Ding. Ten seconds later, ding. After that was. Ding, ding, ….. ding. It was my smart phone telling me about texts and emails coming in. I had to ignore it because I was proctoring an exam.
Afterward, I read several messages that boiled down to:
Joy Reid Rocks! Did you see the smack down of [old man, misogynist] Alfonso Aguilar? He was talking smack about Planned Parenthood. Ya gotta see it!
Well, that’s what I was told yesterday while stuck in a classroom. This is what I hunted down:
This is a lie that won’t die. Joy Reid was having none of Alonso Aguilar’s assertions about Planned Parenthood (PP) targeting Latino women for extinction. She shut him down. She wouldn’t hear it. Joy didn’t go into a defense of Planned Parenthood (it would take too long and maybe she thinks Aguilar was a dinosaur). Here’s the scoop on that if you need the PP history).
Sometimes, we need to know more about the back story.
Planned Parenthood’s (PP’s) work started in 1916 when even telling women they could attempt to avoid pregnancy was considered “obscene”. Birth control was considered “dirty” something no one discussed. My mother used birth control starting in the 1940s when she married my father. She had five children. Let that sink in. Can you imagine how many siblings I would have if she didn’t use birth control? The method she used was a diaphragm. It was effective when she used it properly. It never worked well if it was left in the bed stand drawer during sex. She never discussed birth control with me until the 1970s and then, only when we were alone. People who decry Planned Parenthood today are rather clueless about the birth control choices available in the early years of Margaret Sanger’s work up until the revolutionary birth control pill made available in the 1960s that didn’t require a level head in the throes of passion.
Sanger went to jail over the radical idea that women may want to control when they have a child. Women had no choices in 1916. Women didn’t work in gainful employment or they worked for pay until they got married, then they stayed home. Or, maybe they worked for pay after marriage until they became pregnant, then they stayed home. My Mom was no exception to that norm, but my father’s mother found herself to be a single parent in the hostile work world of the 1930s. Planned Parenthood paved the way for women to have careers expanded from the accepted female professions of teacher or nurse.
Planned Parenthood today offers services with full disclosure as to the risks and management for their patient’s reproductive health. The choice is up to the Planned Parenthood patient. Alfonso Aguilar infantilizes Latina women. He makes a patronizing case that women aren’t smart enough to make their own reproductive choices. He thinks Planned Parenthood of 1950 is the Planned Parenthood today. He thinks the women over the years have been duped into having fewer babies. I have a message for Mr. Aguilar: No, women have decided to have only as many children as they can handle and they don’t see the sense in leaving that decision up to fate.
Planned Parenthood’s current organization, the one we know today is different than it’s fore runner that existed over 70 years ago. I understand there was a history of the U.S. forcefully sterilizing people deemed “defective” and that was wrong. At the time sterilization was considered the most effective birth control method (yeesh!) The International Planned Parenthood in the 1940s did promote sterilization to Puerto Rican women under unethical standards (no other form of birth control was available and the child care services offered to women on the U.S. mainland during WWII was denied to Puerto Rico). The program ran from about 1940 to 1970 when Puerto Rican women’s groups justly called foul. That was wrong then and it’s wrong today. Eugenics is a very uncomfortable fact, but the assumption that PP can’t have learned, evolved or stepped up their ethical standards as many organizations did in the aftermath of WWII is willfully ignorant. Eugenics is a dark spot of history, something we do not do today….or do we? The fact that sterilization is “offered” to women under unethical circumstances does require our vigilance, but Planned Parenthood is no longer involved in these shady dealings and hasn’t been involved for decades. Planned Parenthood’s FAQs on sterilization makes clear it’s a permanent procedure and you shouldn’t do it if your life could change and you may want to bear a child in the future.
The right only supports reproductive freedom when it suits their purpose. In this case, the debunked allegation (a couple times over) is that Planned Parenthood targets minorities for eugenics purposes. PP has always offered women of limited means an opportunity to have sex without risking pregnancy (to the best of PP’s ability limited to the best birth control technology of the time). We need to go down history here. The prevailing eugenic “wisdom” from around 1890 to Hitler taking the concept to it’s illogical extreme was that we could breed humans into a utopia. If you believe Planned Parenthood is tainted by eugenic genocidal tendencies, then you also need eschew J. P. Morgan Chase banks, MGM. BASF, GM, Volkswagon, Ford, Alcoa, Siemens, IBM, Bayer, Coca Cola (renamed Fanta in Germany after Pearl Harbor) and more because their behavior 75 years ago as their management teams were just as (if not more) egregious. J.D. Rockefeller funded eugenics work back in the day. Henry Ford got the Grand Cross, the highest award given to foreign nationals by Germany in the 1938. I get it that most history classes ran out of school year before they got to the 20th century, but the facts are there. If you want to know who really exploited the African American and Hispanic communities, may I suggest you study up on men by the name of Frederick Drumpf and Prescott Bush and the Harriman connections. Look into Harvard, Yale, Rockefeller, Carnegie and more. Eugenics was an accepted idea in 1920 (there’s a pro-Eugenics SCOTUS decision from 1927), a hundred years later; eugenics is anathema. To single out one person based upon one quote (twisted to fit a right wing narrative) offends me to my core as a rational, thinking woman. Apparently, Joy Reid agrees with me. Thank you.
The founder of the current Planned Parenthood organization did hang out with people proposing eugenics and the most ardent supporters of eugenics promoted a horrible agenda for the “better good”. Why did Sanger hang out with these awful people? Well, they were “normal” in that time period. It’s complicated and you would have to read up on a lot of bone headed ideas, like lobotomy, that prevailed during the first three decades of the twentieth century to get a fuller picture. I surmise Sanger associated with bigots was to try and educate them to a better way. She also advocated prevention from a point of view formed (based upon) the medical technology of the 1930s-1940s (antibiotics didn’t have widespread use until 1940). And also, because they agreed with her core mission — birth control made available to the masses….something that a lot of people thought should be illegal (read the Comstock Act of 1873 and that it lasted until 1965 and on into the 1990s). Sanger proposed a radical idea that women should have children when they want to have children. She believed reproduction did not have to be left up to fate.
If you take the time to read even 10% of Margaret Sanger’s work (226 boxes -112.75 linear ft.) starting with her book on the birds and the bees; you’ll find she’s not quite what you’d expect. She was born in 1879 and lived until 1966. For her day, she was quite open minded (certainly more open minded than the Harriman’s and the Carnegies) and from her writings, you see her embrace more radical ideas about civil rights as she aged. It took Hitler and Joseph Mengele to form our current ethical standards for medical research. Sanger did not agree with the master race bullshit. She did NOT want to see minority populations extinguished — she wanted every baby to be a wanted baby. If she did promote African American genocide, I doubt Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported her work like he did. He would never have accepted The Planned Parenthood Federation Of America Margaret Sanger Award on May 5, 1966.
If you take the time to research Hispanic women and the use of birth control, you’ll find acculturation and language are major factors. You’ll also find health care access, education and social values also impact Hispanic use of birth control. What the U.S. did to poor women in Puerto Rico was wrong. To use 45 year old history as an excuse to demonize a modern, updated organization doesn’t pass muster. Planned Parenthood advocates using LARCs and the birth control pill over sterilization, but Aguilar doesn’t want to admit that fact is true today. He’s stuck in the past and Planned Parenthood looks to the future.
I trust women. I trust black women and Latino women to do their own homework and know what a benefit Planned Parenthood is to all women and their families. Planned Parenthood is at the forefront of preventing unintended pregnancy. We don’t need Alfonso Aguilar telling us what to think. His ideas are old, out of date and he sounds like an paternalistic, old man mansplaining a snow job. I stand with joy Reid, I’m not going to allow that.