The Achievement of a Lifetime: Planned Parent

Planned Parenthood: The Achievement of a Lifetime

In reviewing my life, I have witnessed many changes in the world that surprised me, none more so that the transformation of women’s lives between 1960 and 2010. The sexual revolution was not so much a revolution as a reconfiguring of America from one set of anti-obscenity and anti-birth control laws to a different principle establishing sexual privacy as a basic personal right. Many years elapsed between the development of efficient contraceptives and the ordinary woman’s legal access to them. The old laws Anthony Comstock and his Wall Street funders pressed congress to pass in 1873 remained a repressive force until the U S Supreme Court set them aside in 1966. It was at that time that the Court helped my generation, then in their early twenties, decide the number of children we wanted with reliable forms of birth control. For younger women, the changes since the 1970s are simply revolutionary.
Those of us in college in 1960 were born in the late 1930s or early 1940s. In my sophomore year when my friends and I were eighteen and nineteen, a classmate got married, becoming the first in our group to get a prescription for ‘the pill,’ after showing the doctor the announcement of her engagement in the paper. She took Enovid for six weeks prior to her wedding night, the night for which she had saved her virginity. That year also one of our friends died after a botched back alley abortion. I was quietly working my way through school, keeping silent about my stay in an unwed mother’s home in my last year of high school. I put the baby up for adoption, and at my post-partum checkup at the U.C clinic, the doctor refused to give me contraceptives because I was unmarried and only seventeen. These disparate circumstances were very much part of that era: the golden ideal of being a virgin on your wedding night counterposed by the risks of sex out of wedlock and unplanned pregnancy.
By 1964 America’s birth rate had dropped dramatically. Something had changed in the lives of married couples in the USA. 1966 was the first year Planned Parenthood opened clinics in the SF Bay Area, after Title X of the Civil Rights Act 1965 allowed women to get birth control, regardless of income. The idea of sexual privacy had arrived, reaching the highest court in the land, terminating the Comstock Laws that forbade birth control for married couples in 1966. The court spoke again in 1972 when it extended the same right to singles. In the forty years since that time our expectations of personal freedom have changed, altering society’s views of women at home and in the workplace.

Today we are once again threatened with a loss of freedom and privacy in the current attempts by social conservatives to stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood. It is a tragic turn of events, since the use of contraceptives prevents pregnancy, thereby avoiding abortion. If the conservative goal is to reduce or eliminate abortions, the logical position would be the advocacy of personal responsibility to avoid unplanned pregnancy. To eliminate or reduce access to birth control would return us to the Comstock Laws. This goal of social conservatives has everything to do with women, with limiting the free agency of women, with curtailing the sexual expression of women, and restoring traditional matrimony with its attendant risks without much said about self-restraint for men.
If the conservative agenda were truly pro-life, it would foster spending on social programs, like childcare and food stamps, but it does not. For the young and the poor. “Abstinence only” is what conservatives promote, with the consequence being the predictable failure of large numbers of people to restrain their youthful sexual appetites. Spontaneous unprotected sex leads to pregnancy and poverty, to poor families, poor women, and poor children, just as it did in 1729 when Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal.
As a survivor of the bad old days, the last days of the reign of the Comstock Laws, I say, “Give us family planning through Planned Parenthood, please. Give us our privacy and our personal choices as established in Title X.”