Thursday, January 25, 2018

1990sFest: Day Six—"The struggle never ends for Planned Parenthood"


Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) by Barbara Kruger (The Broad, Los Angeles)



     I'm on vacation this week. One great thing about this job is meeting fascinating people who've spent their long lives doing important work. Peggy Carr passed away only in 2016, at age 103. 


     Peggy Carr was born in 1913 on Chicago's South Side, the third child in four years.
     "My poor mother," said Carr, 83, who has devoted much of her long life to helping women plan their families through an organization that came to be known in Chicago, 50 years ago this month, as Planned Parenthood.
     Three years after Carr was born, her child-weary mother slipped off to a South Side meeting held by contraception pioneer Margaret Sanger.
     Sanger was the New York nurse who started the movement leading to Planned Parenthood and, it might be argued, should be listed as one of the founders of 20th century life, for good or ill, along with Freud and Darwin and Marx.
     Carr's mother had to go in secret because in 1916 a woman could be arrested in Chicago not only for speaking about contraception, but also for hearing about it.
     That sort of oppression is worth remembering in the complicated present, since those who moon for the days of farm wives and their 12 kids churning butter forget that misery often went hand in hand.
     Peggy Carr remembers. While opponents of Planned Parenthood often give lip service to their love of children, sympathy for the plight of children led Carr, and others, to form the group in the first place.
     "My mother was president of the Chicago Orphan Asylum," said Carr. "Here were these neglected, unwanted children. We used to have the children come and play with us; the old orphanage was not far from where we lived on 48th Street. It was always so sad for these children nobody cared for."
     Then, as now, society found it more convenient to ignore unwanted children than to try to keep them from being born.
     "Lots of convents had a revolving door, you put the baby on a little shelf and rang a bell," said Carr. "They came and turned the door around and took the baby away."
     In 1939, Carr joined what was then the Illinois Birth Control League and served as its last president. At the time — and, in fact, until the 1960s — most states had laws either banning or restricting the spread of information about contraception.
     "Women begged their doctors to tell them how not to have another baby, and the doctors told them to tell their husbands to sleep on the roof," said Carr.
     Acting in the margins of the law, the Birth Control League held clinics and women just seemed to know when to show up.
     "They had never heard of birth control, but somewhere they found out and came to us. They may have already had nine children when they came, it meant so much to the women," said Carr. "You saw constant child bearing -- women had 10, 12 babies, and so many babies died."
     Though not a professionally trained nurse, Carr would help in the clinics to teach wives about reproduction and how to prevent it using methods available at the time, condoms and diaphragms.
     "Our clinics were only for married women," she said. "It never occurred to me that we would offer birth control to unmarried women."
     Even when money for professional health workers was available, the workers were not always willing in the early years.
     "You could hardly get anyone to work 50 years ago," she said. "They'd hardly dare tell what they were doing. It took a lot of courage."
     Carr remembers when Red Cross volunteers got in trouble for attending Planned Parenthood programs.
     "They were told never again to appear at a Planned Parenthood program in uniform," she said. "That's how much we were shunned."
     She also remembers the husband of one important Planned Parenthood advocate being called on the carpet and told that unless his wife curtailed her activities, he'd be fired.
     Another longtime Planned Parenthood worker, Geneva Hayden, who joined in 1966, remembers there being a constant struggle just to find a room to hold a clinic.
     "In Markham, we had to set up in the judge's chambers," said Hayden, 60. "There was no other place."
     To focus on the dismal past is to imply the situation is much better today, and it isn't. Simply because you can listen to Peggy Carr without fearing jail doesn't mean that her message isn't blunted in other ways.
     Ad agencies, for instance, that do pro-bono work for other social service groups still shun Planned Parenthood out of fear that clients will object.
     Television, which runs the vilest garbage, can barely bring itself to run ads for condoms. And while accepting the "Life: What a Wonderful Choice" ads from the religious right, TV stations refuse Planned Parenthood's most benign offerings, such as the one that boldly states: "Children have the best chance at a healthy life when they're born into a loving home."
     With such opposition, the next half century will hardly be easier. But as Carr noted, observing a fact that seems to elude so many of Planned Parenthood's opponents: "You can't go back."
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 22, 1997

10 comments:

  1. Neil - They still think that they can "go back" and they will embrace anyone they think will help them accomplish that. That's why I suppose that so many evangelicals voted for Trump and so many leaders even today continue to support Trump. They've embraced political power instead of the power of the gospel but that's another topic. What amazes me is that they think they can change the minds of the public but that's hard to do when you make pro-life equivalent to pro-Trump.

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  2. Too bad that just a few people with extremist views have been able to dictate the terms of discourse about having babies.

    john

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  3. "Pro-lifers" who want to defund Planned Parenthood are sometimes confronted with the fact that PP clinics are often the only alternative for low-income women who need tests and referrals for breast and uterine cancer, STDs, etc. One group countered with a long list of alternative treatment centers. Upon examination, almost all of these "alternatives" turned out to be dentists' offices, food pantries and other nonsensical suggestions.

    And let's not forget that genius Jon Kyl, former U.S. senator from Arizona, who stated on the floor of the Senate that "99 percent of what Planned Parenthood does is related to abortion." When it was pointed out that the proportion of PP's budget spent on abortion was actually 3 percent, his office responded that it "was not intended to be a factual statement."

    Those people are simply incapable of making factual statements.

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    1. "was not intended to be a factual statement." That's GOP-speak for "his intent was to lie."
      284 days till the midterms.

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  4. That Margaret Sanger is not given more credit for her contributions to society is a shame. And to read this column today falls right in with the current climate of women stepping up to be heard on topics of abuse, pay equality and demanding to be heard. Thank you to Ms.Sanger and those who followed.

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  5. Brings back memories of Junior High School, well before that epochal event in 1963, and a class in what then passed for sex education for boys, taught by the coach, Mr Sorenson. The dear man evidently saw as his primary mission warning us against the practice of what was then quaintly termed "self abuse." His problem was, having done due diligence, he found it necessary to dispel as myths such notions as that it would cause hair to grow on one's palms, cause insanity or keep a person from having children. Than left him with no negatives beyond it being "not a many thing to do."

    When we tried to bring up the more interesting topic of congress with the opposite sex, he could only offer that we should defer that until we got married or went in the Army. In those post WW 11 days the latter suggestion was probably not as funny as it now seems.

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    1. Except for it probably being a decade or more later (the JFK years), and his name not being Sorenson, I could have had the same coach my freshman year. Buzz in the locker room was that he had once been a minister. His advice, intoned with a total poker-face was as follows: "When I get those urges, I take a good shower, and then I feel rosy all over." He lost it when one of the wise-guys called out "Who's Rosy?"

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    2. Well, that's a winner! You had wittier wise guys than we did another decade later, I gotta say. Just curious, Grizz. You've certainly been a welcome addition to the EGD Commentariat -- how did you happen upon Neil's blog over there in the Buckeye state, if I may ask?

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    3. Thanks for the shout-out. Sorry for the year-long delay...just saw this. Not a native Ohioan...moved east of Chicago in '92. I grew up in both the city and the suburbs, and lived in the area for a total of 42 years. Used to read "Bobwatch" (sp?) in the Reader...I actually knew Bob Greene at one time...and read the Sun-Times online after leaving Chicago.

      But when I was gifted with a copy of "You Were Never In Chicago" a few Christmases ago, and loved it, I eventually stumbled onto this blog. Lurked for a long time, then posted about "sort of knowing" Royko. Hell, I didn't KNOW him, exactly, but I did piss next to him once in the men's room at the Billy Goat, and was never stupid enough to make the mistake of sitting on his personal barstool.

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  6. Raises that seemingly impossible question again: Are babies part of a biological process involving a fertilized egg, or did God love us so much that he put a baby in Mommy's tummy?

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