Planned Un-Parenthood Roe v. Wade

...More broadly, as a matter of popular intuition, abortion and birth control appear naturally intertwined, like it or not, in two standard narratives of historical "progress": the post-Civil War march to gender equality in domestic, economic, and national affairs...

...Opponents of abortion, on the other hand, are the "out" party and have no such fixed point of reference...

...But she does not elaborate...

...And there is "Crissy," a high school student whose story leads the book, so pitiably confused about her experience that she is willing to consider the possibility that her own life, too, should have been interrupted in utero: If I ever have [a child] I want it to have the best that I could possibly give it, with a father and mother who love it...

...Take, for instance, this moving testimony by Kathleen Turner, a working mother in New York City: "Judging from the brouhaha occasioned by my twenty seconds of nudity on the Broadway stage in The Graduate," Turner reports, "this country has an anguished relationship with its sexuality...

...What Feldt does state explicitly, however, over and over again, in a tone of voice that admits no possible disagreement, is her absolute faith that abortion is what's always best for the mothers involved...

...Surely this isn't what your average suburban soccer mom has in mind when the Gallup man asks for her take on Roe and she offers up the phrase "pro-choice...

...If Americans can't be talked out of their reliance on abortion until every single one of them has joined the Catholic Church, then Planned Parenthood will be with us forever...

...Also, they get pregnant...

...What are they, precisely, these asserted "similarities," of theory or function, between Margaret Sanger's warmly remembered and popular "legacy," on the one hand, and Planned Par-enthood's network of steel tables and stirrups, on the other...

...Well into the 1960s, public opinion polls showed men, not women, had more liberal views on abortion, and no American women's group officially dedicated to the liberalization of abortion law existed until 1966...

...It's about the "nature and purpose of human sexuality" and suchlike cosmic stuff...

...Abortion is so much a vexed, passion-saturated, and dispiriting controversy, of course, that the demand for a fresh look at its resume—by knowledgeable investigators willing and able to abandon the distorting crutch of preexisting theory—may well be a demand for the impossible...

...Children such a mother might later bear suffer "Post Abortion Survivor Syndrome," an "existential guilt" about their dead sibling that "might" lead them to "violence" and "terrorism...

...And lo, one day in Olde Times Square, this innocent fair maiden didst chance full-frontally to reveal God's gift of pulchritude, and the Puritan villagers blushed, for they had never seen breasts before, and they banished their sister Kathleen to Coventry, or at least to her weekend place in Amagansett, Long Island, whilst from their frosty pulpits the far-right town fathers didst hurl a thousand angry thunderbolts of Neurotic Uptightness...

...it's there on page 386, and the book's editors tell us she "often" employed the analogy...

...One of Feldt's favorite letter writers ventilates at fevered length about the pro-life movement's "animosity toward sexuality," about its adherents' "virulent misogyny" and "serious psychological problems," and about the fact that "many" of its allied politicians "lead reprehensible lives" behind closed doors...

...She was monumentally selfish, quite aware of the fact (unable, she admitted, to experience anything but "chemical love"), and proud of it, even...

...But they also disagree, to a striking extent, among themselves...

...Daily Variety: "Turner's Mrs...

...Better that the state should save its money "to spend on geniuses...

...Thank you...

...Indeed, she herself once made a not-choice like this, in long-ago Texas when she was fifteen years old...

...And Margaret Sanger, who knew a thing or two about contraception, said that birth control "has nothing to do with abortion, it has nothing to do with interfering with or disturbing life after conception has taken place...

...It is from prudery like this that per-sonal-reproductive-lifecycle-issues arise in the first place, Gloria Feldt explains...

...The issue is not her advocacy of birth control per se...

...She rates a "perfect ten" on the digestive-system scale of reproductive freedom, Feldt boasts: She can stomach them all...

...But the piece otherwise rejects, categorically, all the harshest indictments lodged against "the founder" by the "anti-family planning movement...

...That was the hardest thing I ever had to do...

...She did not like those of her erstwhile allies who thought women should have access to contraceptives without a doctor's prescription...

...Her own words make plain, in the diary-like detail of her piled-up correspondence, that Sanger was a case-study zealot...

...Mildred Jefferson, past president of the NRLC, who writes the book's introduction, hopes that pro-life activism can remain formally and self-consciously nonpartisan and unideological...

...Birth control stands alone: "It is the first, last, and final step we all are to take to have real human emancipation...

...It is not right, pace Planned Parenthood, that Margaret Sanger declined to advocate abortion on grounds that it was then a dangerous and illegal surgery...

...In her preface, Wagner says, "We are not winning...

...I said, "Well, you know, Devin, not all families plan on having children...

...But the better ones do contain the facts, which are always useful...

...Robinson is not remotely alluring...

...Perhaps there should be twenty-four-hour waiting periods and informed consent requirements before heterosexual couples are allowed to go to bed at night...

...exclaimed this most carefully planned child...

...Both are "about" sex and parenthood, obviously...

...Planned Un-Parenthood Roe v. Wade at thirty By DAVID TELL In the promotional material for Behind Every Choice Is a Story— Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt's contribution to the flurry of books marking the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade—the publishers include a brief marketing advisory for booksellers and reviewers...

...Nurse Ratched in a cocktail dress...

...There is the college student who is "abstaining from sex because I feel that I owe that to the child I gave up...

...Former Boston mayor and Clinton administration diplomat Raymond Flynn, in fact, suggests that the pro-life cause should be a largely Democratic phenomenon— and would be, but for the delegate-selection rules his party adopted at its 1972 convention...

...Internal debate is a valuable thing in a movement like Teresa Wagner's...

...This is history, too...

...Planned Parenthood needs to amend its website...

...And who could dare presume to challenge the sincerity of their evidence...

...It is her final, foghorn warning blast to the nation's voters: Again, "abortion isn't about abortion," ultimately...

...If it is ludicrously illegitimate for Gloria Feldt to wrap her enterprise's grubby tradecraft in Margaret Sanger's skirts, what else might be wrong with the conventional, mythopoeic understanding of abortion, in which context looms larger than the thing itself, in which this one great legal and moral question is required to synthesize and reflect all the related but separate questions, too...

...For relevance to still unsettled political arguments, though, this volume, covering all the crucial years of Sanger's career, is clearly the one that matters...

...puerile...

...Feldt basks in Sanger's glow, and she sees "many similarities with Sanger's day" as "I stand by Margaret Sanger's side," leading "the organization that carries on Sanger's legacy...

...On that basis alone, you would expect most abortion opponents to shun the idea...

...Such people are simply not to be trusted, the president of Planned Parenthood grimly insists...

...In it, Sanger is likened to Hitler, accused (unfairly) of plotting genocide against American blacks, raked over the coals for various outrageous pronouncements that she made (and for some that she did not), and invariably described—without much bother over where the picture comes from—as a lifelong and active "promoter" of abortion who was there at the creation and thus shares significant responsibility for the design of Planned Parent-hood's subsequent, post-Roe empire...

...The early feminists almost uniformly opposed abortion...

...Abortion has never been fully and effectively "illegal," and the push for recodification and relaxation of state-based restrictions against it was led, for most of its history, by men...

...Other eugenicists, of the "neo-Malthusian" tendency, believed that creating more human beings was always a bad idea and that birth control for the "working masses" was a more efficient response to the plague of "defective" children...

...The moral of this story, according to Gloria Feldt: "Only love can make a family...

...the political pro-life movement is dead...

...And what of the pro-life side...

...But Margaret Sanger wanted blood...

...This, you'll note, is certainly a "worldview": the notion that massive religious revival is the only solution to abortion...

...But since I'm here, I'm going to strive to make things better...

...But they have done their editing with scrupulous care, they have annotated the documents they reproduce with monk-like dispassion, and on the face of it they have held nothing back...

...And then there is the eugenics problem...

...At the time, plenty of perfectly respectable people were of the view, and said so out loud, that "undesirables"— the physically infirm, the "feeble-minded," and the "genetically criminal"— were reproducing themselves too quickly and threatening to overwhelm their betters...

...But few among them manage to pull it off completely...

...She did not like James Joyce, whom she read with "nausea...

...Thomas Emerson, the Yale professor who argued Planned Parent-hood's case in Griswold, insisted that recognition of a contraceptive privacy right would not threaten any state's anti-abortion legislation...

...Though effectively retired (and privately critical of its policies and practices), Sanger did agree to serve an initial term as honorary chairman of the emergent successor institution: the Planned Parenthood Federation of America...

...To what extent is Gloria Feldt correct that abortion and birth control each now depends on the other for legal, political, and social survival...

...When we consider that "a moron's vote is as good as an intelligent, educated, [thinking] citizen," Sanger advised, "we well pause and ask ourselves: 'Is America really safe for Democracy?'" Sanger did, indeed, call the "morons" who so disgusted her "human weeds...

...She turned women seeking abortions away from her clinics: "I do not approve of abortion...

...How can that be...

...Major umbrella groups like the National Right to Life Committee have sailed wide of the fracas, but for years, samizdat folk research on Sanger has circulated throughout the pro-life movement's trenches...

...There's been a rough brawl about this, centered around Sanger's relationship with the early twentieth-century craze for eugenics among American progressives...

...The Woman Rebel, 19001928 is the first in a projected four-volume series...

...an undercurrent of profound uncertainty bubbles to the surface...

...She called the results of abortion "an outrageous slaughter," "infanticide," "foeticide," and "the killing of babies...

...Nineteenth-century opposition to abortion was born and crystallized in the same phenomenon that made abortion increasingly prevalent in the middle class: the Victorian elevation and idealization of women's and children's status in smaller, "affective" households...

...One day when Devin was in the second or third grade, around the time he pasted "the cancelled check for the semen donation" onto the first page of a class autobiography project, the "unusually empathetic" youngster told his male "co-parent" that he'd noticed something troubling...

...Almost without fail, her correspondents make impressive, valiant efforts to express convincing pride in their decisions to abort...

...As Jon recounts the conversation: "I don't understand, some of the kids at school seem so isolated and unhappy and there seem to be so many of them...

...From the husband, "I by and by became divorced...

...She's probably never even learned what an orgasm is...

...She raises false fears about the end of modern sexuality—she refuses to acknowledge the troubled conscience about abortion implicit in those women's letters she publishes— because she knows something that Charles Rice does not: When abortion is just about abortion, abortion may very well lose...

...As you might expect, Planned Parenthood doesn't see her that way...

...I was an unexpected child that perhaps shouldn't have been born...

...The New York Times editorial page is proof of that...

...The entire book is structured to sustain the point, in fact, for Feldt has reprinted many, many letters from women ostensibly attesting to the body-and soul-preserving benefits of maximally exercised reproductive freedom...

...Why, then, one can't help wondering, does the president of Planned Parenthood feel so free to indulge the assumption that other people's "unplanned" children—including those born into circumstances considerably less straitened than she faced at age fifteen—generally aren't loved...

...But is there anything else of real moment that links them...

...Put bluntly, which is the only way Gloria Feldt knows how: "If abortion rights go, birth control rights are equally at risk...

...they must forge one from scratch...

...A truly impartial, authoritative summa on the subject has yet to be written...

...What ought to be, instead of Roe, and how it's best to get there, are unavoidable questions...

...But not the way Gloria Feldt imagines...

...They too, like the earlier biographers, unambiguously admire the woman...

...Some among the better types thought it appropriate and necessary for healthy, productive, and intelligent families to engage the "breeding war" directly, and they urged their peers to procreate more aggressively...

...The biographers have satisfied no one...

...And so forth...

...There are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician," she wrote in 1920, and "we know that abortion, when performed by skilled hands, under right conditions, brings almost no danger to the life of the patient...

...Then, of course, there is the apparently straightforward institutional connection between contraception and abortion—in the person and career of birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger...

...Twenty-eight prominent and not-so-prominent opponents of abortion appear in Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement, a collection of essays edited by Teresa Wagner, a former staffer at both the National Right to Life Committee and the Family Research Council...

...Whether under the influence of Manhattan theater critics, "most parents," or the Catholic Church, "where they are unlikely to have been taught about sex," girls enter adolescence having internalized American society's "expectations of celibacy until marriage...

...pointless...

...No ancestral Christian Coalition or council of priests was on the scene at the founding of the American pro-life movement...

...Hull and Peter Charles Hoffer announce an intention "to show respect for and give hearing to a wide spectrum of arguments" about the issue...

...It is a lie, they say, that Sanger favored passage of restrictive and racially motivated immigration laws in the early 1920s...

...And the facts tend inevitably to subvert whatever attitude attempts to tame them...

...Score one for the pro-life pamphleteers, despite themselves...

...What more persuasive and reliable witnesses could there be...

...most of the grassroots sentiment such activism represents, she wants it known, is neither Republican nor conservative...

...if nothing else, she is a canny politician...

...Over a quarter-century period beginning just before the First World War, Sanger did more than any other American ever has to proselytize, decriminalize, and destigmatize women's use of artificial means to time and limit their pregnancies...

...and the general, expansionist trajectory, from the colonial era on down, of an intrinsic American impulse to individual autonomy...

...Gloria Feldt is defending an existing status quo, and so, naturally enough, she does not want—and probably cannot afford—to be anything but doctrinaire and inflexible in her politics...

...In the preface to Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History, the best recent general survey for a non-specialist audience, authors N.E.H...

...For example...

...Although the primary audience for this book is women who support reproductive freedom," the press release reads, "a wide audience including men and teens" will also find it "compelling...

...What might Gloria Feldt's publicists have figured out that everyone else has missed...

...Rabbi Daniel Lapin grins his way through a shallow and not-very-funny explanation of why Jewish liberals favor abortion: If they acknowledge God's strictures against that, then they'll have to stop "eating lobster," too...

...As a constitutional matter, the two subjects are plainly related, if not by clear logic, then at least by clear precedent...

...Planned Parenthood has] given me a chance to live and make my life the way it should be...

...There is "Mandy," defiant about the abortion she had at sixteen—"I will ask my maker's forgiveness regarding many things, but preventing the birth of a child I had no way of providing for will not be one of them"—and wincing about the memory in the very next breath: "I didn't know what it was to truly be a woman until I was asked to give up the one thing that defines and unites us as a sex...

...So she did, and married the father, though she now rolls her eyes at the reasoning involved: Becoming a wife and mother, Feldt concludes, "was my passive, jelly woman way of taking a measure of control over my life in keeping with my idealized notion of womanhood...

...The imperatives of institutional image management won't permit it, for one thing...

...It could be her publicists are right not to expect too much business...

...An equivalent, desperate fatalism is detectable on the other side of the battlefield, remember...

...few Americans any longer remember a time when the propriety of birth control was publicly in dispute...

...But it is a powerful one, with an elite and receptive audience already inclined to suspect that opponents of Roe, behind closed doors, must also, and with similar fervor, reject coed schools and miniskirts and the Nineteenth Amendment and pretty much everything else except abstinence and prayer...

...its author is not exactly the shades-of-gray type...

...Abortion, mutatis mutandis, is essential to life itself, a comprehensive "worldview" all its own...

...That being born has its down sides— that abortion is what's mercifully best for the millions of "fetuses" who cannot hope to live lives so full and beautiful as Devin's—is the governing bias of Behind Every Choice Is a Story...

...No doubt, too, certain people who stand aloof from Feldt's sandwich-board "worldview" will nevertheless find it weirdly "compelling," as intense enthusiasms often are...

...Sanger joined forces with this latter camp, an alliance her sympathetic scholarly biographers have candidly acknowledged, with evident embarrassment—while trying, not very candidly and rather too hastily, to explain it away as a diffident, skeptical, and purely opportunistic marriage of convenience...

...They have chosen it, therefore it is good...

...Consequently, when it comes time for them to defy these expectations in what should be a healthy, normal, and well-considered teenage fashion, young women are too consumed with self-reproach to consult their operator's manuals...

...It is an interesting question, actually, what place, if any, the subject of birth control deserves in the current argument over abortion...

...Which is the customary thing to do, only theirs isn't the customary way to do it...

...Behind Every Choice Is a Story prefers to elaborate, instead, and quite lustily at that, on the character of abortion's ene-mies—on their "intolerance," "ideological fanaticism," "ingrained hostility to women," and failure to appreciate "the fullness and richness of human life...

...All the essayists disagree with Roe and reject what it's wrought, of course...

...For in the battle to preserve that one, singularly controversial reproductive freedom guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, an entire "worldview" of reproductive freedoms is also at issue...

...They are "distortions," "misattribu-tions," or "outright lies...

...Politics has proved a useless weapon against such secularism...

...Something called "Vicarious Pain Syndrome" affects a woman who's had an abortion, according to Philip Ney: The dying baby's trauma is "transmitted across the placental barrier by hormones" and then permanently "resides in [the mother's] head...

...At another, she proposed a total, five-year, nationwide moratorium on childbirth...

...No doubt, in the postmodern nowadays, there's a like-minded "primary audience" for almost anything, even for Gloria Feldt...

...Eight years later, critical reaction to the reasoning of the Roe majority came principally and most pointedly from liberal, not conservative legal scholars...

...Come to think of it, there are no such complexities in Behind Every Choice Is a Story...

...What...

...In the ensuing congress, sad but true, these ladies not infrequently fail to experience "the joy of sexual love...

...Predictably—all by itself, her presence in Planned Parenthood's genealogical chart makes her an irresistible target—Margaret Sanger has become a deeply reviled figure in many grassroots corners of the pro-life world...

...Sanger "never described any ethnic community as an 'inferior race' or as 'human weeds.'" Sanger never even promoted abortion, Planned Parenthood feels obliged to point out, strangely enough— not because the founder had qualms about it, perish the thought, but simply because abortion "was illegal and dangerous throughout her lifetime...

...The whole warp and woof of contemporary American intimacy hangs in the balance, and "they" mean to take it all away from us...

...Perhaps Gloria Feldt's seamless-web, isn't-just-about-abortion "world-view" has got a little too big for its britches...

...Sanger is a thoroughly fascinating figure, and the book makes for compulsive reading, but it will likely do her personal reputation little good...

...Maybe, in the abortion story's details, it really isn't possible to see the same actors, wearing the same uniforms, impelled by the same social tides, at every yearbook's turn...

...I weep for the millions of adults for whom, as a result, sex becomes identified with shame, guilt, and embarrassment...

...Nevertheless, underneath the editorial color commentary, there sits a highly professional piece of history writing, a judiciously selected and generous array of information that would, if permitted to speak for itself, make a thoroughgoing mess of the contemporary prejudices read back into the past each day in our morning newspapers...

...Margaret Sanger really did not like people—many millions of married couples, she thought—who felt free to use their reproductive organs for an actual reproductive purpose, even though they had no damn business having children...

...It is a cartoon...

...She worried, though, about the "increasing race of morons" already on our shores, and expressed disgust that the American people should be taxed to fund welfare spending for the "maintenance and perpetuation of these undesirables...

...Feldt will stipulate that: "The pro-choice position defends your right not to choose abortion...

...And you need to stomach them all, because—and Feldt writes as if anyone capable of reading her book will consider this a given—"the hot-button abortion issue isn't about abortion, really...

...Mind you, any woman confronting such a crisis pregnancy may decide to carry her baby to term...

...Feldt's colleagues at Planned Parenthood maintain an extensive, belligerently defensive essay about Sanger on their website...

...Gloria Feldt likes her brand of reproductive freedom in part because she thinks lots of people are born who maybe shouldn't be...

...And it happens to be a particularly unfortunate worldview in this con-text—for it is precisely the Manichaean impulse with which Gloria Feldt attempts to slander abortion opponents generally...

...Pretty soon, the unusually empathetic boy in your second-grade class is going to start asking one of his fathers about you...

...Verily...

...She was an excellent hater...

...She called it "sordid," "abhorrent," "terrible," "barbaric," a "horror...

...The year before, when the Supreme Court invalidated Connecticut's ban on contraceptives, the nation's last, no one could remember the last time anyone had actually been prosecuted according to its terms...

...And "somewhere," it turns out, is the enormous and altogether dazzling selection of public and private records just put out by the manuscript curators at New York University's "Margaret Sanger Papers Project...

...On the evidence in The Woman Rebel, the real reason Sanger declined to advocate abortion, notwithstanding the law's flexibility and what she took to be the procedure's safety, is that abortion appalled her...

...She has left her door ajar, however, and not everything that walks in is attractive...

...And then they fail to do so, especially in their final chapters...

...It allows that, yes, in olden times she once in a while "entertained" an idea or two that might be "out of keeping" with current multicultural fashion...

...In my case, abortion was whispered as a possibility," she remembers, "but I wanted to have a child...

...Legal incre-mentalism" of one form or another has lately proved the prevailing answer, but serious alternative strategies compete for attention and loyalty within the pro-life movement, and Wagner has given all of them a place in her book...

...Hull and Hoffer are transparently pro-choice...

...Hundreds of different people cross the pages of The Woman Rebel—husbands, lovers, friends, her children, colleagues and rivals in the birth-control movement, the spiritual mediums she consulted for advice—and one winces, hard, at Sanger's treatment of all but a handful of them...

...Sanger did, in fact, endorse the federal government's post-World War I immigration restrictions, during a Vassar College speech on "racial betterment" in February 1924, and she was "glad" the laws were "drastic" enough to help control "the quality of our population...

...It is "increasingly evident," Rice concludes, "that the answer to the culture of death will be found in the timeless moral and social teachings of the Catholic Church...

...The deliberative, bull-session atmosphere that suffuses Back to the Drawing Board works largely to its editor's credit...

...A couple of the book's essays are exercises in crankery...

...But Feldt does not state it explicitly...

...In his foreword, Father Richard John Neuhaus, characteristically taking the long view, finds reason for "immeasurable gratitude" about the movement's progress...

...She did not like Catholics...

...Between 1939 and 1942, with her most important work already done, the two principal organizations she'd founded, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and the American Birth Control League, were collapsed into one and formally reorganized...

...Newsday: "boring...

...She loves them "fiercely...

...Roe's 1973 recognition of an abortion right was based squarely and specifically on the holding of a 1965 case, Gris-wold v. Connecticut, in which the Supreme Court had followed "penumbras from the emanations" of Amendments One through Ten until its majority discovered a previously undreamed-of "privacy interest" in adult contraception...

...Just talking about sexual fulfillment is an act of bravery...

...Might Margaret Sanger have been drawn to "voluntary motherhood," as it then was called, by an identical instinct...

...Yes, well...

...To me, this letter says it all," Feldt offers...

...formidable majority of the nation's adult female population consistently affirms its conviction that there are some cases, at least, in which a mother's desire to terminate her pregnancy should confront no serious legal obstacle...

...Perhaps it's just that they've read her book and have been brought up short by the fingernails-on-blackboard dogmatism of her approach to abortion's ethical complexities...

...One final misconception about Mrs...

...Sanger must also be addressed, it seems, and in this case the truth will terribly inconvenience the propaganda efforts all around...

...To Gloria Feldt, Sanger remains a valuable trademark, the "mother of the birth-control movement" whose triumph we all take for granted...

...Lest you think she's exaggerating here, please be aware that she has made a systematic study of the matter— collecting, for the pages of Behind Every Choice Is a Story, autobiographical reflections on "personal reproductive lifecycle issues" from countless ordinary American women...

...Maybe, in other words, abortion is complicat-ed—and meaningfully unique—and there doesn't exist a neat, coherent "worldview" that adequately and honestly explains it...

...To this effect, Feldt quotes approvingly from a letter by "Jon," a gay man who, with his lover, "Jim," is helping an unnamed lesbian woman raise a little boy, "Devin...

...And most books that have been written are top-heavy with engage attitude...

...But it is not a history recognized in the universe Gloria Feldt inhabits...

...During the three decades since Roe was decided, American women have made more than forty million constitutionally protected "childbearing decisions" of the Planned Parenthood variety, many of them with Planned Parenthood's direct surgical assistance, and still that organization's CEO has yet to see a single abortion whose rationale or methodology merits the slightest expression of moral unease...

...More than a few are deeply affecting, even unforgettable...

...She did not like most of the leading suffragists of her day...

...The public-opinion research appears to say otherwise, after all: Year after year, a David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Still, rich as we might be in so many other wondrous respects, America's strategic reserves of partisanship and irony can hardly be sufficient to secure bestseller status for a book that locates the very Meaning of Existence in unregulated access to outpatient suction and curettage procedures...

...Finally, most unsettling is the presence in Wagner's book of a minority but persistent and hard-edged trend within the pro-life movement best exemplified by retired Notre Dame law professor Charles E. Rice...

...She called abortionists "bloodsucking men with MD after their names who perform operations for the price of so-and-so...

...What seems peculiar here, both as an advertising technique and a matter of elementary arithmetic, is that rather downbeat "although" construction, implying as it does that Feldt's natural constituency, "women who support reproductive freedom," may not be all that "wide" a presence across the land...

...Which today, needless to say, under the leadership of Gloria Feldt, operates what is by far the nation's largest and busiest chain of abortion clinics...

...Well, a lot of people have children by having sexual intercourse without thinking about having children, so many children are born by accident...

...The principle underlying legalized abortion is the principle that underlay the Nazi extermination of the Jews" (and, yes, contraception, too), he writes, and that principle is "agnostic secularism...

...Who adopts such an attitude about something like abortion, unless he secretly believes he cannot make a winning argument...

...Quite the contrary, in fact: Well aware that contraception is effectively unassailable in mainstream political conversation, having attained an almost invisible ubiquity in the United States, opponents of abortion attack Sanger's motives, rather than her work—searching through the historical record and attempting to identify, in the reasons she championed birth control, an ugly and unflattering ideological connection to modern-day abortion-rights rhetoric...

...Gloria Feldt is a Manichaean, too...

...She did not like "middle-class morality...

...Perhaps, for that matter, the whole "worldview" history of America's experience with abortion is ripe for reconsideration—at a higher magnification and at a deliberate, protective remove from those broad-brush narratives of "progress" (or "decline," if you are thus disposed) that manacle political debate in the here and now...

...But one leading pro-life stalwart in Congress, Republican congressman Chris Smith, thinks the Democratic party has permanently "sold its soul" and should be written off...

...There was a difference, he agreed during oral argument: Abortion involves "killing a life in being...

...At the same time, however, Feldt is maddeningly vague about what would seem to be the paramount question raised both by those pro-life attack leaflets—over the top though they may be—and by her own alarums concerning the threat the pro-life movement poses, simultaneously, to abortion and birth control...

...We are meant to see this as the clinching argument...

...Instead, what's necessary is a "reconversion of the American people, one by one and family by family, to the conviction that the right of the innocent to live is absolute because it is the gift of God...

...But from the children, Feldt appears to be inseparable...

...To this understanding of events, orthodox feminism has provided an especially influential contribution: an easily digestible, heroes-and-villains plot line, in which every step forward for women and liberty—out of the home, onto the shop floor, into the ballot box, and beyond—has been achieved against the stubborn and angry resistance of a status-anxious patriarchy...

...The letters in question are genuinely gripping, nearly all of them...

...And she did, too, believe that "ethnic community" was something the race-betterment gardener should want to consider when he was trying to decide which "weeds" to attack with his hoe...

...The Jewish people and Italian families," she complained to the New York State legislature in 1923, "are filling the insane asylums" and "hospitals" and "feeble-minded institutions," and it was wrong that taxpayers should have to subsidize the "multiplication of the unfit" this way...

...There is dissent aplenty here...

...Among other things, the book is abrasively hostile to the dissenting justices in the Supreme Court's Roe line of cases, contemptuous of the modern pro-life movement as a cause analogous to "creationism in schools," and soap-boxy about the familiar Light-Against-Darkness dramaturgy the authors have layered onto 150 years of abortion politics...

...At one point, Sanger classified eighty-five million Americans as "mediocre to imbecile...

...But then, your average suburban soccer mom is basically an idiot anyhow, isn't she...

...Somewhere, amidst the sucker punches and cries of foul, the truth must reside...

...Otherwise, by the time you start breathing, it's already too late...

...And it's got to be the right kind of love, too, involving the right kind of semen donation, deposited and filed with the right kind of prospectus by the right kind of co-parents proceeding from the right kind of teleological first principles...

...Few of us grow up knowing that sexuality is a healthy, normal part of human life that greatly enriches our lives," Feldt notes...

...Are the surveys wrong...

...But there is a broader and more important reason why committed abortion opponents should feel no need for apocalyptic "worldviews"—of any sort...

...Judith Reisman is allowed a long, vulgar, paranoiac maunder about "fornication," "sodomy," and long-dead sexologist Alfred Kinsey—and she hardly mentions abortion at all...

...Birth control is one thing...