In Chapter Two of Beyond Choice, on pages 66-67 in the hardback, I discussed, in the section on eugenics, the abortion/crime controversy, citing the 2001 study by Donohue and Levitt, which found that the legalization of abortion resulted, twenty or so years later, in a reduction in the crime rate because potential criminals were being aborted rather than born. I also cited contradictory studies that found no effect, or the opposite effect, of abortion on crime. I concluded saying that “The best that can be said is that the case for the alleged causal connection between the legalization of abortion and a decrease in crime rates is unproven.”
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Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court, in an unanimous decision, ruled that a doctor, prior to performing an abortion, was not required to tell his patient that the embryo inside her was “a complete, separate, unique, irreplaceable human being,” with the implication that abortion he was about to perform was the same as murder. The patient, Rosa Acuna, had filed a malpractice action against her doctor, Sheldon Turkish, after her abortion, claiming emotional distress, and asserted that he should have told her, as part of the informed consent process, that it was a “scientific and medical fact” that the abortion would result in the “killing of an existing human being.” The plaintiff claimed further that her doctor had a duty “to explain that the procedure (would) terminate the life of a living member of the species Homo sapiens, that is a human being.”
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Historians and others who should know better keep misquoting my grandmother. Here is the latest example from Harvard. My response comes first and the offending article follows.
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Please use the following link to access the complete Power Point presentation on Abortion in the United States:
http://www.guttmacher.org/presentations/ab_slides.html

In winter 2001, the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York City sponsored an exhibit, “Perfecting Mankind: Eugenics and Photography,” where posted on the wall was a quotation ascribed to my grandmother, Margaret Sanger: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.” My grandmother never said this. The quotation actually came from a 1919 editorial in American Medicine that followed my grandmother’s review of an article. This quotation has been repeatedly and falsely attributed to my grandmother over the decades since. After I objected, the ICP promptly removed the offending quotation from the exhibit, but only after countless gallery visitors had seen it.
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The pro-choice movement is claiming victory in the 2006 Midterm Elections. We turned back a draconian abortion law in South Dakota and two mandated parental involvement initiatives in California and Oregon, all with about a 55-45 margin. Pro-choice forces picked up three new Senate seats and about 22 new House seats with some House races still undecided.
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Recently Democrats in Pennsylvania in a primary election overwhelmingly nominated anti-choice Bob Casey as their candidate to unseat anti-choice Republican Senator Rick Santorum. Many pro-choice Pennsylvanians called Casey “the lesser of two evils”. On the same week, the Vatican invoked the “lesser of two evils” justification to explain its investigation into the permissibility of using condoms to halt the transmission of HIV.
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Rosalind P. Petchesky recently wrote a piece entitled On the Unstable Marriage of Reproductive and Sexual Rights for Conscience Magazine. Below is my response which Conscience printed in their current Summer 2006 issue.
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I’ve never been to the Dakotas, either North or South. My grandmother’s, Margaret Sanger’s, uncle, William E. Purcell, moved to North Dakota from New Jersey, practiced law and eventually represented the state in the U.S. Senate from 1910 to 1911. He didn’t care much for my grandmother’s cause. Neither do his political descendants in South Dakota, which recently passed a law criminalizing abortion.
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