Historian Jill Lepore has an entertaining and informative profile of Planned Parenthood in this week’s New Yorker. She traces the history of the organization from Margaret Sanger dispensing birth control and pamphlets in the tenements of Brooklyn nearly a century ago to Tuesday’s vote in Mississippi over whether to rebrand a fertilized ovum as a human being.
In recent years, Republicans have worked tirelessly to make Planned Parenthood synonymous with abortion and nothing else. However, as Lepore explains, Planned Parenthood crusaded for birth contol long before it started performing abortions. Sanger founded her outlaw birth control clinic in 1916, but Planned Parenthood didn’t begin to grapple with abortion rights until 1955. So, the history of the early opposition to Planned Parenthood gives us a striking glimpse of what anti-birth control rhetoric looked like before abortion was an issue.
The men who put Sanger on trial for distributing birth control argued that fear of pregnancy was a necessary check on female sexuality. If women weren’t afraid of getting pregnant, they warned, women would become promiscuous. At her trial, Sanger argued that banning birth control was unconstitutional because it forced women to risk death in childbirth. The judge, unmoved, ruled that no woman had “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”
Lepore doesn’t say this in so many words, but here’s the conclusion I drew: Little has changed since 1917. The desire to control female sexuality is as strong as ever. The anti-choice crowd has just figured out how to cloak its misogyny in a bunch of sentimental mumbo jumbo about fetuses and embryos.
One of Lepore’s most astute observations is that the woman who spearheaded the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, Phyllis Schlafly, is also the grandmother of the modern anti-choice movement. For Lepore, this is no conincidence. Schafly’s agenda has always been to deny women legal equality in order to safeguard male authority within the “traditional” family.
Schlafly and her fellow social conservatives fear that if women have too many rights, opportunities, or government benefits, they will cease to be dependent upon their fathers and husbands and the patriarchal family will become just one more lifestyle choice. And if you know deep down that you’re wife stays and bears your children because she wants to, not because she has to, you’re not much of a patriarch, are you? The social conservatives aren’t entirely wrong. It’s just that we feminists see progress where Schlafly sees the demise of Western Civilization.
The struggle over reproductive rights has always been about female self-determination – even if some of the early victories were couched in terms of a husband’s right to rule his household.
“If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights, women cannot have equal rights with men,” Lepore writes, “That, however, is what no one wants to talk about because it’s complicated and it’s proved surprisingly easy to use the issue to political advantage,” Lepore writes.
We’ve made strides since Sanger’s day. Direct opposition to birth control has become politically incorrect. If you want to women to fear pregnancy and disease in the hopes of preserving their chastity, you’ll have to dress it up in terms of the rights of the unborn. That’s what the Congressional GOP did last year when it deceitfully framed its bid to defund Planned Parenthood as a battle over abortion. In fact, Planned Parenthood hasn’t used federal funds for abortions in over 30 years. Defunding PP would merely have deprived countless low income women of birth control and sexual health care.
When the “personhood movement” started agitating for full human rights for ovum Americans, the whole spectacle devolved into self-parody.
Today, Mississippians vote on whether to declare a fertilized ovum a person. If they vote yes, they will thereby neutralize women’s legal equality.
Declaring a fertilized ovum to be a person would ban not only abortion but many forms of birth control. What’s more, legal personhood for fertilized eggs would declare every woman the rightful subject of continual state scrutiny. Because you just never know whether a woman has a tiny person inside her that the state needs to supervise.
Thus, the misogyny of the anti-choice movement comes full circle.
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