After reading this paean to the birth control pill, I can't help but wonder why feminists feel compelled to doctor Margaret Sanger's birth control views?
One of his targets was Margaret Sanger, a nurse who wrote a sex education column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for a left-wing New York newspaper, The Call. When Comstock banned her column on venereal disease, the paper ran an empty space with the title: “What Every Girl Should Know: Nothing, by Order of the U.S. Post Office.”
Sanger was the first person to publish an evaluation of all the available forms of birth control. As a reward, she got a criminal obscenity charge. She fled to Europe to avoid going to jail, and her husband was imprisoned for passing out one of her pamphlets. In the end, he got 30 days, and Anthony Comstock got a chill during the trial that led to a fatal case of pneumonia.
Sanger was also a huge proponent of eugenics and forced sterilization of the mentally disabled. Oddly enough, feminists, while praising birth control, don't like to bring up its sordid history as a tool for eugenics and racists. I guess it sort of goes with Jessica Valenti's lament that MTV isn't showing teenagers getting abortions. You know, history doesn't make abortion sound so attractive.
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