I appreciate your very thoughtful reply.
As a woman — and a feminist from way back — I can understand the development of the pro-choice position. In some respects, I consider myself pro-choice on libertarian grounds. (Although I also think the abortion question should be decided by the people of the respective states, not judges.)
The need for women to control their own fertility arises out of the drive by women to participate fully in modern society. The problem, of course, is that the birth control movement in this country took its direction from the radical Margaret Sanger. Following her lead, it still insists on absolute rights without responsibility — when every sensible person knows that pregnancy is all about responsibilities. Another case of warped values, courtesy of utopian socialism.
At this point, I fundamentally agree with you, though I do think that, because our National Foundations are rooted in originating documents asserting the preeminent value of human life, there is a basis for Federal legislation. Even there, however, I remain in complete agreement that it must be a matter decided by "We, The People" through the representative legislative process, NOT by judicial fiat.
In regard to women controlling their own fertility, I agree with you as to the perversion of that concept by the assertions of those like Sanger. We have come to a place where our society now views that control as a wholly separate thing from the woman's personal responsibility. Despite the fact that personal responsibility shouts it from the mountain tops, we dare not say to women, "You abicated your right to control of your fertility when you consented to engage in potentially impregnating sexual behavior." Advocating personal responsibility over feral hedonism has become hate speech, and that's truly damnable.
I understand the point you are trying to make. In addition, no discussion of abortion, birth control,and the “pro-choice” position can be complete without an exploration as to exactly what Margaret Sanger and the movement she created were.
There are many myths created by the Left and MSM about Margaret Sanger, one of the High Priests of the pro-abortion movement, and the Planned Parenthood Movement she founded.
Here are the truths:
She was a Marxist and radical feminist
She opened America’s first “birth-control” clinic in 1916
She recommended euthanasia for those deemed irreparably unfit
She believed in Eugenics and Social Darwinism
She was a racist
She created the term “birth control” and employed it in its lieral sense : to control the number of births to poor, non-white women
From her biography at Discover The Networks, an excellent site detailing the connections of organizations to the Left and Marxism:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1816
In 1960, the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, vowed that she would leave the United States forever if that well-known defender of reactionary conservatism, John F. Kennedy, were ever elected to the presidency. Sanger was a fervent Marxist, a radical feminist, and, despite comical denials posted on Planned Parenthood’s website, a rabid eugenicist. According to her New York Times obituary, dated September 7, 1966, Sanger specifically recommended the practice of birth control to prevent procreation among those of the poor prone to producing heritably ‘subnormal’ children, and, in the early years of the 20th Century, the masthead of her Feminist-Socialist magazine, The Woman Rebel, defiantly proclaimed “No Gods! No Masters!” to its readership.
At first glance, one could hardly disapprove of Sanger’s attempts to promote better health practices among poor women, or seriously find fault with her call for legalized contraception as a means of reducing dangerous self-inflicted abortions. Fewer than 100 years ago, urban women still regularly succumbed to disease and died young, especially if they were poor and had repeatedly endured the physical hardships of pregnancy. In fact, Sanger’s own mother had died of tuberculosis, at 48, after bearing eleven children in rapid succession. Legend has it that it was her mother’s death, coupled with her experience as a maternity nurse among the indigent, which finally convinced her to crusade for legalization of birth control in America. But Sanger was no mere social worker, and that particular legend omits much more than it describes.
It was Sanger who actually coined the phrase “birth control,” and it was she who opened the first birth control clinic in the nation, circa 1916. Sanger also deliberately politicized her push for legalized contraception by founding the National Birth Control League in 1921, and, later, she presided over the founding of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Of course, her activism put her directly at odds with law-enforcement officials and the Catholic Church, but little discussed is the actual extent to which her early Marxism guided much of what she managed to achieve. Her good friends included ultra-radicals like John Reed and Emma Goldman, and the truth is that Sanger’s feminism, and her support for eugenic ‘sexual science’, were both simply part-and-parcel of her own unique Marxist vision. Humanitarianism, per se, had little to do with what motivated Margaret Sanger.
Simply consider Sanger’s horrific contradictions. For Sanger and her generation of radicals, the success of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia largely validated Marx’s promise of a pending new world order. As a proponent of birth control, Sanger certainly sought to remedy specific health threats impacting the lives of poor women, but as a Marxist committee member of the New York Socialist Party, she also certainly anticipated the day when poor workers would be expected to rise up, kill off significant numbers of men, women, and children within the American middle class, and fully seize the nation’s political and productive powers in efforts to establish a communist workers’ utopia. It is absolutely indisputable that the spilling of bourgeois blood was viewed as a necessary step toward achieving the expected Marxist future, and although her own Socialist tenets likely were a bit less militant than those of many of her comrades, she doubtless accepted that such bloodshed would be required.
A political pundit recently quipped that a separate, leftist faction emerges from each and every progressive activist sporting an outsized ego. The same sort of factionalism splintered alliances among the headstrong Marxists of Sanger’s era, and Sanger, herself, had her own very definite ideas about how best to run a revolution. Unlike Marx, Sanger blamed the poor for their own misery, and her hybrid views led her to sharply criticize Marx’s monomaniacal obsession with economic determinants: she did not believe for a second that the revolution’s replacement of one economic system for another would miraculously transmute degraded humanity into collectivist supermen. “In pointing out the limitations and fallacies of the orthodox Marxian opinion,” Sanger penned, in The Pivot of Civilization, “my purpose is not to depreciate the efforts of Socialists aiming to create a new society, but rather to emphasize what seems to me to be the greatest and most neglected truth of our day: unless sexual science is incorporated …and the pivotal importance of birth control is recognized in any program of reconstruction, all efforts to create a new world and a new civilization are foredoomed to failure.” Aspects of social Darwinism loomed large in the world of ideas at that time, and, for Sanger, eugenic breeding techniques were the key to molding model citizens.
Painfully aware that the miserable poor surrounding her were hardly the makings of a future political vanguard, Sanger sought to improve their revolutionary fitness by encouraging smaller families, selective breeding, and, of course, elimination of births among those deemed to be lowly intelligent. Because Marxists fundamentally believed that children were the property of society (and not that of their parents), Sanger and her followers apparently felt fully justified in demanding not only that poor families immediately begin eugenically manipulating their own procreation, but also that governments fully mandate it. In keeping with Sanger’s teachings, American communists eventually accreted the belief that it was selfish and counterrevolutionary to sire too many kids: children, especially ‘defective’ ones, interfered with the family’s ability to adequately respond to the needs of the party. The whole idea that the poor might someday soldier a revolution in America led Sanger to work tirelessly on its behalf. And, had Marx not successfully established the notion that the proletariat was a sacred class, one wonders if, for expediency, Sanger might rather have recommended euthanasia for those deemed irreparably unfit. (Luckily for them, though, she demanded only that they be segregated or sterilized.)
Like all political agitators of the Marxist stripe, Sanger also likely exploited the bourgeoisie for the benefit of the cause: in general, all non-Marxists were viewed as expendable non-persons to be cynically milked for whatever they could provide. Wealthy women who supported Sanger’s efforts regularly organized their own social circles to provide funding and political influence, but, as Sanger and her colleagues well knew, such generous, heartfelt support would not ultimately spare them the tumbrel’s ride directly to the revolution’s gallows.
It was not out of compassion for women that Sanger did what she did: her work was aimed at benefiting only a particular class of women, and, what is worse, it assisted a political ideology that, at last worldwide count, was shown to have deliberately murdered nearly 100 million innocent people. Sanger’s own activities were part of a broad radical agenda calculated to upset the political, religious, and social orders of the day, and, collectively, all were intended to hasten the expected collapse of bourgeois America. In the Marxist universe, clever lies, rationalized by dialectic sophistry, ingeniously obscured sordid truth, and Sanger’s own efforts were always disingenuously cloaked within the mantle of social justice.
Pol Pot, to take but one example, eventually achieved in Cambodia what Sanger and her Marxist friends apparently longed for in America, i.e., the deliberate extermination of millions to jumpstart a hideous revolution. Public awareness of these psychopathic hopes should alone suffice to bar Ms. Sanger from receiving any further posthumous accolades…that is, except from those in our midst who still believe as she once did.
This profile first appeared as an article titled “Contraception As Weapon in the Arsenal of Class Struggle: The Masked Radicalism of Margaret Sanger,” written by Victor Spooner, January 2005.