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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Sunday Evening Long Read: “Birthright”

Sunday Evening Long Read: “Birthright”

by Anne Laurie|  December 18, 20117:33 pm| 22 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Vagina Outrage, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Rare Sincerity

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Totally worth your time. From the New Yorker, an excellent article by historian Jill LePore on Planned Parenthood and women’s health care in America over the last hundred years:

… There are, in history, very few straight lines. Still, even on this winding road a turn that has conservative women invoking Susan B. Anthony to attack Planned Parenthood is a hairpin. Margaret Sanger opened that first clinic in Brooklyn four years before the passage of what was called, at the time, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Women had only just got the right to vote when the Equal Rights Amendment, written by Alice Paul, was introduced to Congress: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States.” Revisions were introduced in every session from 1923 to 1971. In 1972, the E.R.A. passed and went to the states for ratification. Its eventual defeat was accomplished by conservatives led by Phyllis Schlafly, who opposed the women’s-rights movement and supported a human-life amendment. Schlafly, not Anthony, is the grandmother of the pro-life movement…
__
If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights, women cannot have equal rights with men. This, however, is exactly what no one wants to talk about, because it’s complicated, and it’s proved surprisingly easy to use the issue to political advantage. Democrats and Republicans thrust and parry, parry and thrust, in a battle that gives every appearance of having been going on forever, of getting nowhere, and of being unlikely to end anytime soon. That, however, is an illusion. Neither abortion nor birth control is, by nature, a partisan issue, and, from the vantage of history, it’s rather difficult to sort out which position is conservative and which liberal, not least because this debate, which rages at a time when there is no consensus about what makes a person a person, began before an American electorate of white men was able to agree that a woman’s status as a citizen is any different from that of a child.
__
The first birth-control clinic in the United States opened on October 16, 1916, on Amboy Street in Brooklyn. There were two rooms, and three employees: Ethel Byrne, a nurse; Fania Mindell, a receptionist who was fluent in Yiddish; and Byrne’s sister, Margaret Sanger, a thirty-seven-year-old nurse and mother. Sanger and her sister came from a family of eleven children, one of whom Sanger helped deliver when she was eight years old. When Sanger began nursing poor immigrant women living in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side, she found that they were desperate for information about how to avoid pregnancy. These “doomed women implored me to reveal the ‘secret’ rich people had,” Sanger wrote in her autobiography…
__
Sanger wasn’t the only person to hand out literature about contraception—Emma Goldman once spent fifteen days in the Queens County jail for doing the same thing—but she was the first to make it a movement. In 1914, Sanger began publishing The Woman Rebel, an eight-page feminist monthly, in which she coined the term “birth control.” Six of its seven issues were declared obscene, and were suppressed. Indicted, Sanger fled the country. When she returned, in 1915, the charges against her were dropped. One of her three children, a five-year-old daughter, had just died of pneumonia, and the prosecution decided that bringing a grieving mother to trial for distributing information about birth control would only aid her cause. Determined to have her day in court, Sanger rented a storefront from a landlord named Rabinowitz, who lowered the rent when she told him what she was going to use the space for. She wrote a letter informing the Brooklyn District Attorney of her plan…

… Here is where we are. Republicans established the very federal family-planning programs that Republican members of Congress and the G.O.P.’s Presidential candidates are this year pledging so vigorously to dismantle. Republicans made abortion a partisan issue—contorted the G.O.P. to mold itself around this issue—but Democrats allowed their party to be defined by it. And, as long as Planned Parenthood hitches itself to the Democratic Party, and it’s hard to see what choice it has, its fortunes will rise and fall—its clinic doors will open and shut—with the power of the Party. Much of the left, reduced to a state of timidity in the terrible, violent wake of Roe, has stopped talking about rights, poverty, decency, equality, sex, and even history, thereby ceding talk of those things to the right. Planned Parenthood, a health-care provider, has good reason to talk about women’s health. But, even outside this struggle, “health” has become the proxy for a liberal set of values about our common humanity. And it is entirely insufficient…

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Reader Interactions

22Comments

  1. 1.

    JGabriel

    December 18, 2011 at 8:05 pm

    Cesária Évora dead at 70. RIP.

    .

  2. 2.

    MikeJ

    December 18, 2011 at 8:14 pm

    I’ve never understood this “Democrats have allowed themselves to be defined by it” argument. We’re supposed to want Democrats who hate women so that it won’t be a partisan issue?

    The sane people are on one side. The insane people are on the other. It shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but sanity is partisan.

  3. 3.

    RichJ

    December 18, 2011 at 8:18 pm

    Jill Lepore should stop mailing in New Yorker articles and get back to mailing in scholarly books.

  4. 4.

    Mark S.

    December 18, 2011 at 8:26 pm

    From the article:

    “Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better,” the Times columnist David Brooks has written, insisting, “Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.”

    Oh, Bobo, you don’t want to know how vicious the debate would get if Roe were overturned. And it would not be pretty for you and you asshole buddies in the GOP. All the sudden, a lot of people would start voting who weren’t before.

    And fuck you, political discourse wasn’t always very civil before Roe.

  5. 5.

    Sly

    December 18, 2011 at 8:37 pm

    @Mark S.:

    “Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better,” the Times columnist David Brooks has written, insisting, “Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.”

    Shorter Bobo: “Unless I get what I want, I won’t stop being an asshole and providing cover for other assholes, and you not giving me everything I want means you’re damaging democracy.”

    If upsetting the delicate sensibilities of people who would prefer that others remain second class citizens does damage to our democracy, than Chief Justice Marshall did far more damage than Blackmun. Brown v. Board of Ed. alone would probably make him history’s greatest monster, if you went by such absolutely fucking absurd and cringe-inducing definitions of tyranny.

    What a shithead.

  6. 6.

    dlnelson

    December 18, 2011 at 8:42 pm

    I do not comment much, but we love our dogs more than our women. Women know what is best for their bodies, men do not. It is sad. I have been around a long time, the republicans want to make us go back to the fifties. We have a problem, as democrats, we cannot challenge the incumbents. It is forbidden. We have folks serving for over 40 or 50 years. It is not fair. Maybe we can change the ladder, it is worth a try. I am from No cal, and from MN and ND, I have never seen such vitriol, it is uncalled for. I hope for much more.

  7. 7.

    dlnelson

    December 18, 2011 at 8:42 pm

    I do not comment much, but we love our dogs more than our women. Women know what is best for their bodies, men do not. It is sad. I have been around a long time, the republicans want to make us go back to the fifties. We have a problem, as democrats, we cannot challenge the incumbents. It is forbidden. We have folks serving for over 40 or 50 years. It is not fair. Maybe we can change the ladder, it is worth a try. I am from No cal, and from MN and ND, I have never seen such vitriol, it is uncalled for. I hope for much more.

  8. 8.

    scav

    December 18, 2011 at 8:44 pm

    “Oh tut-tut, some of you peoples’ rights are just so unbearably dull! and utterly dreary-making when introduced into the conversationes and soirées and one really doesn’t want to upset the regime de politesse of those who cocktail in Georgetown now, does one? Do be good dears and just go bleed to death in alleys quietly and don’t make such a fuss. There’s champers flowing here.”

    ETA “I mean, don’t you remember the parties of the early 1860s? Dull Dull Dull Dull Dull! Never again dearies.”

  9. 9.

    Villago Delenda Est

    December 18, 2011 at 9:24 pm

    “Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better,” the Times columnist David Brooks has written, insisting, “Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.”

    Exhibit A in the case to be made for unleashing some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on BoBo’s worthless ass.

  10. 10.

    kay

    December 18, 2011 at 9:39 pm

    I thought it was a great piece.

    I think we need one of these on every advance and program:

    ” What was it like before we had the safety net?”

    “Voting: just for white men?”

    They were arresting people for distributing contraceptives in 1956! Really! That happened. Not so long ago.

    People have to be reminded. Constantly.

    I for one am not all that nostalgic. I don’t wanna go back.

  11. 11.

    Roger Moore

    December 18, 2011 at 9:43 pm

    If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights, women cannot have equal rights with men.

    That’s a great quote. I know I’ve heard the same basic thought a bunch of times, but the starkness of it in this quote really brings out just how fundamental the difference is. You just need to figure out how to shorten it enough to fit on a bumper sticker and send one to every woman in America.

    @Mark S.:
    I think it started before Roe; it started at least with Brown. One side would rather blow up the government than let people different from themselves have equal rights. It just looks as if Roe was the dividing line because the assholes were more evenly divided between the parties until Nixon unveiled the Southern Strategy at about the same time.

  12. 12.

    The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik

    December 18, 2011 at 9:50 pm

    @MikeJ:

    I think its more the idea that Democrats have failed utterly to steer the narrative that they’ve let the GOP define them as ‘pro-abortion’ and ceding the field before starting to fight. In other words, the main complaint a lot of Dems have about our leaders in general: we let the GOP make the rules and play within their frames.

  13. 13.

    karen marie

    December 18, 2011 at 11:04 pm

    @The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: Oh, no, according to a rightwing talk radio host I heard while driving across these United Snakes, liberals love to kill babies. I was a little surprised he didn’t also tell his listeners that liberals eat the babies after they kill them.

    Instead of “When did you stop beating your wife,” it’s “When are you going to stop murdering babies.” The question is impossible to answer without a listener believing that you are a baby murderer.

    Abortion on its own is insufficient to have created the political firestorm that has raged for almost 40 years. Turnout is key to winning elections, and few things have been found to be greater motivators of voters than a need to “protect the children.”

  14. 14.

    g

    December 18, 2011 at 11:11 pm

    an American electorate of white men was able to agree that a woman’s status as a citizen is any different from that of a child.

    Wow, so if the fetus is a female, who trumps whom?

  15. 15.

    karen marie

    December 18, 2011 at 11:31 pm

    @g: In China, the adult female would trump the female fetus, but in these United Snakes a transgender fetus with two heads and acute spina bifida trumps the adult female.

  16. 16.

    Ruckus

    December 19, 2011 at 3:40 am

    I’ve tried 3 times, and deleted them, to write a post here, trying to encapsulate my thoughts on human rights.
    I’m so angry and have been carrying that with me for a long time, because I am having a hard time trying to understand those who think far too little of the majority of humans and far too much of themselves. Those selfish, greedy bastards who think they should control events that are none of their fucking business.
    That’s all I’ve got right now.

  17. 17.

    Privatize the Profits! Socialize the Costs!

    December 19, 2011 at 8:18 am

    I don’t think the Republicans really want to overturn Roe v. Wade..

    They certainly showed no sign of it between 2000-2006, when they controlled all three branches of govt.

    I’m talking out my ass here, but I’ll bet Republican women have abortions at roughly the same rates as other US women, just as Catholic women do.

    It’s such a great carrot for them to wave in front of the rubes who vote for them… why would they ever want to give that up?

    Their gays-and-guns carrots seem to have lost their power.

  18. 18.

    Elizabelle

    December 19, 2011 at 8:24 am

    @dlnelson: good post.

    @Roger Moore:

    I think it started before Roe; it started at least with Brown. One side would rather blow up the government than let people different from themselves have equal rights. It just looks as if Roe was the dividing line because the assholes were more evenly divided between the parties until Nixon unveiled the Southern Strategy at about the same time.

    Really interesting thought.

    Not here to grade anyone (!); but you both said it better than I could.

  19. 19.

    The Other Bob

    December 19, 2011 at 9:02 am

    @Privatize the Profits! Socialize the Costs!:

    I’m talking out my ass here, but I’ll bet Republican women have abortions at roughly the same rates as other US women, just as Catholic women do.

    I have little doubt you are right, especially since all the anti-abortion movement has accomplished is to deny the poor access to abortions.

    The last thing R’s want to do is end/win the abortion debate. If they cared about “babies lives”, every state in the union could have banned thrid trimester abortions in a way to satisfy the Supreme Court. Instead they passed unconstitutional bill after bill to leverage all the votes out of the issue they could.

    The people who vote for these con men need to have their heads examined.

  20. 20.

    ThresherK

    December 19, 2011 at 9:03 am

    @Privatize the Profits! Socialize the Costs!: The same way I think they’d rather do everything to make sure we have a hobbled, non-functioning, run-into-the-ground Amtrak rather than none at all, I think Roe v. Wade serves them the same purpose.

    It’s easy for them to do this when they don’t care about the government functioning, by any meaning of the word. It used to be the badge of honor for a section of righties to brag “The government should protect the country, deliver the mail, and keep the roads in order. And nothing else.”

    Now they can’t even say they want that.

  21. 21.

    blondie

    December 19, 2011 at 11:37 am

    If a fertilized egg has constitutional rights, women cannot have equal rights with men.

    This was also the sentence which struck me. It is wrong. At least in one sense.

    Forced-birth advocates would actually grant an unborn person rights greater than any rights enjoyed by a person already born. None of us (who have already been born) have the right to take our sustenance from the very body of another person. Only the unborn would be granted such rights under a regime of forced-birthers. It is not a right to life they seek, but a right to life literally at the expense of another.

  22. 22.

    blondie

    December 19, 2011 at 11:46 am

    @blondie: Just one quick follow-up, I am assuming for the purposes of argument, without agreeing, that a fetus, embryo, or other unborn “entity” is a person. (just to avoid that detour)

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