New York Times, October 15, 2006
OP ED:
Margaret Sanger's Obscenity
By Gloria Feldt
Gloria Feldt, the author of ''The War on
Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women's
Rights and How to Fight Back,'' is a former
president of Planned Parenthood.
WHEN you tour the Lower East Side Tenement
Museum's restoration at 97 Orchard Street,
you walk through the experience of the
immigrants who arrived in waves at the
turn of the 20th century, often to live
five or six to a tiny room. According
to the 1900 census, the 18 wives in the
Orchard Street building had given birth
to 111 children altogether, of whom 67
were then alive.
A 40 percent infant and child mortality
rate sounds shocking now. Back then it
was the norm. Maternal mortality was 99
percent higher than it is today; 40 percent
of those deaths were caused by infection,
of which half resulted from illegal or
self-induced abortion. Birth control was
to revolutionize women's health. But it
would take a social revolution to get
there.
In 1912, Margaret Sanger was a nurse serving
poor Lower East Side women like Sadie
Sachs, a mother of three who had been
warned that another pregnancy would kill
her. When Sadie asked her doctor how to
prevent pregnancy, he told her to tell
her husband to sleep on the roof. Pregnant
again, Sadie self-induced an abortion,
contracted an infection and died.
Sanger began to address women's lack of
information about birth control by writing
a sex education column called ''What Every
Girl Should Know'' for The Call, a socialist
newspaper. But in 1914, a warrant was
issued for Sanger's arrest. She stood
accused of violating the Comstock law,
which made it a crime to circulate ''obscenity''
through the mail.
Passed in 1873 in response to pressure from
a crusader named Anthony Comstock, the
law defined information about contraception
or abortion as obscenity. Comstock boasted
that he destroyed hundreds of tons of
''lewd and lascivious material,'' including
60,000 ''obscene rubber articles,'' otherwise
known as condoms.
In place of Sanger's column, The Call ran
an empty box that read: ''What Every Girl
Should Know -- nothing, by order of the
United States Post Office!'' Never intimidated,
Sanger published ''The Woman Rebel,''
a periodical intended to challenge Comstock
laws directly. She then fled to Europe,
where she visited a birth control clinic
in the Netherlands and began to envision
setting up a network of clinics throughout
the United States.
By the time she returned to America, public
opinion was swinging her way, and she
sensed the time was right for action.
On Oct. 16, 1916, Sanger opened America's
first birth control clinic in the Brownsville
district of Brooklyn. Her sister, Ethel
Byrne, was the nurse; it would be some
time before they could get a doctor to
join the effort. Handbills in English,
Yiddish and Italian advertised the clinic
throughout the neighborhood.
The police closed that clinic 10 days and
464 patients later. But Sanger, who would
go on to establish the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America, had founded something
much larger than a clinic: she ignited
a movement for women's reproductive freedom.
During the 20th century, this movement won
such decisive victories that today many
people cannot believe they could ever
be reversed: birth control and then abortion
were made legal; better contraceptive
methods, like the pill, were developed;
and the government started financing family
planning for low-income women. Today,
more than 90 percent of Americans have
used birth control.
When Sanger opened her clinic, women wouldn't
get the vote for four more years. And
yet the debates of her day over suffrage
and contraception sound strikingly familiar
to modern ears. Would such policies promote
women's equality or destroy the family?
Would they advance justice or spread promiscuity?
Where was the line between medical care
and pornography? The answers, then as
now, depend on your views about women,
sex and power.
The current struggle over birth control,
abortion and sex education make clear
that courageous actions like Sanger's
are as necessary now as they were 90 years
ago. For if anyone doubts that women's
reproductive freedom has been crucial
to American progress, I recommend a short
walk through the lives of the women of
97 Orchard Street.
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