Margaret Sanger

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 25, 2013

Margaret Sanger, an early activist for women’s reproductive health was ridiculed, vilified and persecuted. She was far from perfect, but she still can be one of our heroes.

One of my friends from Alabama has a shrine in the hallway of his house. Over a little shelf with candles on it hangs a picture of Jesus. On one side of Jesus hangs another picture, this one of President Jimmy Carter. On the other side is University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant.

One of the sources of our Unitarian Universalist faith is the prophetic words and deeds of great men and women. In believing that there is ongoing revelation about the truth of things, one lets go of thinking that all truth has been laid out for us, that a sacred book could have answers to everything. Truth is revealed through actions and words, not only of ancient people but of people who have made history in our own lifetimes. We also learn from the words and deeds of the people down the street in our neighborhood, sitting next to us on the subway, dancing to the swing band while we play the fiddle.

I have been thinking for years about whose pictures might make up my shrine, if I were to build one. I might have pictures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robin Hood, Margaret Sanger, Bette Midler. I wasn’t raised to have heroes, in the sense of believing someone was without flaws. My father taught me that the line between creation and destruction runs down the middle of every person. He adored JFK, and maybe he thought of him as a hero, but he was well aware of at least a few of the man’s weaknesses. This sense that everyone is flawed has kept me from building a shrine like my friend’s.

It’s getting harder and harder to admire people with your whole heart. We come to realize unsavory things about Thomas Jefferson or Jimmy Carter. Someone says Bette Midler wasn’t kind to the little people on her way to the top. Bear Bryant certainly wasn’t a perfect hero. Apparently Gandhi had a difficult relationship with his children. Should we allow ourselves to enshrine people who do a variety of deeds, some enlightened and some egregious? Perhaps we could keep our sense of purity if we allow as much of their picture in our shrine as represents the percentage ofthem that is admirable, so we would have tom up confetti photographs in a montage.

I would hate to think how I might have to rip off chunks of my photograph if I wanted to be up there amongst my heroes. If! demand perfection of them, surely I must demand it of myself, right?

So I’m stuck. I want to draw from words and deeds of great men and women, but how do you tell who is great and who isn’t? What if I love some of the things Emerson said and did and I don’t love others? What if one of my friends is brave and kind, adventuresome, healthy and skilled, but clumsy at relationships and bad with money? I still admire my friend.

The ancient Greek heroes all had flaws, and their gods had flaws. The characters moving through the Hebrew Scriptures had flaws, yet they are held up to us as models of faithfulness and bravery. Where did I get this idea that the people in my shrine should be perfect? Where did I get the idea that perfection had anything to do with greatness? The revelation of truth, in my life, has come from things people have written and said, from a painting by Mark Rothko, and from music by Josquin des Prez.

I just got a swift and lovely “beyond categorical thinking” lesson from a burly Alaskan man in his seventies. His hair was white and somewhat uncombed, his boots were scuffed and his khakis wrinkled. He was getting a pedicure in the Fairbanks nail salon where we were doing the same. That took me aback a little, but it was when I saw him hand the lady a bottle of autumn bronze polish that I had to admit I had looked at him and judged him as a certain type of man. He showed me handily that I had no idea what type of man he was, and for that I thank him. His picture would be in my shrine for a while, at least.

Suddenly it has occurred to me that those I enshrine don’t have to be the same people year in and year out. Guides need to change as the path changes. I might need a model of insane courage at one point in my life, while at another point I may not be taking the same risks I would were I responsible only for myself. At that point I may want a model of care and gentle thoroughness.

I can relax. Perfection and greatness, I think, are unrelated. I can now respond with equanimity to the people who love to burst my bubble about people I admire by telling me Gandhi’s children hated him, or that Bette Midler was rude to them, or that Robin Hood is fictional. I’ll just mutter “Your mom’s fictional” under my breath and light my candles in peace.

I wanted to start with this, because we’re going to talk about a particular world-changing individual this morning, and what she brought into the world was what it was, with both good and bad consequences. Would she be a hero in my shrine? She certainly affected my life, and I’m betting she has influenced yours. She enabled me to do what I have done with my one wild and precious life.

Margaret Sanger was one of the eleven living children of a woman who had eighteen pregnancies. Her mom was Catholic and her dad was an atheist. “The Village Atheist,” Mike Wallace says in a dismissive tone in his 1957 interview with Sanger, which I watched on YouTube Friday. He had served in the Civil War, which would make anyone an atheist. The family admired Socialists. Margaret and her ten siblings were jeered at on their way to school, called “devil’s children.” Nice way to grow up. It may have made a hostile Mike Wallace a bit less intimidating. Seeing her mother die at 49, her body ravaged by constant pregnancies, she blamed her father for the death. She left home to train as a nurse, but married a nice Leftist architect and settled in the suburbs of New York. She had three children.

When their home burned down, they re-settled in the City. Margaret became involved in socialist politics, in workers’ rights, in the bohemian culture of their neighborhood, Greenwich Village, and started writing a sex education column called “what every mother should know.” She began working among the poor and immigrant families in the Lower East Side” delivering babies for whom there was little room, little food, tending to women who were suffering from botched five-dollar terminations or from trying to do that themselves (I’m speaking a bit indirectly because there aren’t only adults in the room). People begged her for information on how to prevent this happening again and again. The Catholic Church hierarchy was opposed to this information being distributed, but the law was also against it. The Comstock Act had made it illegal since 1873 to speak about birth control, claiming it was an obscenity. Doctors could not send information through the US Mail. Medical textbooks containing this information could not be mailed.

Margaret went to the libraries in New York to research for some information on contraception to give her patients, but couldn’t find anything. In her speeches she told of a patient named Sadie Sachs, whom she met after Sadie had terminated a pregnancy herself. The second time she was called to Sadie’s family’s apartment for the same reason, Sadie didn’t make it. Sanger said she threw her nursing bag into the comer of the room and swore she wouldn’t take one more patient until she had a way to prevent this dangerous and desperate situation for women and their families. Her father disapproved of her crusade for birth control until she reminded him that, if her mother had been able to control her fertility, he might still have his wife. Then she had his support.

With the influence of some of her anarchist friends, among them Emma Goldman, she came to believe that only by freeing women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would fundamental social change take place. She started a monthly eight-page publication called “The Woman Rebel,” and talked about birth control, which was a radical term at the time. She liked how direct it was, and, later, when she founded Planned Parenthood, she disapproved of the name they chose as being too soft. She began writing a sixteen page how-to guide called “Family Limitation” which included graphics and details about how reproduction works and how to interfere with it. “The Woman Rebel” was sent out, but the Postal authorities managed to suppress the first five issues. In August of 1914 she was indicted under the federal anti-obscenity laws. Instead of standing trial, she jumped bail and sailed to England under a pseudonym, ordering the release of “Family Limitation” while en route. In England she was supported by the people who were alarmed about population explosion and the limited food resources of the planet. (It was fascinating to see the 1957 Mike Wallace, hair shining like black patent leather, smoking a cigarette, telling her that, with recent improvements in agriculture, there would be plenty of food, even if they planet’s population increased by and incredible thirty percent.)

When she came back in 1916, she opened a birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Nine days later she was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse. The judge said that women should not have the right to have sex with a sense of security that pregnancy would not result. This conviction was appealed, and another judge ruled that physicians could have the right to prescribe birth control for medical reasons. That was the first victory. She was asked to found another clinic up in Harlem, and she staffed it with all African American doctors and nurses. W.E.B. DuBois was on its board of directors. Some have called any enthusiasm for birth control for people of color a kind of genocide. One strand of shame in this story is that some of the things Sanger has said do indicate that she felt children ofthe infirm, and of prisoners, are marked from the beginning, and that some women should be sterilized.

Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, and middle class middle of the road people (not just Anarchists, Socialists and Bohemians) began to join their voices to hers. And they joined their money to hers. One person can speak loudly, but a group of people? Watch out. Sanger travelled to China and Japan, and worked with a prominent Japanese feminist to strengthen the birth control movement there. In 1929 she founded the organization to lobby for changes in federal birth control laws. Having no success with that, 1932 saw her challenge the law again by ordering a diaphragm from Japan. It was confiscated by the US Government, and the ensuing court battle led to a 1936 ruling that overthrew a significant portion of the Comstock Act. In 1937 the American Medical Association adopted contraception as a normal part of medical care. In 1946 she founded the organization that was to become Planned Parenthood. Her dream was of a pill that a woman could take, just one pill a day, that would prevent contraception. Finally, in the early 50’s, she found a research scientist, Greg Pincus, who had just accomplished in vitro fertilization of rabbits. The American press ran a shadowy picture of him with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a picture whose overtones whispered “mad scientist.” Sanger visited him to talk about a pill. Hormones are the key, he said, but I don’t have the money to do the research, and you certainly don’t. It would take millions.

Sanger enlisted her friend from the women’s suffrage days, Katharine McCormick, who controlled the International Harvester fortune. She wrote Dr. Pincus a check and told him to get whatever he needed. Shortly thereafter was a pill that prevented pregnancy in rabbits. They needed a physician to try it on humans. Enter a handsome Roman Catholic doctor named John Rock, a Harvard educated infertility specialist. He took on the job because, at 64, he had seen too many women whose lives were ruled by unplanned pregnancies. They tested the pill on women. Now here is one of the streaks of shame in the process. They tested in Puerto Rico, where there were more birth control clinics and looser laws about medical testing. The pill worked, but the side effects were rough. Millions of women in the next twenty years went on the pill. 80 percent of women born since 1945 have been on it. The hormonal dosage has been slashed, so the side effects are fewer these days. And the world, for women who have access to contraception, has changed. We can go to school and have relationships at the same time. We can accomplish things in the world with three or four kids that we might not be able to do with ten or twelve.

She is still under attack. State by state, legislatures are closing family planning clinics. Sanger saw enough pregnancies terminated by desperate women to vow to prevent unwanted pregnancies in any way she could. These clinics provide safer terminations, but much more than that, they prevent countless more abortions by giving information and contraceptives to people who need them. It’s monstrous that those who say they are anti-abortion are, by their legislative actions, going to take away the resources poor families need to prevent abortion. Listen to the Mike Wallace interview, and you will see it permeated by the same hostile engine that runs the current legislative push to close down clinics. The engine is fueled by the religious views of a few. It’s so striking to hear this supposedly neutral journalist passionately the position of the Roman Catholic Church, using terms like “sin” and “evil” to refer to sex without fear of conception. It’s obvious because our culture has changed so much in 56 years. You all were part of the change, and you will be part of the changes still to come.

“I feel we have divinity within us, and the more we express the good part of our lives, the more the divinity is expressed within us… All religions are so much alike, when it comes to the divine part of our being.”

People sometimes ask why there aren’t more women throughout history who have achieved great things. There are some, but when you are already achieving the great thing of building new human beings in your body, braving death to give birth, then getting them as best you can to adulthood, there isn’t much time or energy for anything else unless you have the wealth to pay for help with them, or unless you have something that will help you choose when to invite another member into your family.

I could go to seminary and be married. I could become a therapist and work half time, because I could afford pre-school for two kids. Thank you, Margaret Sanger. Thank you for enduring social abuse and for being thrown into jail eight times to make this enormous change. We wouldn’t have agreed on some things, but you are still one of the heroes in my shrine.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776