How family planning saves and improves livesHow family planning saves and improves lives

In response to Dean Bruckner’s letter of March 3, let me, as former grant-writer at the Seattle affiliate, provide context for Planned Parenthood’s position on reproductive health and rights.

Obstetric fistula in Sub-Saharan Africa is often associated with the genital mutilation of girls before puberty who are then married off very young. Without emergency obstetric care, labor can last a week, rupturing the tissues around the birth canal. Now the reason any person with half a brain would not want women to turn to a Catholic or fundamentalist charity for treatment is because it’s essential to make contraception available.

Though a wife leaking urine and feces is often abandoned by her husband, if she did become pregnant again, she would need a caesarian section with perhaps no access to a hospital. Core strategies to prevent fistulas include delaying first pregnancies, spacing births, and limiting total pregnancies. Abstinence-based family planning is not a realistic option for many women who are powerless in a society that doesn’t value women. “Not tonight, dear, I have a headache…”?

Moreover, health workers on the front lines of AIDS prevention have for decades condemned the church for its morally indefensible ban on condoms. Yet only in late November 2010 did Pope Benedict soften the official stance for male and female prostitutes. Not, however, for married women at risk of HIV. Catholicism’s insistence that procreative Russian Roulette play itself out at the expense of a vulnerable woman’s health and life is unconscionable. Call it assault with a deadly doctrine. Serious health professionals approach women’s health holistically, not holily.

The World Bank recognizes that each year 529,000 women around the world die from pregnancy-related causes, and more than 10 million suffer severe illnesses and disabilities. Certainly abortion should be safe and legal everywhere. But the primary goal is to reduce the need for abortions by improving the lives of women and girls through education, job opportunities, enhanced social status, and the ability to delay and space childbearing.

Time for priests and Talibangelists to butt out! And that includes their female enablers, whether passing draconian legislation in Congress or sexually mutilating little girls in Africa. Women need the space and dignity to be co-equal members of the human race rather than mere breeders subject to involuntary servitude to eggs, cell clusters and fetuses. The institutional mystification of sex and childbearing requires women to give up their personal autonomy and sacrifice their bodies and lives to a religio-cultural abstraction serving patriarchal ends.

The bald assertion that Planned Parenthood’s lead product line is abortion does not make it so. According to the latest figures (2009), abortions accounted for just 3 percent of its services to 3 million patients. At the Seattle affiliate, we cheered loudly when abortions went down after the state partnered with us to provide free contraception to an additional 50,000 women each year. In Ohio, Planned Parenthood has been at the forefront of the effort to get the General Assembly to pass the Ohio Prevention First Act. What part of “prevention” first don’t they get?

Planned Parenthood exists to help millions of women prevent unintended pregnancy, and to add a layer of health care for the uninsured. Middle-class women can get contraception and abortions at their doctors’ offices. So if most Planned Parenthood patients are low-income, and so many are from minority groups, this is an indictment of the extreme social, racial and income disparities in our country, and of our loony health-care “system.”

Unlike fake clinics, Planned Parenthood informs already pregnant women of all their options. If the number of abortions outweighs births, this is a reflection of these women’s own decisions. The woman may be a victim of rape, incest or domestic violence, or have a serious health problem making pregnancy dangerous. She may be unemployed. A foreclosure may have crammed the family into a motel room. She may have seen her life wash away in post-Katrina flooding, or may be a student for whom the door of opportunity closes abruptly. Behind every abortion is a woman’s own story.

At the turn of the millennium, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared birth control one of the top 10 public health achievements of the 20th century. The reasons are not hard to find. In a chapter entitled “Conscripted Motherhood” in her 1922 book “Pivot of Civilization,” Margaret Sanger looks at the appalling conditions under which a woman born into poverty and drudgery, uneducated, dislocated from the support system of her home country, would have to endure 13 pregnancies in 17 years, with only two children surviving. Whether working 10-12 hours a day in a Brooklyn factory or the cotton fields of Mississippi, or taking in laundry in an Ohio coal town, these worn-out women (when they survived childbirth) were our grandmothers and great grandmothers, our aunts and great aunts. How quickly we forget!

When you distill Sanger’s “eugenicist” statements, it’s clear that she was advocating intentional motherhood instead of haphazard procreation that amounts to slavery. She believed that only women who were ready – and could care for them – would have healthy children.

At a time when women did not yet have the vote and were still the property of their husbands, fathers, brothers and the government – and would remain, as their oppressors today would have it, the property of the fetus – Sanger understood, profoundly, that “no woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.”

Editor’s note: Lyrr Descy of rural Athens served as development officer for grants and foundation relations at the Seattle-based Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest from 1999 to 2007. She’s writing here in her private capacity.

REPLY TO THIS COMMENT

Dean_Bruckner

Ms. Descy,

Eugenecist Margaret Sanger wrote quite a bit, much of which is still appropriately shocking to us today. Here's another sample:

"The [black] minister's work [as Planned Parenthood's mouthpiece] is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." [1]

It's not clear from this quotation whether she wanted to exterminate the race or merely prevent new black citizens from being born, but her condescending attititude and slave-master talk ("rebellious") reveal her disdain for non-whites.

You also misrepresent the truth of the fistula controversy. As Chris Smith states in [2], Planned Parenthood ally Rep. Crowley's push would have reduced the number of fistula centers in order to drive out pro-life competition and preserve "access to contraception" ideological purity, at the expense of African women:

"During committee mark-up on H.R. 2601, Rep. JOE CROWLEY (D-NY) amended my language in H.R. 2601, to mandate that the new centers 'expand access to contraception.' At first blush, the language looked OK, but it became very clear that it would have had the dire consequence of excluding certain faith-based health providers who, while deeply committed to mitigating the pain of fistula, would be barred from receiving funds. For example, the Crowley language would have excluded NGOs and church-based organizations opposed to chemicals that act as abortifacients—those that prevent implantation of a newly created human life—from getting any U.S. funds. Had my amendment not succeeded, several hospitals selected by USAID as 'fistula centers' would have lost funding. The amendment I offered that passed on the floor in July corrected this problem so that the faith-based sites including those already identified for the program by USAID—and perhaps others in future—could participate and provide assistance to women in need." [2]

Your name calling ("fake clinics", "Talibangelists") simply reveals the weakness of your own facts and the ideological inheritance of contempt for others you've received from Margaret Sanger. Why did you not address PP spearheading measures to force all health care workers to participate in abortions by eliminating conscience clauses? For all your talk against slavery, you seem to support forced servitude for some.

I'll save the greatest weakness in your arguments for later.

[1] http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/special_issues/population/the_negro_project.htm

[2] http://www.house.gov/list/press/nj04_smith/crpparenthood.html

Lyric

1) There you go again, Mr Bruckner, bald assertions that are unsupported. Whatever Concerned Women for America and the nameless "many people" believe about Sanger's project is irrelevant. CWA has an axe to grind and a world view to defend. What matters is what Sanger herself believed and said. And it is perfectly clear that she did NOT want to exterminate the Negro race, but needed a credible messenger to help make the case for family planning.

It is intellectually dishonest to use her actual words to imply the opposite of what she intended. She did not want the black population to misconstrue the goal of a family planning project which might play into fears of wiping them out. This same fear informs the debate today about marriage between same sex couples, and of course abortion. It is very easy to manipulate these fears because long-standing racial discrimination was and remains real (eg Tuskegee syphilis study). The Mormon Church did this very effectively in pushing Proposition 8 in California -- pretty ironic (and cynical) coming from a sect that until recently excluded African Americans from membership.

And why this fixation with Margaret Sanger some 80 or 90 years ago?

2) It's plain silly to talk about ideological purity when women's lives and welfare are at stake. It's the anti-contraception movement which would impose its ideological purity on women who need other options. Nobody is forcing these women to use contraception. But to withhold the information and the wherewithal to improve their quality of life (or save their life) is monstrous. Prevention and treatment of fistulas goes way beyond surgery. You don't just patch them up and send them back to their existing lives without the ability to change their circumstances and prevent a recurrence. THEIR CHOICE.

And why this fixation with Representative Chris Smith, who sheds crocodile tears without considering the fundamentals that underlie the lives of women? Saint Christopher Smith is a Catholic who is toeing the Church's line. How does this make him an authority on women's health and lives?

3) Crisis pregnancy centers are notorious for employing people who have no medical qualifications at all, and whose mandate is to exert psychological pressure on women to carry their pregnancy to term. Many women who go to them don't even know what their agenda is when they walk in the door.

Just like your fistula clinics, these centers give women a hug, a pat on the back, and a supply of diapers and send them out feeling "supported." They spread misinformation using discredited pseudo-science -- and lots and lots of guilt. But that's a specialty of religion, right?

Certainly I feel contempt for fake clinics, as well as Talibangelists (I don't include all people of faith). They deserve nothing less. The reasons are all around me. My case is made for me day after day as I witness the onslaught against women by people who would control their lives. I didn't need Margaret Sanger for that. Do you suppose we can't think for ourselves? Ah, but then Catholics and Talibangelists aren't required to think for themselves, are they? They have to defer to their sect's orthodoxy.

The fundamental question behind my op-ed piece is: Who owns the bodies and lives of women? Not Chris Smith, not Pat Robertson, Not Tony Perkins, not James Dobson, and not the Pope.

Dear Lyric, or Ms. Lyrr Descy,

I think we've been arguing past each other. You don't answer my points, and apparently I'm not fully answering yours. In the interest of honest communication, I'll try to address yours first, with honest if blunt reply for each.

1. Your fundamental point is that women have the right either to love and nurture, or to dispose of, if necessary, the fetus within them. OK so far? I'll even give you that a woman has the right to control her own body.

However, here's where we part ways. A woman does not, and should not, have the sole, absolute, and unquestioned right to rip apart another human being, without anesthesia, even if it is trespassing. If the neighborhood kid trespasses on my lawn, I can't shoot him and cut him in parts, even if I didn't invite him over first, or even if he moves into my house. An absolute right of life and death was the core power of the Roman paterfamilias, the family patriarch. Don't you recognize the irony of your position?

2. You say that there is pseudoscience involved. I'm not sure what you mean since you didn't provide any examples.

I'll offer two firmly established scientific facts for starters. The first is that the fetus is 100% human from the instant of conception, with unique DNA. It is just what a human is at that stage of life, like you and I were. It is alive. Without something being done to end its life, she will become fully grown, just like you and me, and can play sonatas or type comments on a website. The second fact is that by 8 weeks gestation, the fingers and toes are fully formed and the heart is beating. It is recognizable as a human being. The Ohio House received testimony last week from two fetal heartbeats of 9 weeks and 15 weeks of gestation. [1] For me, this is enough to rule out abortion on demand in law.

Is there some other scientific fact in question?

3. You say that pregnancy resource centers are malignant organizations that do not have the best interests of women at heart, accept unqualified people and lie to women about their options. It's been pretty clear that I feel the same way in all those particulars about Planned Parenthood. Is that a fair characterization from both sides? I'll go further and say that not every one involved in PP clinics is like that.

I guess to resolve this we should each do two things. One is to visit the "other side", and the other is to provide some examples. Some PP clinics have been in the media lately covering up underage pregnancies by older men as exposed by Lila Rose (some on my side object to the undercover journalism technique, please note). But I'm unaware of counterexamples. I know that there is nothing fake about the Athens Pregnancy Resource Center; you can tell that from your first visit to their website. They love women and babies, but sometimes that is telling them what they don't want to hear.

4. You say that to care about women, all pro-life clinics, whether Catholic or not, should offer contraception, and if they don't, they are callous and uncaring.

I can't accept this. First,I assert that the contraception training & protection provided by PP actually leads to more underage sexual activity, and with it more pregnancies and more diseases. Teenagers won't wear a coat in the snow if they think their friends disapprove. The condom project is flawed from the start.

4. You consider Margaret Sanger as a role model.

I can't come to any other conclusion than that she was a eugenicist. CWA is not making stuff up. Here are a bunch of quotes that make my point; can you impeach them? [2] The reason that she is relevant is that her agenda seems to be alive and well in PP because of the sheer number of black and hispanic women who are abortion their babies through PP.

But enough about my assertion--what I hear you saying is that both the the particulars of religious faith and the honestly developed position that providing birth control actually undermines women's health in the long run, are irrelevant and despicable, as are the people who hold them. The names you use say it. The sarcasm you use underscores it. Frankly you don't sound like a very nice person. Of course, you would say, and have said, the same about me.

Now, would you do me the courtesy of responding to my points that you have not answered:

1. PP services to its clients may be overwhelmingly contraception and non-abortion by the numbers of visits but the #1 source of income is from abortion and PP would exist as we know it without that income, and so PP protects it for economic as well as other more ideological reasons.

2. PP provides 180 abortions for every adoption and about 12 to 14 abortions for every woman provided prenatal care. This distances them from what most people see as love and concern, and is why, for the first time in decades, that more Americans--especially young Americans--call themselves pro-life than pro-choice.

3. PP is leading efforts to strip conscience provisions away for all health care providers, essentially taking away their livelihoods if they refuse. This reinforces the perception that people take away from my #1 and #2 points above

And a personal note, with no offense meant. It sounds like you've been hurt by some people who you identify as pro-life, and still carry a heavy burden wtih you. It's not within my responsibility or my capability to do anything about that, but I wish you well in coming to terms with that in a positive way. I wish you well.

[1] http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20110314/NEWS01/103140304/Ashland-woman-helps-promote-heartbeat-bill-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Frontpage

[2] http://www.gateway.org/content/pdf/quotes.pdf

Edit needed for entry above--move para beginning "But enough about my assertion..." to before para 4 about Margaret Sanger.

Editing in 6 point font is challenging.

More edits:

5. You consider Margaret Sanger...

1. "...PP would NOT exist without that income."

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