On Sanger and sexual choice

We readily acknowledge that Sanger was not a saint. She held views that, while less controversial during her lifetime, we also consider offensive. Her role in eugenics was an attempt on her part to legitimize the birth control effort with science, and it clearly ended up being a misguided and dangerous effort. Even so, character assassination of the type that Smargon employs can be easily used against any leading historical figure — Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, or Thomas Jefferson. King has been called a sexist and Jefferson a hypocrite for owning slaves, but this doesn’t mean that we don’t value civil rights or celebrate our nation’s founders. Rather we acknowledge that they were complex people with complex contributions to the world. We do believe that Sanger’s accomplishments should be celebrated, along with her willingness to help poor and minority women escape from the physical, emotional and financial burden of endless unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. But she wasn’t perfect: like King and Jefferson, she was very human.

Sanger’s ostensible racism, however, was hardly the point of Smargon’s article. He clearly has more at stake than indicting a historical figure. Smargon doesn’t get to the crux of his argument until the end of the article, when discussing what Pro-Choice Vox actually commemorates. When he asks whether our open house was offensive because it celebrates “the fact that we can now have as much sex as we choose with as many partners as we choose while disregarding both the ethical and social consequences,” it’s clear that the issue at stake is not Sanger’s views on eugenics, but reproductive freedom. Sanger fundamentally challenged the notion that women had no right to decide what happened to their bodies, and she was a strong believer in creating stable and happy families. She made contraceptives widely accessible to the general population, and Planned Parenthood continues to do so today. If this expansion of reproductive choice is what Smargon wants to debate, he should address this directly.

Additionally, the insinuation that Planned Parenthood somehow still has a hidden eugenics agenda is completely unfounded. Minority women access abortions more frequently than others because of a complex system of inequality perpetuated by our society. This disparity is related to issues such as access to healthcare and sex education, not to some sort of ominous social design. Ultimately, Planned Parenthood functions to confront, not exacerbate, the injustices of poverty, sexism and racism.

Smargon claims that he doesn’t advocate that we stop celebrating Sanger’s birthday, but instead that we celebrate her while acknowledging that she also held reprehensible beliefs. If he had bothered to engage any one of us at the open house, we would have said the same thing that we are saying here: We are strongly committed to Sanger’s vision of providing affordable birth control and reproductive care to everyone. And we’re willing to talk about abortion, contraception and even sexual ethics as long as it’s a balanced debate that refrains from unproductive finger-pointing and dubious reductionist conclusions. But it’s nearly impossible to respond to a conversation that does not truly address the issue at hand.

Martha Ferguson, Sierra Gronewold and Amelia Thomson-DeVaux are juniors and co-leaders of the Princeton Pro-Choice Vox. They can be reached individually at mferguson@princeton.edu, sgronewo@princeton.edu and ajthomso@princeton.edu.