ABSTRACT
Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing diaphragms to immigrant women from a makeshift clinic in a tenement storefront in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. When she died nearly 50 years later, the cause for which she defiantly broke the law had achieved international stature. Although still a magnet for controversy, she was widely eulogised as one of the great emancipators of her time. A visionary if sometimes quixotic thinker, a relentless agitator and gifted organiser, Sanger lived just long enough to savour the historic US Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which established privacy protections as a framework for legalising basic reproductive rights. Elderly and frail, she watched Lyndon Johnson finally incorporate family planning into US social welfare and foreign policy programmes, although he refused her a much coveted Presidential Medal of Freedom, for fear of provoking controversy with Catholic voters. She saw the birth control pill developed and marketed by a team of doctors and scientists she had long encouraged and found the money to support. She watched a global family planning movement descend from her own international efforts. The years since have not been as good to Sanger, even as they have witnessed measurable progress for women in achieving reproductive freedom. Today, outside of a small minority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of the Middle East, which are now high-profile exceptions to the global norm, a typical woman bears no more than two children over the course of several years and spends another 30 to 40 years avoiding pregnancy. More than 60 million women around the world use oral contraception daily, a dramatic increase since organised interventions began. The right of women to plan their families remains at least for the time being enshrined in the US Constitution and in international human rights law, where it is widely recognised as a necessary condition to improve women’s status, and in turn to sustain democratic institutions, promote social and economic progress and help sustain fragile environments. Still, universal standards for women’s human rights offer no sure cure for violations that persist with uncanny fortitude and often unimaginable cruelty in so many places around the world. Harsh fundamentalisms are resurgent in many countries, where women’s bodies remain an arena of intense political conflict, as a perhaps predictable response to the social dislocations resulting from changing gender roles and to the larger assaults on traditional cultures from the many real and perceived injustices of modernisation and globalisation. Counted among these are the abuses of technologically driven and demographically targeted population programmes,
which have spawned understandable outrage and, despite many well-realised efforts at reform in recent years, continue to spark controversy, especially around Sanger to whom they are linked, however indirectly. Even in the USA, decades of substantial progress by women have fuelled a fierce backlash. With an intensity that few would have predicted in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected as America’s first pro-choice president, a powerful conservative minority has eroded abortion rights along with funding for family planning at home and abroad, while dollars have surged instead for abstinence programmes known to be ineffective and often harmful. We have tolerated the impunity of daily campaigns of intimidation and outright violence against courageous providers of contraception and abortion. And Sanger herself has become a collateral victim of this frenzy, her reputation savaged by rightwing zealots who deliberately misrepresent what has been a heated but usually respectful academic discourse about the history of birth control to circulate scurrilous, false accusations about her on the internet.2
