Happy 100th
Birthday, Planned Parenthood, and Thank You!
While you
would think it would be hard to argue with health care, it seems that Planned
Parenthood has always been at the eye of a hurricane, right from the earliest
days when founder Margaret Sanger challenged the status quo by providing
contraception and other health services to women and men and educating the
public about birth control and women’s health.
It is no exaggeration
to say that women's progress in recent decades — in education, in the
workplace, in political and economic power — can be directly linked to Sanger's
crusade and women's ability to control their own fertility.
Let’s start
by looking at the world that Margaret Sanger faced in the early years of the 20th
century. What was the reality for women – especially poor women - in terms of
their reproductive lives? There was widespread ignorance of reproductive
health, even among the medical professionals of the day. For too many women,
they faced early and multiple pregnancies, which often resulted in early death.
Margaret
Higgins Sanger
(1879 – 1966) saw this in her own family. Her mother, Anne Higgins,
went through 18 pregnancies in 22 years, dying at the age of 49. Margaret was
the sixth of eleven surviving children, and spent much of her youth assisting
with household chores and caring for her younger siblings.
Supported
by her two older sisters, Margaret Higgins attended Claverack
College and Hudson River Institute,
before enrolling in 1900 at White
Plains Hospital
as a nurse probationer. She married and had three children.
Starting in
1911, Margaret Sanger worked as a visiting nurse in the slums of the East Side of
New York City. During this work, she cared for too many women who underwent
frequent childbirth, miscarriages and self-induced abortions from a lack of
information on how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. The women of the day could not
access contraceptive information; it has been prohibited on grounds of
obscenity by the 1873 federal Comstock
law and other state laws.
Recognizing
the need for better education, Sanger wrote two columns on sex education
entitled "What Every Mother Should Know" (1911–12) and "What
Every Girl Should Know" (1912–13) for the socialist magazine New York Call. Her next step in 1914 was
to create an eight-page monthly newsletter which promoted contraception named The Woman Rebel. She helped to
popularized the term "birth control" as a more candid alternative to
euphemisms such as "family limitation."
In 1915,
she traveled to Europe, where attitudes toward family planning and more laws
allowing contraceptives were ahead of those in America. She learned about
diaphragms for contraception and began importing them from Europe, in defiance
of United States
laws.
On October 16, 1916,
Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, which led to her
arrest for distributing information on contraception. Her subsequent trial and
appeal generated controversy and publicity on the topic. Sanger believed that
in order for women to have a more equal footing in society and to lead
healthier lives, they needed to be able to determine when to bear children. The
family planning organizations she inspired eventually evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger
continued her work, realizing that changes to federal and state laws were
needed. In 1929, Sanger formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation
for Birth Control in order to lobby for legislation to overturn restrictions on
contraception. Following
her legal victory in 1936 that challenged a provision of the Comstock laws, the
American Medical Association to adopted contraception as a normal medical
service and a key component of medical school curriculums in 1937.
But state
laws continued to restrict women’s access to contraception. The
Supreme Court settled the matter in 1965 in Griswold
v. Connecticut. The Court ruled that the Constitution protected a right to
privacy. The case involved a Connecticut
"Comstock law" that prohibited any person from using "any drug,
medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception."
By a vote of 7–2, the Supreme Court invalidated the law on the grounds that it
violated the "right to marital privacy", establishing the basis for
the right to privacy with respect to intimate practices. This and other cases
view the right to privacy as a right to "protect[ion] from governmental
intrusion."
But the
reproductive ignorance that Sanger had identified and fought in the early
1900’s still raged. In 1970, women themselves took self-education action. OurBodies, Ourselves, first produced in newsprint for women by women, shared
knowledge about women sexuality and health in an accessible format that could
serve as a model for women who want to learn about themselves, communicate
their findings with doctors, and challenge the medical establishment to change
and improve the care that women received. It was published in 1973 and really
started a revolution in self-care and awareness.
Local Planned
Parenthoods continue to be a key part of the health care system for women and
men. The clinics provide high-quality, affordable family planning and
reproductive health care for millions women and men. And after 100 years,
Planned Parenthood is still under political attack, even in the face of the otherwise
unmet needs they fill:
In 2015, the Guttmacher Institute reported
that "In two-thirds of the 491 counties in which they are located, Planned
Parenthood health centers serve at least half of all women obtaining
contraceptive care from safety-net health centers." Further, Planned
Parenthood is the sole safety-net provider of family planning services
"[i]n one-fifth of counties in which [it] is located." Guttmacher
also found that "the average Planned Parenthood health center serves
significantly more contraceptive clients each year than do safety-net centers
run by other types of providers," which means that the organization
"serve[s] a greater share of safety-net contraceptive clients than any
other type of provider"
If you
think there would be financial consequence to defunding and closing Planned
Parenthood centers, the Congressional Budget Office has run the numbers:
Permanently defunding Planned Parenthood would end up
increasing government spending by $130 million over ten years, according to the
Congressional Budget Office. The CBO, Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper,
projects that defunding Planned Parenthood would actually end up increasing
government spending because it would result in more unplanned births as women
lost access to services like contraception. Medicaid would have to pay for some
of those births, and some of the children themselves would then end up
qualifying for Medicaid and other government programs.
So when you
hear politicians target Planned Parenthood with closure, ask them what they would replace
these health services with. If they don’t have a good answer, that is your
answer.
Candidates
must tell us how New York
State can improve women’s
whole health and better support women’s access to comprehensive reproductive
health care. Because the truths of women’s lives are these:
·
Three-quarters
of women now entering the workforce will become pregnant on the job,
·
About
half of all women in the U.S.
have an unplanned pregnancy at some point in their lives.
·
Publicly
funded family planning services in New
York saved $605.8 million in public funds in 2010.
·
Young
people between the ages of 15 to 24 account for 50% of all new STD’s, although
they represent just 25% of the sexually experienced population.
·
130,691
of New Yorkers are living with diagnosed HIV in 2013, 30% of them women.
·
The
Zika virus crisis illustrates the need for women to have full autonomy over
their reproductive health, as well as government’s need to invest in ensuring
women’s health.
So, ask the
candidates for office in the elections you will be deciding this November about
their plans to improve women’s health. See if their health care priorities match
yours before you enter the voting booth!
Stay in
touch with all the important economic security issues this fall as we
#PowHerTheVote. Learn more and sign up at http://www.powherny.org/powher-the-vote/.
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