You're an idiot. You probably think the earth is flat and we have never landed on the moon! What a HOOT!
Margaret Sanger:
The Woman Most Responsible for Doubling Your Life Expectancy
"Because of death during childbirth, the life expectancy of a female infant born in 1900 was 48, but by the end of this century, it is anticipated that life expectancy of a woman will be eighty. With birth control, a woman's life in one century has been almost doubled."
-- The Great Ideas, 1996 edition
The woman most responsible for doubling your life expectancy as a woman is Margaret Sanger, born 09-14-1883, who fought and won the battle for legalized female fertility control.
Yes, there were others who battled valiantly for women to have a defense against unwanted pregnancies, but it was Sanger who so effectively used PR in her single-minded campaign that carried the movement to victory.
Her campaign started from being able to dispense birth control information in 1914 to actual birth control devices such as a diaphragm in the 1930s, to the development of the Pill in the 1960s.
As horrible as it sounds, the laws of most "civilized" nations forbade ANY discussion of birth control information especially to women who were the ones who would die from too many pregnancies. Men, of course, had used condoms for the millenia - and the U.S. Army even bought condoms for its soldiers - although allegedly for "disease" control. But women - BY The LAW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT - were kept ignorant.
Sanger's manifesto plunged a knife into the heart of men's abuse of women.
"A woman's body belongs to herself alone. It is her body. It does not belong to the Church. It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other Government on the face of the earth... enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman's right to life and liberty."
At one point she shook the foundation of this nation's hypocritical morality by asking, "Am I to be persecuted and classed as immoral because I advocate small families for the working women while Mr. (President Theodore) Roosevelt can go up and down the length of the land shouting and urging this class of women (Anglo-Saxon women or as he termed them, 'native American women') to have large families and is neither arrested nor molested but considered by all society as highly moral? But I ask you which is the more moral, to urge a working woman to have only those children she desires and can support or to delude her into bearing cannon fodder for munitions makers and professional jingoes? Let us ask ourselves which is America' s definition of morality."
Modern attempts to discredit Sanger - and consequently birth control itself - point out that Sanger was controlling, promoted herself, had emotional problems, and had a number of sexual affairs with men other than her husbands.
So?
Another case of degrading successful women. Most men of power had the same faults. Oh yes, she is being called a racist and condemned for her belief in eugenics - although almost every leading political figure of the period from Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson, etc., was an overt racist.
She traveled all over the world for more than 30 years preaching birth control. She was jailed in the U.S. Sanger was arrested first in 1914 for publishing The Woman Rebel and then sentenced to 30 days in the workhouse for actually opening a birth control clinic in the lower East Side of New York in 1917.
She spent a lifetime writing pamphlets, books, and articles, and lecturing on the need and advantages of birth control.
Sanger was always at odds with the "feminists" of the day. She felt the suffragists were too narrow in their aims and other groups of women too elitist. She herself, however, pushed many of them away because of her socialist positions.
She broke with the socialist movement, at least in membership, because the men would not support women's issues, including birth control.
As a result, Sanger began publishing The Woman Rebel which had as its subheading, "No Gods. No Masters." Seven of the first nine issues of The Rebel were seized by the U.S. Post Office under the Comstock Act. The growing controversy about the tabloid culminated in August, 1914, when Sanger was arraigned on four criminal counts of violating the Comstock Act, which classified as obscene "every article or thing designated, adapted or intended for preventing conception..."
The arraignment stimulated significant national publicity for Sanger and the birth control movement. That publicity was heightened even further when Sanger left behind her children and husband and fled to Europe in November, 1914, to avoid prosecution. (Three years later she would go to jail.)
In Europe she had several sexual affairs as well as learning much more about birth control, mainly from the Netherlands where such things were legal. (She was married at the time and had two sons.)
She imported the first (illegal) diaphragms into the U.S. (They were hidden in shipments from Europe for her second husband's business.) Because of Sanger's single-minded drive, for the first time it was possible for an American woman to control whether or not she wanted to get pregnant.
And yet, after all her work, she was booted out of the birth control movement by those who considered her too radical! She did not hide her anger because women's birth control movement had been taken over by men! Men's control of women's fertility was exactly what she had fought. Fortunately, the new organization Planned Parenthood has been returned to woman control.
In her autobiography, Margaret Sanger explained why she decided to dedicate her life to making birth control for women legal - and available.
As a nurse working with poor immigrants on the Lower East Side of New York City, she witnessed first hand the results of uncontrolled fertility, self-induced abortions, and high rates of infant and maternal mortality.
"Always (came) the question...'Tell me something to keep from having another baby.'
"I tried to explain the only two methods I had ever heard of, both of which were invariably brushed aside as unacceptable... because they placed the burden of responsibility solely upon the husband - a burden which he seldom assumed. What she was seeking was self-protection she could herself use, and there was none...
"One stifling mid-July day of 1912 I was summoned to a tenement..." She went on to describe a 28-year old woman with three children who had almost died of a self-induced abortion. When the woman begged the (man) doctor for help to keep from getting pregnant again his only comment was "It can't be done... Make Jake sleep on the roof."
(Three months later Mrs. Sachs was dead. Jake was never prosecuted for murder - as no man has ever been prosecuted for killing his wife with uncontrolled impregnation even though throughout most of history, a married woman had NO CHOICE legally or morally but to submit to her husband' desires - even when another pregnancy would certainly kill her.)
"I looked out my window and down upon the dimly lighted city. Its pains and griefs crowded in upon me, a moving picture rolled before my eyes with photographic clearness: women writhing in travail to bring forth little babies; the babies themselves naked and hungry, wrapped in newspapers to keep them from the cold; six-year-old children with pinched, pale, wrinkled faces, old in concentrated wretchedness, pushed into gray and fetid cellars, crouching on stone floors, their small scrawny hands scuttling through rags, making lamp shades, artificial flowers; white coffins, black coffins, coffins, coffins interminably passing in new ending succession. The scenes piled on upon another. I could bear it no longer.
"As I stood there the darkness faded. The sun came up and threw its reflection over the house tops. It was the dawn of a new day in my life also. The doubt and questioning, the experimenting and trying, were now to be put behind me. I knew I could not go back merely to keeping people alive.
"I went to bed, know that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky."
[Margaret Sanger. An Autobiography. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1938.]
In her autobiography, she also writes with a cry that spans the decades of how her mother suffered and died from too many pregnancies.
(QUESTION: Has anyone ever wondered why doctors who are "pledged" to save human lives let women die from repeated pregnancies without doing anything about it? The doctors never stopped treating men's illnesses no matter how the men became ill. Also, why has no man been prosecuted for the murder of his wife for impregnating her when her death from pregnancy was certain?)
References regarding the life and very complex personality of Margaret Sanger and the battle for birth control:
Chesler, Ellen. Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Coigney, Virginia Coigney. Margaret Sanger: Rebel with a Cause. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
Douglas, Emily Taft. Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future. New York: Holt, 1969.
Gordon, Linda. Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History 0f Birth Control in America. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Gray, Madeline. Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control. New York: Richard Marek, 1979.
Lader, Lawrence. The Margaret Sanger Story and the Fight for Birth Control. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.
Sanger, Margaret. An Autobiography. New York: Norton, 1938.
Sanger, Margaret. My Fight for Birth Control. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931
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The Best-kept Birth Control Secret
Finally in 1996, U.S. women were allowed the opportunity for emergency birth control that had been available to women throughout the world for YEARS:
NEWS ARTICLE (ITN-1996) - In a move hailed as unveiling the best-kept secret of women's health care, government scientists declared high doses of ordinary birth control pills taken soon after sex a good way to prevent pregnancy.
But the largest contraceptive manufacturer said it will not sell "morning-after" pills in United States for fear of lawsuits - even though it does sell them abroad - and some abortion foes protest the pills.
In at least six other countries, women who are raped, whose birth control fails or who just forget in the heat of the moment are routinely prescribed high doses of birth control pills to prevent pregnancy.
They're even sold specially packaged to have on hand in case of emergency.
The same pills are sold here as birth control, but are not marketed as "morning-after" pills - and no company has even asked for FDA permission to do so - because of legal and political fears.
Consequently, while it is legal for doctors to prescribe the Pill for emergency use, few know what doses to use and half of women who could benefit even know to request them, surveys show.
If 100 women have unprotected sex in the second or third week of their menstrual cycle, the time closest to ovulation, eight will get pregnant, Dr. James Trussell of Princeton University told the FDA advisers. But with the so-called "morning-after pill" - although it can be taken up to 72 hours after sex - only two will get pregnant, he said.
The panel agreed that emergency contraception is effective 75 percent of the time.
To work, two to four pills are taken up to 72 hours after sex, and then the same dose taken again exactly 12 hours later. The panel said the six brands known to work are: two tablets of Wyeth's Ovral or four tablets of Wyeth's Nordette, Lo/Ovral or Triphasil or Berlex Laboratories' Levlen or Tri-Levlen.
In Britain, where 3.5 million doses of one brand alone have been prescribed since 1984, the government has found just six women who took morning-after pills suffered serious effects. One died but it was not because of the pills.
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