{"id":1796,"date":"2005-08-22T11:45:22","date_gmt":"2005-08-22T18:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/08\/22\/the-true-legacy-of-margaret-sanger-ms\/"},"modified":"2005-08-22T11:45:22","modified_gmt":"2005-08-22T18:45:22","slug":"the-true-legacy-of-margaret-sanger-ms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1796","title":{"rendered":""The true legacy of Margaret Sanger"-Ms."},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the cover stories of Ms. Magazine<\/em> this past summer dealt with the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and what is all at stake for women’s reproductive rights in this country, and the changing Supreme Court. And with Dubya nominating a guy like Roberts, yeah, it’s going to be one f-ugly<\/em> battle, and there is indeed a lot at stake for us, considering the man’s stance on women’s rights. Anyway, Ms<\/em>. received a lot of letters and emails about the story, many coming from readers concerned with the future of Roe v. Wade<\/em> (and possibly Griswald v. Conn.<\/em>). One letter in particular was reprinted in Ms. Musings blog<\/a><\/strong>, citing the legacy of Margaret Sanger and women’s reproductive empowerment.<\/p>\n

[…]One of the letters was submitted to Ms. Magazine Online by Miriam Reed, author of Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words (Barricade Books, 2003). It is reprinted in its entirety below:<\/p>\n

In the summer 2005 issue of Ms. Magazine, Ellen Chesler refers to Margaret Sanger and her important work as birth control pioneer. Fortunate we are that Sanger worked so assiduously for birth control, but often overlooked is that birth control for Sanger was only a means to an end. The end was the freeing of the feminine spirit that it might fulfill its mission. And its mission?<\/p>\n

To express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities (Woman the New Race [1920], pp. 98-99).<\/p>\n

One is at times hard put to find the feminine element in American life today, with the gag rule in force, with American militarism holding sway (Sanger was a pacifist), with access to contraception as well as abortion for the indigent less and less available, with honest information on a woman’s physiology and birth control methodology withheld from many young people.<\/p>\n

As a dedicated consumer, by necessity, by custom, and by redilection, American women depend on corporate-produced contraceptives and corporate-produced food. When Margaret Sanger made The Pill possible, it served as an answer for those times. She never dreamed that pharmaceutical companies would become the powerful profit-driven machines that they are today. But what if women knew their bodies so intimately that birth control pharmaceuticals were unnecessary? What if women took the time and the initiative to recognize their cycles and mucus consistency and could control their conception with natural birth control methods? What if women taught this information to each other and to their younger sisters? What if women were no longer dependent on male-run corporations for these matters?<\/em>[…]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then their (corporations’) allies in the political sphere will do their damnest to significantly limit or outright illegalize this new form of radical natural contraception teachings among women and girls. Penalties for ‘thought-crimes’<\/em> or printing “illict” materials come to mind. Censorship. We see this in another form when it comes to the issue of self-righteous, moral-supremacist, misogynist anti-choice zealots who wear white lab coats in pharmacies, who use their ideological and anti-women-reproductive-rights dogma to thwart women’s access to their contraception–thus, thwarting women’s attempt to determine their own reproductive destinies. Whenever women attempt to break away from traditional societal expectations and even dependency on male politicians and predominately male-institutions such as the corporate world and the field of medical science, never fear, there will always–and unfortunately so–be the more powerful and influential reactionaries there to sabotage all of their (women’s) endeavors to independently empower themselves. It’s a sad fact of life.<\/p>\n

For some years before Roe v. Wade, the Jane group in Chicago performed their own abortions. Learning to know your own body and demanding food that is locally grown does not require nearly as much courage. Women cannot be sent to jail for their consumer choices. But women would have to be educated by other than corporate advertising, would have to change their shopping habits, would have to engage within themselves the feminine spirit that Margaret Sanger sought to free when she was sent to jail for handing out contraceptives.<\/p>\n

Birth control is only a means to an end. Woman’s refusal to engage in a profit-driven global market but instead “to create a human world” is the true legacy of Margaret Sanger<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shorter: Women’s refusal to blindly go along with the traditionalist ideal of a woman’s “duty and obligation” to society (ie<\/em>: having as many children as society dictates, never mind if the woman is personally against having that many or personally having children at all–even if she’s just a young twenty-something with no higher education or significant financial security), is a form of reproductive empowerment. In a nutshell, women standing up and being able to proudly say “I’m not going to have children when you tell me to,” or “I’m not going to have children until I accomplish a, b, c,” or “I’m going to decide how many children I have, not you,” and\/or lastly, “I’m never going to have children,” with the aid of contraception and even legal and safe abortions, was the legacy of Margaret Sanger. Reproductive empowerment for women, which in case you haven’t notice, is having to be fought for and demanded all over again. Women controlling their reproductive destinies is just that<\/em> annoying to some people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the cover stories of Ms. Magazine this past summer dealt with the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and what is all at stake for women’s reproductive rights in this country, and the changing Supreme Court. And with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,118,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion-reproductive-rights","category-anti-contraceptivesec-zaniness","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}