Alexander Sanger, Avabai Wadia, and Prime Minister I. K. Gujral, shaking hands

Avabai Wadia, a distinguished leader of the IPPF, died July 11, 2005 at the age of 91. She didn’t seem that old. She had, like her friend and my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, a countenance made youthful by her lifetime of devotion to the great cause we all work for. Her zest for our cause was with her until the very end. In 1998, I traveled to Bombay (now Mumbai) to deliver a speech to the FPAI. Avabai was gracious enough to introduce me to the audience and to remark that I was a much better speaker than my grandmother was! I don’t know if I won over the audience, but her flattery won me over.
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By Dahlia Weinstein, “Luncheon promotes teen responsibility”

The late Margaret Sanger gained worldwide attention as founder of the American birth-control movement, Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She developed family planning efforts throughout the international community.

Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains has followed in Sanger’s footsteps, helping women, men and teens make choices about reproduction for more than 85 years.

Individuals have followed in Sanger’s footsteps, too, including her grandson, Alexander Sanger, who served as president of Planned Parenthood of New York City and its international arm, The Margaret Sanger Center International, from 1991 to 2000.

Congratulations to PPNYC and their new ad campaign. It’s right out of Beyond Choice! Follow this link: http://www.ppnyc.org/services/planningispower.html.

Here is the full speech delivered at The Rubin Museum on May 19th (click here to read the entire speech), an excerpt follows below:

The timing of this session is fortuitous because just this week the World Economic Forum released a report on “Women’s Empowerment—Measuring the Global Gender Gap”. In many areas the gap is wide if not abysmal. The report measured economic participation, economic advancement, political participation, educational participation and health status and wellbeing.

I am more accustomed to dealing with the issue, where are the women? In my world at Planned Parenthood, we are faced with over 500,000 women who die every year around the world from pregnancy-related causes, including 70,000 from botched abortions. We are faced with just half the women of the world having access to modern contraceptives and as a result with half the pregnancies on the planet, including in this country, being unintended. We are faced with the increasing feminization of the HIV epidemic, where half of the people living with HIV are women, and in sub-Saharan Africa it is 60% and rising. We are faced with the explosion in STDs around the planet and the medical fact that 70% of women with a STD are asymptomatic, whereas only 10% of men are, thereby making women less likely to be treated. We deal with sex bias against girls before, during and after birth. The sex ratios in China and India are heavily skewed towards the male child. The issues of male violence against women and lack of education, political and business opportunities for women are well known.

The health and rights issues of men are less well known, but they are there. I come to the issues of men with some biases and skepticism, but with increasing concern. The picture of male versus female health is a mixed one. There are few clear answers. We know that male behavior leads to deleterious health consequences for men and for women. I am convinced that we are not going to solve female health and rights issues, without addressing those of men too. Gender is an important lens with which we should view these problems, but it is not the only lens.

The question we have to answer for men is, What’s in it for the men?

Click here to read the entire speech.

Click here to read Jim Crawford’s story “Planned Parenthood Crowd Hears Message of Change” in the Amarillo Globe-News, excerpted below.

“These are crucial times for Planned Parenthood and abortion and birth control,” said Sanger, a New York lawyer who also is chairman of International Planned Parenthood Council and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund.

“Politically, we’re going backward. More and more state legislatures are restricting access to birth control.”

In the early 1900s, Margaret Sanger advocated that a woman’s body is hers to govern.

“A woman is the best judge as to when to give birth,” he said. “Every culture in the world has abortions. They should be safe, legal and rare. Our job is eliminating shame if there is an unwanted pregnancy.”

The silence was deafening. Not the silence after Terri Schiavo died and the pontificating and posturing were finally silenced. No, I mean the silence from the pro-choice movement while she was “alive” and the (Im)moral Minority grabbed microphones and headlines as they preened and strutted their way into well-deserved infamy. They went too far and they did it all on their own. Perhaps the pro-choice movement (and the Democratic Party) knew enough to give them the rope and let them hang themselves. If so, then good work! Continue reading →

A recent photo taken at an IPPF event in Portland, Oregon on March 17, 2005.

You can now read the full text from my recent address in Portland, Oregon by clicking here (http://www.alexandersanger.com/state_2005.html). Here’s an excerpt:

In the midst of international crises—Iraq, Iran, Korea, the Tsunami, HIV/AIDS in Africa—just to name a few, the central role of demographic and population concerns to the well being of the planet threatens to be forgotten, overlooked or ignored. We at Planned Parenthood tend to focus on lowering fertility and giving women the means and services to do this. Over the past two decades some researchers and policy makers in the demographic arena have tended to focus on the population and fertility decline in many countries of the world, rather than on the continuing high fertility in some developing countries. The implications of smaller families and impending population decline in Europe is by now old news, the implications being fewer workers, reduced economic growth, if any growth at all, and the need for increased immigration to pick up the slack and pay pension benefits to workers who now retire at age 60 or earlier. We are seeing the beginnings of the same story here as our President tries to drum up public support for a “social security crisis” caused by fewer workers being available to make the payroll tax payments necessary to support our elders in the years ahead. Immigration “reform” is never far from the political agenda in America or in other developed countries, nor is emigration in developing countries with its attendant brain drain and loss of productive workers but offset by cash remittances home that are a major source of local GNP. Population growth and decline are spread unevenly around the planet and in many parts of the world population growth is proceeding upwards at a rapid rate. There are also other demographic issues that cannot be overlooked—-an imbalance in the sex ratio, abnormally high death rates in some countries due to AIDS, just to name two. What is a planet to do?

You can also see a recent article on page 18 of TEEN Speak magazine.