To Save the Lives of Women

It comforts the freakazoids to think of liberals as idle rich do-gooders and drugged hippies in their ivory towers plotting to destroy ril murkins. But liberals all come from the same place: seeing first-hand the horrific effects on everyday people of I-got-mine politics.

Margaret Sanger was a public health nurse in New York City.

As Margaret worked in New York's Lower East Side with poor women who were repeatedly suffering due to frequent childbirth and self-induced abortions, she began to speak out for the need of women to become knowledgeable about birth control. While she was working on duty as a nurse, Margaret met Sadie Sachs when she was called to her apartment to assist her after she had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Afterward, Sadie begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again, to which the doctor simply gave the advice to remain abstinent. A few months later, Margaret was once again called back to the Sachs’ apartment, only this time, Sadie was found dead after yet another self-induced abortion.

Did everybody catch that? Abstinence advice led directly to death by self-induced abortion.

This was a turning point in Margaret’s life. Sadie Sachs’ predicament was not at all uncommon during that time period. Margaret came to believe then, more than ever, that she needed to do something to help desperate women before they were driven to pursue dangerous and illegal abortions.

On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States.

Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League (now Planned Parenthood), established her clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn at 46 Amboy St. It took the cops nine days to figure out what was going on before they raided the joint and arrested her.

Sanger, whose activism was well known from her column, "What Every Girl Should Know" in the New York Call, was charged with maintaining a public nuisance and jailed for a month. Released, Sanger reopened her clinic and got jugged again.

Sanger's clinic stood in defiance of the Comstock Act, passed in 1873, which banned birth control outright and made it a crime to send contraceptives through the mail. Sanger's defiance brought the legal system down on her head, forcing her to flee the country at one point to avoid prosecution. (Happily, she fled to Europe, where she learned a whole lot more about contraception and the politics of sexuality.)

Sanger saw birth control not only as a woman's issue but as a class issue. Although contraception was technically illegal for everyone, it was widely known that wealthy Americans practiced it freely, obtaining their devices — condoms and spermicidal jelly, mostly — from abroad.

In 1938, with Sanger once again forcing the issue in court, a judge lifted the federal ban on birth control devices. This, in effect, ended the Comstock era. Almost immediately, the diaphragm became a popular method of contraception.

Nevertheless, the United States remained shackled to its Puritan heritage and didn't get around to completely legalizing birth control methods for married couples until 1965. A year before Sanger's death, the Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut law banning the practice, citing a couple's right to privacy. It would take another seven years for that right to be extended to unmarried sex partners.

Saying you're against abortion and against contraception is like saying you're against teenagers driving cars and against a minimum driving age. The latter defeats the former. And yet that is exactly the bizarre position of repug candidates like Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Rand Paul.

Do not be fooled by the teabaggers' faux libertarianism. Wingnut freakazoid extremism is the foundation of their politics.

Have you made calls for your Democratic Congressional candidate today?