As we end women’s history month I feel compelled to bring up one of the most influential women in America, whose beliefs and compassion for the poor and uneducated have had a direct affect on how we live today: Margaret Sanger. 

In 1914, Margaret Sanger launched the magazine The Woman Rebel: No Gods, No Masters, whose goal was to bring information on contraception to the public.  At that time, she was challenging federal obscenity laws which banned the dissemination of information about contraception, as a result she used the term “family limitations”.  Despite trying to find a loophole in wording her husband was still arrested for handing a copy to an undercover postal clerk.  This magazine came on the heels of working in the slums of New York City, where she attended to the care of women who died from self-induced abortion and where she witnessed women begging doctors for information on how not to become pregnant.  The standard answer usually “Abstinence”. As the granddaughter of Irish immigrants I can tell you right now–abstinence doesn’t work.  She was later arrested for opening the first birth control clinic in the  United States which eventually became the American Birth Control League, which eventually became Planned Parenthood.  The judge in her arrest case declared, “Women did not have the right to copulate with the feeling of security that there will be no conception.”  And she was thrown in the workhouse for a month.

Though Margaret Sanger’s views on abortion remained very conservative, she saw the need to prevent deadly back alley abortions, and viewed birth control as an abortion deterrent.  I wonder–after decades of work, campaigning for reproductive rights, how she would feel today that we are having the same damn argument all over again.  As the generation that should “know better” about equal rights, civil rights and the struggle of minorities, I think there is every reason to be worried about the seriousness of the rights of women to maintain control over their bodies. This control has direct and proven links to education, wealth, the likelihood to vote, graduate from high school and become a productive member of society. 

Let’s look at the facts (and yes, there are exceptions to every rule).  According to the Center for Disease Control:

• The United States leads the developed world in teen pregnancy. 
• Children of adolescent mothers have a higher chance of not finishing high school, being incarcerated, have more health problems, lower school achievement and a higher chance of giving birth during adolescence themselves.
• Teen pregnancy costs the US taxpayer $11 billion a year in healthcare, foster care, incarceration for children of teen parents, and loss of tax revenue due to lower educational attainment and income among teen moms.
• Pregnancy and birth directly affect a teens chances of dropping out of school, only about 50% of teen mothers will receive a high school diploma (by 22 years of age).

And from a recent CDC report (March 2012) of teen pregnancy in the south:

Teenage birth rates are higher in the U.S. South than elsewhere in the country

A correlation has been found between poor sexual health, high poverty, and low educational attainment by women.  Supporting this theory, the South’s sexual health profile is ranked below that of other regions, as measured by rates of teenage pregnancy, teenage birth, babies of low birth weight, and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.

Teenagers who lived in the South were more likely to get pregnant than their counterparts in other regions.  Southern teenagers were also more likely to have babies than teenagers in all other regions.

The Southern regions in this study (Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia) also beat out everyone else with the highest rates of gonorrhea and spending on sex education programs.  These programs are abstinence-only programs, and in some  states it is the law that abstinence is the only sex education program that can be taught.   In the United States there is no mandate that any school has to teach sex education and only 21 states do.  If states do decide to teach sex education, there is no requirement that it be medically accurate.

Making birth control less accessible, more expensive, not covered by insurance and shutting down organizations like Planned Parenthood who provide birth control and education can only lead to more oppression and poverty in the United States.  I wonder what Sanger would say?

I am going to leave off with the founding principles of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control league:

We hold that children should be

1. Conceived in love;

2. Born of the mother’s conscious desire;

3. And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health. Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to prevent conception except when these conditions can be satisfied.

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