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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Last week saw the funerals of two extraordinary women, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan.
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It struck me this week that we had the funerals of two extraordinary women, Coretta Scott King and Betty Friedan. Each had respectful obituaries in all the papers and on TV. The similarities end there. King’s funeral was a major media and political event. Friedan’s wasn’t. Ten thousand people attended King’s funeral, 300 attended Friedan’s. King’s body lay in state and 100,000 mourners filed by and thousands more lined the streets to the church as her casket passed by. There was no lying in state for Friedan, and no mourners lining the streets.
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The last few weeks have been busy ones for fictionalized memoirs. Sam Alito’s performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a masterful display of myth-making that would have made James Frey and JT LeRoy, the newly crowned kings, or queens, of the fictionalized memoir, proud.
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This week the Congress finished work on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), reauthorizing it for another five years with a healthy (20%) increase in funding as well as new programs to address and prevent the problems that domestic violence causes women and children (but not men!). Women’s groups hailed the passage of the law, and the sponsors.
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