Battle for Abortion & Contraceptives

Planned Parenthood

The history of Planned Parenthood is voluminous and extensive. It has been filled with controversy, legal spats and struggles for acceptance and funding from the United States government. Even nowadays, the organization is threatened with budget changes or cuts from the federal government and many people have turned to violence against Planned Parenthood and similar groups over the years due to opposition to abortion or other birth control options that Planned Parenthood is known for providing or at least advocating for. What follows in this report is a history of Planned Parenthood as well as some of the pivotal events and outcomes that have occurred over the years. While Planned Parenthood is an organization with a lot of detractors, they also have a huge amount of support from some very loyal and entrenched groups around the country.

History

While the major decision that exists regarding abortion occurred with Roe v. Wade in the 1970's, Planned Parenthood has actually been around a lot longer than that. Indeed, the organization was founded in 1916 when Margaret Sanger, her sister and a friend opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. The country and its state at that time was quite different than it is now. Indeed, women were not able to vote, sign contracts, have their own bank accounts or divorce their abusive husbands. They also could not control the number of children they could have and also could not obtain information about birth control. Indeed, many of the laws on the book at the time, many of which stemmed from "draconian" measures thought up in the 1870's, were the context for many people considering "family planning" to be an obscene concept and term (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

Sanger was keenly aware of just how damaging and hurtful such rhetoric and laws were and that is what drove her to feel as she did. Her mother had a total of eighteen pregnancies, of which only eleven went to term. She died in 1899 at the age of forty. Sanger had previously worked as a nurse with immigrant families in the Lower East Side area of New York. She was a first-hand witness to the sickness, misery and death that resulted from unplanned pregnancies and illegal abortions. The New York clinic that she opened provided contraceptive advice to the poor, immigrant women and so forth. The amount of people that would line up to see her was staggering and it would often twist and turn around the block. The reaction from the local authorities was swift and nasty. The clinic was raided and the three women that ran the clinic (including Sanger) were convicted of disseminating birth control information.

Sanger was not intimidated in the least by such tactics and she reacted to this development by founding The Birth Control Review. It was indeed the first scientific journal that was dedicated to contraception. She appealed her conviction and that appeal led to a new and more liberalized interpretation of the anti-contraception statute that existed in the state of New York. In 1923, Sanger opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in the Manhattan area of New York. This bureau was designed to provide contraceptive devices to women and also to collect accurate statistics to prove the safety and long-term efficacy of those products. Also in 1923, Sanger incorporated the American Birth Control League. It was deemed by many to be an ambitious way to help address global issues like world population growth, disarmament and famine. The two organizations mentioned thus far would eventually merge and they would thus become the Planned Parenthood Federation or America, or PPFA for short (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

In 1936, Sanger and her colleagues were able to win their first major judicial victory. Sanger was arrested after leaking information to postal authorities that she had ordered birth control products through the mail. This led to a judicial review of the matter. Judge Augustus Hand, which wrote the opinion for the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, ordered a sweeping change and liberalization to the Comstock laws from the 1870's that were mentioned in passing earlier. The main gist of his opinion was that the general viewpoint that the information about damage from unplanned pregnancies and the overall benefits of contraception should not in any instance be considered obscene and thus illegal to disseminate. However, the scope of that decision was limited because it was only made at the Circuit level. As such, only New York, Connecticut and Vermont were subject to these changes. It was more than a generation, about thirty years in total, before that decision expanded in size and scope relative to where it was enforceable and where it was not. However, a short-term victory before that came in 1937 when two good things happened for female contraception. First, the American Medical Association recognized that birth control was an "integral part" of good medical practice and education about the same. Also, North Carolina became the first state to recognize birth control as a public health measure and thus they would then provide contraceptive services to indigent mothers through the public health programs that existed in that state (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

A huge pivot point for Planned Parenthood and birth control was the 1960's. Indeed, the development of the birth control and the intrauterine device (IUD) both came about during that time frame. Before that, however, there was a grant awarded to a man named Gregory Pincus. A research biologist, he undertook a series of tests and studies and this led to the birth control pill. In 1960, the pills were approved by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States. The pill was a huge breakthrough and more than one in four women had used the pill for at least some time just five years after it came out. 1962 marked the beginning of Alan Guttmacher's reign as the President of Planned Parenthood. He was a huge advocate for legal abortion and cited some major examples of why a ban on abortion was the wrong thing. One instance was the fact that there were many women in the United States and Europe that took the drug thalidomide from 1956 and 1962. This led to many babies being deformed upon birth. In 1966, there was a rubella outbreak and this caused much the same deformity problems with kids. There was a great amount of anger because there were many women that wanted to get abortions in light of these patterns but could not do so because the practice was still illegal at the time (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

These two developments as well as other things led to a higher demand for legal abortions and more family planning options and this was something that Planned Parenthood was at the forefront of. In 1981, Estelle Griswold was a member of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut. Her clinic dispensed contraceptives and the clinic was doing so in direct contravention and conflict with the laws of the state at the time. Of course, the state eventually fought back but Griswold and Planned Parenthood at large came out victorious when the case Griswold v. Connecticut rules that such a barrier on birth control was simply not permissible. Just one of the state laws that was struck down as a result of this case was a law in Connecticut that banned sales of contraceptives to married couples in the state. This started a domino effect and ten other states have more liberalized birth controls rules and legislation. Abortion became part of that change when Colorado addressed the matter in 1963 and thirteen other states followed suit shortly thereafter (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

The efforts and ideas of Planned Parenthood reached a Presidential level during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Indeed, abortion and family planning was part of Johnson's wider approach with the War on Poverty. The United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare creates a program that helps provide contraceptive advice and services to families that are low-income and for married women in general. There are also amendments to the Social Security Act, which was originally passed in the 1930's, that said that at least six percent of the annual appropriations for maternal and child health should be earmarked and set aside solely for family planning services and for the individuals out there that request the same. Finally, there was a change with the United States Agency for International Development. They began to provide contraceptives as an "integral part" of its development programs overseas (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

President Nixon continued the momentum that Lyndon Johnson started. This was despite the fact that Johnson was a Democrat and Nixon was a Republican. Nixon asserted that any family or woman in particular that wanted family planning services but that could not afford them should be given those services without fail or question. In 1970, Nixon signed Title X of the Public Health Service Act into law. This made contraceptives available regardless of income and it also provided funding for educational programs and contraceptive development. Congress later broadened the mandate to provide community-based sex education programs and preventive services for unwed teenagers that were at risk for pregnancy. This obviously brought the national laws of the country more in line with what Planned Parenthood was trying to do. This continued in the 1970's when Hawaii repealed all laws criminalizing abortion and the Syracuse, New York chapter of Planned Parenthood became the first chapter to allow on-site abortions through the 24th week of pregnancy. The only other condition was that a licensed physician had to be the one to do the procedure. In 1971, Planned Parenthood created an international program that was largely funded by the United States Agency for International Development. This lead to that part of Planned Parenthood being the "largest U.S. non-government provider of family planning services, reaching millions of women and men in developing countries" (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

As mentioned in the introduction, Roe v. Wade was an absolute turning point when it came to abortion. That case was heard before the Supreme Court in 1973 and it had two major aspects to it. First, it recognized that there was a constitutional right to privacy. Also, it was granted that women should have a right to have an abortion if she so chose to do so. However, that was not the only major domino that had to fall. In 1976, there was a law in Missouri that stated that spousal and/or parental consent had to be garnered for an abortion to occur. That law was struck down based on the outcome of Roe v. Wade. About the same time, laws that banned distribution of contraceptives to those people under the age of sixteen were also struck down. Lastly, while teenagers could not get an abortion without parental consent, the child would have the option to pursue the matter with a judge. This is known as a judicial bypass and was deemed to be a valid way to keep the parental requirement in place. In short, a minor could get an abortion if they had parental or judicial consent (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

However, there was some pushback from the federal government when it came to abortions. Even though they were still legal in light of the Roe decision, Henry Hyde made it a point to introduce an amendment that would ban Medicaid funds from being used to fund abortions. Since Medicaid is used to help pay the medical expenses of poor people, the implications against poor women in need of an abortion or similar services was quite obvious. Further, the Reagan Administration was the also filled with a huge campaign against the choice to abort (or not abort) a fetus. Perhaps the worst part is that some very vitriolic rhetoric about abortion and the doctors that engaged in the same was running rampant like wildfire and the Reagan administration did not seem interested in quelling that verbiage. Another squelching of funding occurred when the prior government assistance for international efforts was banned or at least limited starting in 1984. This became known as the "global gag rule" or the "Mexico City policy" (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

In the last ten to twenty years, there have been incidents of censoring of clinics, threats to lower or eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, lawsuits regarding some of the devices being used and their supposed lack of safety, refusal of some private corporations to pay for certain contraception or birth control procedures or items and so forth. This is despite the fact that a sound majority of Americans have supported access to birth control. The approval of abortion itself has been much more moderate but has usually wavered and half. A major proverbial bullet was dodged for abortion proponents when President Reagan nominated Robert Bork. Bork vehemently and openly disagreed with the Roe decision aspect that stated that privacy was a right. Bork asserted that no such right was defined or guaranteed in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights even if the Roe case asserted this to be true. However, some Supreme Court decisions have narrowed access to abortion despite the best efforts of Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood reacted to this by creating an advocacy and lobbying arm called the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Even with that, some bad decisions disappointed Planned Parenthood. Several cases during the Reagan and Bush years led to restrictions on abortion including allowing states to create their own regulations rather than ensuring that the federal government alone had the right to do so (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

Planned Parenthood and its efforts were emboldened after the 12 years of George HW Bush and Reagan ended and President Bill Clinton took office. He repealed the aforementioned gag rule and this led to poor people getting the services that were at one time blocked. George W. Bush made his own efforts but current President Barack Obama has restored the shift to the left when it comes to abortion. Even with all of the positive developments over time, Planned Parenthood has been attacked both verbally and literally. Indeed, there were letters sent to Planned Parenthood Centers around the country that were stated to contain anthrax. There was also the bombing of a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. This bombing was at a reproductive center and killed police officer Robert Sanderson. There was also the killing of Doctor Barnett Slepian. Someone shot him in his kitchen using a rifle. There was also the killing of abortion doctor George Tiller in the lobby of own church in Wichita, Kansas. In just a decade, there were many attacks, attempted or successful, on a number of Planned Parenthood and similar clinics or locations. These included forty bombings, at least four hundred instances of stalking, more than one hundred assaults, three kidnappings and sixteen instances where murder was attempted but not successful (Planned Parenthood, 2016).

Many people associate Planned Parenthood with abortion but there are certainly other things that they are involved in and contraception is not the only one. Indeed, two thirds of the people in this country that are childless want to have them but have been unable to do so for a litany of reasons. Planned Parenthood and other reproductive clinics can certainly also assist with things like adoption and fertility. Indeed, this has been true as far back as 1950 (Loth, 1950). At the same time, morbidity is a concern when it comes to family planning and pregnancy and parents should be empowered to have abortion if the life of the child is going to be an ongoing and seemingly never-ending struggle. However, the increasing access to birth control has seemingly helped a lot. The children per family rate was about four at one point in the 1950's but has since been cut in half and this roughly coincides with the rise in the accessibility to and use of birth control (Centers for Disease Control, 1999)