Author: alexandersanger

As Goes New Jersey… We Hope.

| alexandersanger

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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Eugenics, Race, and Margaret Sanger Revisited: Reproductive Freedom for All?

| alexandersanger

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 Lesser of Two Evils?

| alexandersanger

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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South Dakota Mon Amour

| alexandersanger

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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