(pause while I put my head on the desk and take a deep breath)
Because Margaret Sanger advocated for birth control for the poor does not make her a racist. Why? Because what she advocated was women having a CHOICE. A choice to have kids or a choice to not. And she recognized that poor women, many of whom were are are minorities, are the ones most desperately in need of that choice. She wasn't marching into ghettos with a gun and forcing women to submit to insertion of IUDs, you know. She was setting up birth control clinics in poor neighborhoods and letting poor women decide whether they wanted to go to the clinic. Because poor women have always had fewer options than rich women. Giving the poor options makes her racist, because those poor women choose to improve their economic lot by having fewer kids? What? On what planet does that make sense?
In fact, Sanger was quoted as finding abortion repellent- her big thing was avoiding unwanted pregnancy in the first place. But the right-wingers who are convinced things would be perfect if only all women could live in dread fear of getting pregnant every time women have sex, will twist and turn and ignore the complicated person she was, in order to evade the issue of poor women not having choices when it comes to their reproductive health.
How many anti-abortion advocates are out there pushing for mandatory contraceptive education? Or guaranteed health care for kids? Day care, for working moms? Oh right, none of them. They aren't interested in saving babies; they're interested in pregnancy being a punishment, a very financially challenging punishment, for sexually active women. Real pro-life, huh?
And for the record, abortions make up a very, very small part of Planned Parenthood's business. Most of it is providing health care, including contraception, to women. And they do a good job of it, and I had friends in high school who avoided becoming pregnant at 15 thanks to PP's only charging them what they could afford for birth control. The one I'm still in touch with is now a happy mother at 37- having had a kid when she was ready.
Which is not to say Sanger didn't have some pretty harsh ideas about the severely disabled and their rights to reproduce, but that's like saying Faulkner's personal feelings about African-Americans (someone who, it can be argued, did have racial issues) means his books sucked. People are products of their times and you can't throw out great achievements because the person wasn't perfect, or believed in some ideas, popular at the time, which we now know were incorrect.
Read the woman's own words (in context)- not quotes from a completely different writer she was said to have agreed with.
(Aww... I've spent so much time getting my political fix from balloon-juice.com I forgot how much I missed you guys...
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