Introduction to Planned Parenthood
By The Honorable Robert C. Marshall - All About Issues, March-April 1992
The Honorable Robert G. Marshall is Virginia State Delegate for the 13th District. He is also American Life League’s Director of Congressional Information.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America has told Americans for more then 70 years that its only goal is to protect the health of mothers and babies, and along the way to facilitate personal choice in such matters. For almost 50 years virtually every major social pillar of American society has echoed that claim. This message is part of Planned Parenthood’s self-cultivated public mythology.
Yet, Planned Parenthood’s founder and some early board members supported birth control as a weapon against the increasing number of births from so-called "unfit people" (usually the poor), or people of color (the "black and yellow peril"). Also, both NAZI and KKK sympathizers were prominent in the birth control movement. But even where such "facts" are admitted after footnotes are checked, they are usually dismissed as ancient history.
Planned Parenthood’s real record is at odds with its announced goals of improving maternal and child health. That real record includes a radical social agenda and the restructuring of society, with its claim that the most basic social constant of human existence, namely the family, is merely an optional social arrangement.
If you don’t believe this, ask yourself how we arrived at the point where the "big" question in major public school systems is whether a banana or a zucchini should be used for mixed-sex-in-class condom demonstrations? Even suggesting this show-and-tell fruit and vegetable birth control/AIDS show a few years ago would have produced derision, and doing so would have meant dismissal from school for both teachers and students. Now, opposing it brings charges of wanting to spread AIDS and increase out-of-wedlock teen pregnancies. Yet this is only one of the many Planned Parenthood chickens come home to roost in the alleged pursuit of improving maternal and child health.
How did this begin and who started it?
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was the founder of the Planned Parenthood organisation in the United States. She was a radical sex reformer with little respect for organized religion, traditional morals and a family structure based on fidelity and monogamy. Since Sanger and other PP leaders had a keen nose for public relations, as a rule they avoided head-on attacks against traditional moral and institutional impediments to a sensual, self-indulgent lifestyle.
In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s human sexuality was in the province of religion and morals. Sanger’s first job was to separate that linkage so that sexuality could become medicalized. That would leave the doctor and not the priest or minister as the deciding expert on not just what was possible, but what was desirable as well.
To do that, Sanger aligned herself with a group of liberal Protestant and Jewish scholars who provided alternative interpretations for the traditional Genesis view condemning Onan’s act of coitus interruptus, and by extension all artificial birth control. Gaining religious support for her cause was critical. It was a slow process, but one which accelerated after 1930, the year in which Anglican bishops approved birth control for the first time.
Sanger’s second goal consisted of getting the support of American medicine. In 1931, this was easier said than done, a fact which can be understood by reading a statement by the then President of the American Medical Association, Dr. William G. Morgan. He said, in response to the approval of birth control under the most controlled of circumstances by The Federal Council of Churches, that, "I cannot believe any considerable number of the 23,000,000 individuals making up the 27 American Protestant churches will endorse the findings of that Council."
Approval from American medicine eventually came as the result of a 1936 Sanger-initiated court cast which struck down a Congressional prohibition on importing birth control drugs/devices if ostensibly used for the health of a pa-dent. Since contraceptives then or now do not cure disease, but are aimed at limiting or avoiding childbirth, the mental sufficiency, family size, and relative poverty of otherwise healthy people became the property - after the court’s decision - of the physician and his clinical judgment.
Sanger’s third goal was to enlist the support of the federal and state governments. This, as with other Planned Parenthood efforts, started small. During WW11 the U.S. Public Health Service told state health officers that birth control should be made available to married women employees in War industries. This was allegedly done so that war production would not be impeded by women taking sick leave from the assembly line because of complications from illegal abortions.
The fourth plank was to enlist the help of social workers as supporters of the birth control message. Before 1940 most social work was done by religious organizations which were mostly opposed to birth control. With Roosevelt’s "New Deal," social work became more and more the province of nonsectarian government agencies or. their surrogates, rather than religious organizations.
PP has emphasized several themes in their drive to first gain social acceptance and then dominance of things sexual. PP first claimed that birth control would not harm a woman’s health; secondly, that it was healthy for women; thirdly, that any form of birth control, including legal abortion, is safer than pregnancy and childbirth - things which then became the new menaces to women’s health.
It surely takes a colossal amount of pride to suggest that a few chemists with their pills, IUD’s, etc., or abortionists with their suction machines and scalpels, can harmlessly impose their own program on women’s bodies and society to replace the one prescribed by the Architect of nature. Yet, that is surely what they arc doing. Never mind that sterility has increased or that venereal diseases have gone from five in 1955 to over 50 now.
A second major claim of PP since at least 1920 is that birth control will minimize or even eliminate the "need" for abortion. Yet PP’s own Dr. Christopher Tietze, has acknowledged that "women who have practiced contraception are more likely to have had abortions than those who have not practiced contraception, and women who have had abortions are more likely to have been contraceptors than women without a history of abortion."
Moreover, contraception is displaced by abortion. PP President Dr. Alan Guttmacher acknowledged in 1968 that: "...if we had abortion on demand, there would be no reward for the woman who practices effective contraception. Secondly, abortion on demand relieves the husband of all possible responsibility; he simply becomes a coital animal."
There’s the irony; an organization that proclaims itself the premier defender of women’s rights has ended up making women playthings for coital animals. Some freedom.