awakenings: on margaret sanger

[niyad]

Awakenings: On Margaret Sanger
Michelle Goldberg

Her origins were grimly ordinary. Born in 1879, the sixth child of eleven, Margaret Higgins saw her middle-aged mother die in 1899, debilitated by childbearing and the struggles of caring for a large family on the meager income of an irresponsible husband. Though she longed to be a doctor, she settled for a career in nursing, which proved to be an education in the suffering caused by unsafe abortion. She married young, to the Jewish architect and aspiring artist William Sanger, got pregnant quickly and endured a difficult delivery while suffering from tuberculosis. For a while, Margaret Sanger played the housewife in upstate New York, a role she found stultifying. She began to thrive in 1910, when she and her husband moved to New York City, throwing themselves into the exhilarating ferment of radical politics. Working part time with Lillian Wald’s Visiting Nurses Association in the immigrant ghettos of the Lower East Side, Sanger was “exposed to the social pathos of a poverty hauntingly familiar to her from her own youth in its victimization of women and children,” as Ellen Chesler explained two decades ago in her landmark biography Woman of Valor.


It was in 1912 in these ghettos that Sanger supposedly encountered Sadie Sachs, a Jewish immigrant who sparked her “awakening” to the necessity of birth control. In speeches and books, Sanger later described nursing Sachs, a 28-year-old mother of three, through the complications of a botched abortion. Sachs had begged the doctor who initially treated her for advice about preventing another pregnancy, saying, “Another baby will finish me.” The doctor’s response was callous: “You want your cake while you eat it too, do you? Well it can’t be done. I’ll tell you the only sure thing to do….Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.” Months later, Sanger returned to the apartment and found Sachs suffering from septicemia, the result of a self-induced abortion.

“I was now finished with superficial cures, with doctors and nurses and social workers who were brought face to face with this overwhelming truth of women’s needs and yet turned to pass on the other side,” wrote Sanger, promising, “I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard.” As Chesler noted, the portrait of Sachs may have been apocryphal, a composite of many women Sanger had encountered. Even so, its account of the widespread maternal misery that Sachs represented was indisputable.

Speaking publicly about such matters was not easy. Federal and state obscenity laws essentially prohibited the public discussion of contraception. Physicians would quietly counsel their patients about birth control, but poor women without private doctors were left in the dark, forced to depend on back-alley abortions or patent medicines sold under euphemisms like “feminine hygiene.” In 1912 Sanger broke the silence by writing “What Every Girl Should Know,” a series of sex-education articles published in the Sunday supplement of the New York Call, a popular Socialist daily. In 1913 the column was censored by the Post Office, and in response the paper ran the “What Every Girl Should Know” headline over a black box with the word Nothing beneath it.

. . . .


http://www.thenation.com/article/166121/awakenings-margaret-sanger

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. God I hate politics.

That's my immediate thought when reading this article. The systematic art of feelgood delusion.

God bless science.

[midnight]

2. k&R!

[CAPHAVOC]

3. Old enough to remember.

I am. When I was in High School I remember how it was. It was shameful to be an unwed mother. Fast forward 30 years and I met a young girl who wanted to have a child in order to get welfare. Amazing. Now Controlling Birth Control is an issue. The new testing can determine if a child will be diseased or deformed and even the sexual orientation. I wonder how the Ethics and Morals will turn out regarding selection.

[niyad]

4. like you, I am old enough to remember all this, and despair that we are having to fight for our live

harder than ever

[Gormy Cuss]

5. It shouldn't be shameful to be an unwed parent.

It should be shameful to refuse to support your child. It shouldn't be shameful to need welfare to do so.

As for that young girl you mentioned, I'd bet good money that she was too immature to understand the consequences of such a choice. Shaming her wouldn't smarten her up on the issue either. What WOULD work is mentoring by adults who could guide her to see choices that would be better in the long run. The first choice would be emphasizing the importance of doing her very best in school and graduating. The second would be to show her just how hard it is to raise a child alone on meager support --if she wasn't already living in a very low income family, that is. If she was, this desire to have welfare in her own name was likely born from the frustration of living in a household with such constraints. As naive as the latter is, that's often cited as a reason teen girls from low income families get pregnant -- they see it as their ticket to independence.

[CAPHAVOC]

6. You pretty much nailed it.

BTW. I did not say anything about it to her. But when I was a kid it was very shameful to get pregnant and not be married or take charity. There was not really much in the way of welfare programs at all. But there were jobs if you needed one. Anytime.

[libodem]

7. She is a hero

Birth control was not discussed in those days. You could go to jail for providing information.

[Gormy Cuss]

8. For all of the very valid criticisms of Sanger, this is her shining achievement

and the reason she has a place in history.

[niyad]

9. exactly. she was incredibly brave