Planned Parenthood recently took steps to publicly disallow its founder, Margaret Sanger. The organization announced that it was cutting off its call from a Manhattan clinic, raising its eugenics. This resolution did not satisfy the right’s “right to life” that continues to attack Planned Parenthood, but gained the support of pro-choice activists and anti-racists, who argue that she had criticism of eugenics that were also false. as they are now, it has become an impediment to the effort to raise awareness among women of color.

Disauthorization follows a demolition of statues and monuments of the American Confederates of the Civil War and their supporters for slavery.

Allegations have been made about Sanger’s racism for many years, and it is no surprise that Planned Parenthood, under heavy attack, as it comes from the right, is seeking to take this challenge away from those who use it hypocritically to damage the organization. The right, which is not known for its opposition to racist ideology, attacked Planned Parenthood by characterizing its founder as a racist defender of eugenics.

It is also understandable that Planned Parenthood is taking steps to remove Sanger’s call from a construction at a time when progressive and anti-racist forces are in motion like never before. No intelligent will user can deny the circle of family members who make plans and their smart pictures want everything they can get.

However, history is complicated and it is unfortunate that in repudiating Sanger, Planned Parenthood does not emphasize that parts of his life deserve compliments and deserve to be remembered. I am referring in particular to the abundant contributions it has made to the labour and feminist movements.

At a time when the elegance of running is more deeply in disarray, having suffered successive and regressive setbacks since the anti-communist years of the post-World War II era, Reagan/Thatcher’s attacks on industry unions in the 1980s, the destruction of the USSR in 1991, and now the calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic – we will have not made contributions through trade union leaders and effective feminists in the past.

While Sanger had concepts that we consider unbearable today, sectarianism and workers’ contempt were part of them.

For nearly 25 years before founding Planned Parenthood with his sister, Ethel Byrne, and a small radical organization, Sanger was one of the first members of the American Socialist Party and organizer of the world’s commercial workers. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, longtime president of the American Communist Party, another prominent organizer of the IWW.

She witnessed the effect of the union struggle on women and young people that caught Sanger’s attention over time. As he states in his memoirs, Pivot of Civilization: “We have noted that, ultimately, the true weight of trade warfare rests on the fragile and overly fragile shoulders of young people… He writes that his considerations have been rejected by man-dominated union leadership. She sought to inspire these families to restrict the number of hungry young people they produced. Some trade union leaders in the industry, adding radicals, had in fact argued at the time that the poorer we had, the faster the proletarian revolution Others, of course, have fallen into the opportunistic position that feminist considerations would deviate from the mess of elegance faced by all workers.

In addition, some of the male leaders of the labor movements did not appreciate Sanger’s challenge to patriarchy. Their common recommendation to women to pay attention to themselves before paying attention to their husbands did not earn well through some husbands.

Interestingly, as his discontent with some of the male leaders he worked with increased, he began reading to writers such as Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Rocker, Lorenzo Portet, Francisco Ferrer and Enrico Malatesta. Sanger writes in her memoirs how these thinkers “encouraged and strengthened her.” Among them, he quotes the rocker, the anarcosindicalist.

While some of these writers shame some of the trade union leaders of the time, none in the field of racists or eugenicists.

It is well known that the Nazis then followed their concepts about the race of American eugenicists. When they burned books, Margaret Sanger’s works were included among those thrown into the flames. They did not like the fact that she wrote that birth control was intended for women’s lives and that it was probably unbearable to use it to reduce the number of so-called lower or minority devotees.

Sanger’s separation from IWW was expanded when she and her sister began smuggling contraceptive devices from the UK. This led the founder of Planned Parenthood not only to a collision course with some of the union leaders of her time, but also with state legislation prohibiting the possession, training or distribution of contraceptives. Connecticut was just one of the states.

In 1920, the full-time painting organizer’s “turn” to the birth control advocate was completed. Sanger had been a feminist and suffragette, and those impulses also led her to her painting organization, as well as to the creation of Planned Parenthood. Sanger, the IWW trade union organizer, officially broke with the union and consolidated the concept of a circle of relatives planning “clinics,” but in her mind, at least, it was a component of the same cause of women’s release. Clinics would provide contraceptives to women, teach techniques to prevent pregnancy, and promote the concept that women, as independents, do not want to pay attention to their husbands.

Under Sanger’s leadership, based on her years as a painting organizer, the clinics were incorporated into black and white: nurses and doctors.

In establishing these clinics, she not only had many white women, such as Flynn of the Communist Party, who was among her activists and money, but also the co-founder of NAACP W.E.B. From the Woods, Paul Robeson, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Mary McCloud Bethune and some pro-Labour black activist ministers who would eventually invite Sanger to speak to his congregations.

Du Bois served on the Board of Planned Parenthood. In the years that followed, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., praised his paintings and received the organization’s first prize.

Du Bois and those black ministers are important. It was in a 1939 correspondence with one of his friends that he took out a passage of context to hang out with Sanger ever since. She wrote: “… We don’t need other people to know that we have to exterminate the black population, and the [black] minister is the guy who can correct that concept if one of his greatest rebellious members ever comes up with it. … “She was talking about her visits with some congregations of black churches.

His words were cut and manipulated to say, “We don’t need other people to know that we have to exterminate the black population.” This trap excerpt is presented as evidence of his supposedly racist beliefs.

Once challenged to his position on eugenics, Sanger was clear: “If by ‘unfit’ the physical or intellectual defects of a human being are understood, it is an admirable gesture, but if ‘unfit’ refers to races or religions, then it is some other matter, which I sincerely regret,” he said in 1934.

While Even Sanger’s characterization of “physical and intellectual defects” is abhorrent today, our evolved social attitudes toward the disabled or physically disabled are just over 30 years old, dating back to the Americans with Disabilities Act of the 1990s and previous struggles in public education to get all young people in school. Moreover, I maintain that his use of the term “racial improvement” in his memoirs, writings and speeches, even in black congregations, has the broadest contion of the human race, a narrow ethnic contion.

Other racist quotes attributed to Sanger have been dispelled through Marxist historian Silvia Federici and Charles Valenza.

Federici’s effort to rehabilitate Sanger extends to works such as Caliban and the Witch: Woguy, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, where he talked about Sanger’s global challenge and women as his face. In a 2012 interview in Factor of Race magazine, Poverty – the Environment said, “As we learned in the feminist movement, the first impediment a woguy encounters when it needs to fight is not directly the state, but the guy in the family.

Valenza’s investigation, on the other hand, revealed that the racist quotes attributed to Sanger were not hers, but they gave the impression in a magazine that she had founded and which was then under the publisher of others. However, in a 1985 paper, “Margaret Sanger Was She Racist?”, published in Family Planning Perspectives, Valenza argues that these disparate authors gave the impression in his magazine about birth due to the popularity of his call at the time, and Sanger was interested in raising money for his cause and not because he backed his ideas.

Finally, I talked about Connecticut, Sanger’s first clinic. They’d follow New York and Maryland. Sanger’s friend and Planned Parenthood co-founder Katharine “Kit” Hepburn (mother of the actress), a communist, helped organize the Connecticut clinic. Hepburn’s sister, Edith Hooker, hosted the first in Baltimore.

The Connecticut clinic selected from the beginning through Sanger as a site to verify antiception legislation, verify instances that culminated in the 1965 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, which not only established a “right to privacy” but also roe v Wade. Array the revocation of legislation that opposes homosexual sodomy and, most recently, the right to marry lesbians and homosexuals.

Sanger died shortly after Griswold in 1966.

The sum of Sanger’s fighting life and the allies and friends he attracted is loaded into a white racist or a eugenicist.

Sanger, however, is the real target on the right. It is women’s sovereignty over their own bodies that right and patriarchy deem reprehensible.

In fact, the right that has attacked him for so long knows it slightly: it is news for anti-abortionists who despise Sanger that Planned Parenthood did not begin to offer abortion until 1973, several years after his death.

And today, as Planned Parenthood disavows its founder, this same right wing seeks to capitalize on an anti-racist narrative in which they have no street credentials whatsoever. They want to take down a hundred-year-old organization which has not only served its main constituency of working-class women but also goes largely unrecognized for the health services it provided to gay men during the AIDS pandemic.

The left must be smart. Who thinks the right will be satisfied now that Sanger’s name has been publicly disavowed? Who thinks the mission of Planned Parenthood will now be freed to do its work? The right is chipping away at the foundations of our radical history, and we must not cede ideological ground to them.

As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the opinions of its author.

Lowell B. Denny, III, has a degree in political science from Washington University. He is now living in Hawaii where the sovereignty movement is strong. He has worked in publishing, retail, as a school teacher, and restaurant waiter.

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