Margaret Sanger was an early birth control advocate who has often been accused of Nazi-style genocide by the pro-life community. As Rep. Smith's comments at a congressional hearing this April suggest, her work has been taken out of context and misrepresented to suggest that Sanger was the kind of person who wanted to kill babies. He took a quote from one of her books that said,

The most merciful thing a family does for one of its infant members is to kill it.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project points out that the quote comes without context. When you look at the surrounding chapter, you see that Sanger is talking about infant mortality in poor large families. At the time of her writing, more than 300,000 infants died, more than 90 percent from malnutrition. Still those like Congressman Smith draw parallels between her work and Nazism.

But Sanger wasn't a Nazi. Far from it. She joined the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda and "gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler's rise to power in Germany." The only intersection she had with Nazis was that she lived at a time when Hitler ruled Germany.

Sanger's work, of course, needs to be looked at through cultural context. Her early work was done at a time when eugenics was not widely studied and almost viewed as a new secular order on the same level as religion. My alma matter, the University of Minnesota, even had a eugenics society that worked on "improving" the human race. Sanger viewed the movement as useful, and pushed them to back access to birth control as part of that movement. Of course, modern academics have abandoned eugenics as a field of study, but it's important to not that at the time it was a significant and widespread movement.

Sanger remains a figure that didn't always reflect the values of the modern reproductive rights movement. As Michelle Goldberg says in her recent book, The Means of Reproduction:

Sanger was a complicated figure, a groundbreaking feminist of her time that who transcended some of the prejudices of her time while remaining mired in others. She operated in an era when eugenics, often a cousin of the Malthusian doctrine, was considered a respectable pursuit on both the left and the right, and rarely hesitated to invoke eugenics arguments for birth control ... Many eugenicists opposed birth control, fearing that it would lead to genetically desirable women to have too few children.... She was not, in fact, a racist, believing that inherent ability and intelligence varied among individuals rather than among ethnic groups, but at times used dubious language that reeks of racism to modern ears.

What Sanger did do was play an important role in shaping access to birth control in this country, especially among poor women who were desperate not to have their seventh or eighth child. She founded the American Birth Control League, which later merged with Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau to create the Birth Control Federation of America. That organization became what we know as Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The important thing is to look at Sanger's work with a critical eye, but to keep it in context.

Margaret Sanger Papers Project [NYU]
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project [Feminist Law Professors]

Ginsburg first noted two levels of concern with the Supreme Court's abortion rulings. The first was that the "undue hardship" provisions disproportionately affect economically disadvantaged women by limiting their access.

There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don't know why this hasn't been said more often.

The second was that Roe itself (and many of the other rulings and laws) are inherently paternalistic. She said:

It will be, it should be, that this is a woman's decision. It's entirely appropriate to say it has to be an informed decision, but that doesn't mean you can keep a woman overnight who has traveled a great distance to get to the clinic, so that she has to go to some motel and think it over for 24 hours or 48 hours.

And this:

The poor little woman [in Kennedy's opinion on the partial birth abortion case], to regret the choice that she made. Unfortunately there is something of that in Roe. It's not about the women alone. It's the women in consultation with her doctor. So the view you get is the tall doctor and the little woman who needs him.

Both of which are interesting analyses of who the anti-abortion movement is preventing from exercising their constitutional rights and why the ways in which the Court and lawmakers view women when it comes to abortion are inherently paternalistic and condescending.

In the context of the statement that the "undue hardship" test is actually systematically disadvantaging poor women, Emily Bazelon asked Ginsburg about the Hyde Amendment, which was originally passed in 1976 (3 years after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Roe v. Wade) and which originally prohibited Medicaid recipients (poor women) from being able to use their government health insurance to pay for abortion services at all — it was later modified to make exceptions for the life of the mother or women whose pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. As we know now, the end result is that one in four Medicaid recipients is compelled to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term because of the law, while others delay their abortions at further risk to themselves.

The Hyde Amendment was the subject of a federal lawsuit brought by Norma McRae, a pregnant New York Medicaid recipien. In a 1980 Supreme Court decision in Harris v. McRae — before Ginsburg was a judge — ruled that the federal government had no obligation to fund abortions for women on Medicaid. The opinion, given by Justice Potter Stewart said, in part that the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade did not confer on McRae (or anyone else) "a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail herself of the full range of protected choices."

In response to Bazelon's question, Ginsburg cites Harris v. McRae, and says she found the decision surprising, but not for the reasons one might assume.

Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn't really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

This is, obviously, been the subject of some misreading.

I asked Emily Bazelon about it, and she said:

The main thing I'd say about this is that it was clear that when Justice Ginsburg said "we," when she was talking about populations that we don't want to have too many of (you can get the exact quote from the piece), she meant some people in the world, not herself or a group that she feels a part of. That's not how she sees the world, as you I'm sure know. Her point was about other people's conception of who they thought should be encouraged to have children and who shouldn't be, not her own.

In other words, Bazelon is saying the we should have been in quotes, like this:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that "we" don't want to have too many of.

This, of course, hasn't stopped any right-wingers from assuming that Ginsburg was admitting the pro-choice movement was all about eugenics or others who were convinced that her use of the word "we" was something more nefarious than a reference to "some people."

The reproductive choice movement — and particularly Planned Parenthood — is often derided by the anti-abortion movement as nothing more than a cover for eugenics, due in no small part to founder Margaret Sanger's well-publicized written works on the subject. While her conception of eugenics wasn't inherently race-based, it was very much economic-based — which, of course, had strong and has strong correlations to race in this country. Sanger's commitment to eugenics, regardless of whether it was a deeply-held belief or a political tactic to gain support for a movement that was struggling for oxygen and legitimacy, left a stain on the reproductive choice movement it was yet to fully expunge.

And that stain isn't visible only to conservatives. Feminists from Germaine Greer to Linda Gordon to Betsy Hartmann to Andrea Smith (and beyond) have been openly critical of Planned Parenthood's roots and as suspicious of some of its activities — like trying to get the government to pay for poor women's abortions, feeling that whether one can afford the procedure and whether one can afford the child are equally economically coercive, and a government which provides abortions for poor women but not economic assistance for pregnant ones isn't necessarily the best thing, either. There were feminists — radical feminists, in particular, and feminists of color — who wondered aloud whether a group like Planned Parenthood, with its sordid roots in the eugenics movement, should be pushing for more abortions for poor women, and why they were.

So when Ginsburg said "we," she could have been talking about the Republican establishment in the 1970s — although, as she noted in her interview, it was the Nixon Administration that first set about enforcing affirmative action laws — or she could have been noting that there were plenty of feminists in the 70s worried that the abortion-rights movement wasn't necessarily compatible with the larger aims of a social movement for equality.

That argument, if you ask anti-abortion feminists, is still ongoing.

The Place of Women on the Court [New York Times]

Related: Ginsburg: I Thought Roe Was To Rid Undesirables [World Net Daily]
Hyde Amendment [Wikipedia]
Harris v. McRae [Wikipedia]
Restricting on Medicaid Funding for Abortions Forces One In Four Poor Women To Carry Pregnancy To Term [Guttmacher Institute]
People & Events: Eugenics and Birth Control [PBS]
The Ethic of Control: Margaret Sanger, Eugenics, and Planned Parenthood [Inside Catholic]
Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility [Amazon]
A Companion To American Women's History [Google Books]
Battleground [Google Books]
Conquest [Google Books]

Earlier: Awesome, Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg Explains It All To You

According to the Journal, "Parker survived and is now 20 months old. He has poor language and motor skills and may never walk. Already hospitalized three times, Parker's medical odyssey has stretched the Cardens' finances and put a huge strain on their relationship." It got to the point where the Cardens had to get help from their parents to buy groceries for their family, which included three other children in addition to Parker.

A piece in the Washington Post outlines the pros and cons of increasingly advanced fetal DNA testing. Proponents of the test, which "use 'gene chips' to detect much subtler chromosomal variations than standard prenatal testing can," like Baylor's Arthur L. Beaudet, argue that for people who want maximum information, they deserve to know. "Some of these disorders are quite burdensome. They require lifelong nursing care. In some cases these children never walk, never talk, never feed themselves," Beaudet tells the Washington Post. "It can have a major impact on the family. People say, 'I wish you had given me the opportunity to know ahead of time. It's really destroyed our lives.' That's why women want to know."

Opponents say that not only is the test not accurate enough, but that its use could lead to eugenics. "The question is, what is the information used for?" David Prentice of the pro-life Family Research Council asks the Post. "If it's for informing the parents so they can be prepared for what might come, that's great. But if it's being used for eugenics purposes — for abortion — we would be against it." Where I think this could add a new wrinkle in the abortion debate is that perhaps some pro-choicers will believe that aborting a special needs child is morally wrong. This is pure speculation based on anecdotal evidence, but possibly it hews too close to eugenics for some, even considering the dire emotional and fiscal costs to the family involved.

But let's get back to Trig, the public face of special needs. Unfortunately, his mother, for all her purported caring about other children with Down syndrome, does not support the raising of taxes to fund special needs programs. She came out against Colorado's Prop 51, which according to the Guardian, "would provide thousands of children and adults with autism, Down's syndrome, cerebral palsy and other disabilities with critically needed care, through a phased-in sales tax of 0.2%." The proposition has been championed by a McCain/Palin supporter, former Colorado first lady Frances Owens. Palin is against the ballot measure because, "There's got to be an alternative to raising taxes. It's a matter of prioritizing the dollars that are already there in government. What I did as governor of the state of Alaska was prioritize for a great increase in funding for our students with special needs up there. And I think that Colorado can do that also."

But, as the Guardian points out, "It's hard to see how this could become a reality. McCain has sworn to an immediate government spending freeze. And Palin, in Colorado Springs, promised to cut taxes and balance the budget in one year. If past experience is any guide, all that means is cutting programmes affecting children with special needs." Again, as with Bristol's pregnancy, and the Alaska Governor's history of non-support for pregnant teens, it seems that the only children Palin cares about supporting are her own.

The Toughest Test [WSJ]
Fresh Hopes And Concerns As Fetal DNA Tests Advance [Washington Post]
Special Needs And Conservative Creeds [Guardian]

Earlier: Ask Not What Bristol Palin Can Do For You, Ask What Sarah Palin Can Do For Your Pregnant Daughter

It's all because he desires world peace! "If you could make people with ten-point-higher IQs, we'd probably have fewer wars," he says. Not to mention, way better weapons!

What I've Learned [Esquire]
Nobel-Winning Biologist Apologizes For Being Worse Than O'Reilly [CNN]