|
 "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.
[to top of second column] |
DEMANDING ACCESS
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."
(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
