shape their lives and compete in the workplace with men.

"Birth control has been central not just to women's political, workplace and education opportunities but also to their ability to live," said Carrie Baker, who teaches women's studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. "What motivated Margaret Sanger was that women were dying after having so many pregnancies."

Today about half of the 6.6 million pregnancies annually in the United States are unintended, a higher proportion than in Europe, reproductive health experts say.

Teen birth rates in Brownsville, now a mostly black neighborhood that is one of the city's poorest, are among the highest in New York City, and the abortion rate is double the rest of the city, according to the city health department.

"It's still the poorest of the poor who are having more children than they want, who are having children earlier than other women, who are not getting access to preventive methods when they need them - whether it's in Brownsville or Rio de Janeiro," Sanger said. "That same struggle was my grandmother's struggle, and it is mine."

MAAJABU YA DUNIA MWANAUME MMOJA AMPA MIMBA MKWEWE! ZAMBIA,KITWE MAN IMPREGNATES MOTHER-IN-LAW

A WOMAN of Kitwe narrated before the Ganerton Local Court how her husband impregnated her biological mother when she visited their matrimonial home.

Appearing before senior magistrate Fredrick Ndhlovu. was Grace Banda, who sued her husband, Mwila Kalobo for divorce.

The two got married in 2006 and have two children.

Banda, a trader at Kitwe’s Chisokone Market, told the court that all was well in their marriage when the two tied the knot in 2006 until she discovered her husband’s adulterous affair with her biological mother.

She narrated that her mother visited their matrimonial home from the village in 2010 and stayed with them for three months.

She said she would leave home in the morning to sell merchandise at Chisokone Market and would only return home from work around 19:00 hours.

“My mother visited us from the village and she stayed with us for three months. Whenever I went out, I used to leave her home with the children. But one day, my mother decided to leave without telling me,” Banda said.

She narrated that three months later after her mother left, she went to the village to visit her (mother) and discovered that she was six months pregnant.

Banda told the court that when she asked her mother who was responsible for the pregnancy as her father was late, she did not say anything.

“I stayed in the village for two months until my mother gave birth to a child who exactly resembled my husband,” she said.

Banda told the court that when she left the village, she confronted her husband about his alleged affair with her mother and she got a shock of her life when her spouse admitted impregnating her [mother] and asked for forgiveness.

And Kalobo admitted having impregnated his mother in-law and told the court that his wife was a marketeer who always left home in the morning and only returned at night.

He told the court that his mother in-law used to do everything for him at home while his wife was away selling at the market and that he ended up having a secret sexual affair with her until she conceived.

Magistrate Ndhlovu said it was a taboo for Kalobo to sleep with his mother-in-law which resulted into having a child.

He granted the two divorce adding that Banda was never at home to take care of her husband.

Source : Zambia Daily Mail

TATIZO LA MAJI JIMBO LA NYAMAGANA MKOANI MWANZA LAMTESA MABULA

Mbunge wa Jimbo la Nyamagana Stanslaus Mabula akifafanua jambo ofisini kwake.

Mbunge wa Jimbo la Nyamagana Mkoani Mwanza (CCM) Stanslaus Mabula amesikitishwa na baadhi ya wakazi wa jimbo hilo kukabiliwa na ukosefu wa Maji safi na salama huku baadhi ya miradhi ya maji ikichukua muda mrefu bila utekelezaji wake kukamilika kwa wakati.

Mabula ameelezea masikitiko yake baada ya kupokea malalamiko kutoka kwa wakazi wa jimbo la Nyamagana, juu ya kukosa huduma ya maji ya bomba licha ya jimbo hili kuzungukwa na ziwa Victoria.

Mabula ambae alikuwa Mstahiki Meya wa Jiji la Mwanza katika uongozi uliomalizika mwishoni mwa mwaka jana, amebainisha kuwa ipo miradi ya maji ambayo bado haijatekelezwa kutokana na serikali kushindwa kutoa pesa kwa wakati jambo ambalo amesema kuwa atalisemea mara kwa mara katika vikao vya bunge lijalo ili kufanikisha upatikanaji wa fedha kwa ajili ya kutekeleza miradi hiyo.

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