Margaret Sanger Quotes

The overwhelming majority of Canadians and the Canadian legislators do not agree with this position, and Day and a few others represent a small minority view.

History has shown that as girls and women get educated and learn about family planning, their children are healthier and have better chances of survival and despite the lower death rate the population trend slows as a result of family planning.

At the time, condoms and other forms of contraceptives were illegal to buy, sell, possess or own. As late as 1963 a Connecticut druggist was sentenced to jail for filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms and selling them to a married couple even thought the woman might die if she again became pregnant. The Supreme Court (Griswald v. Connecticut) established that a woman had a right to control her own reproductive cycle and the government had no business interfering with a privacy right possessed by a couple. Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. The same moral compunctions used with abortion were, and still are used by some to oppose any form of artificial birth control. They argued: preventing a life was as serious a moral failure as taking one. Many Catholics, many evangelical and fundamentalist protestants, and some orthodox Muslims are today morally opposed to birth control and believe that the government should ban birth control as it once was in the United States.

A Woman’s Concern like many other anti-abortion groups are also morally opposed to birth control of all kinds except celibacy or the “rhythm method” which is not particularly effective. He was appointed by the George W. Bush administration after vigorous lobbying by some of the extreme right wing religious groups who wanted birth control such as pills, IUDs or condoms to be made illegal. These proposals did not get much public support as the vast majority of Americans including a majority of Catholics use birth control methods that this man would have criminalized. His claims about the negative effects of birth control had no scientific bases whatsoever. As a physician, he had been warned by the Medical Association for the improper practice of medicine. He had to resign his government position.

Many leaders of nations are in denial about this problem which exists almost everywhere. In Israel, the problem is compounded because the very orthodox Jews and Muslims both come from a tradition where women are allocated a place subservient to men in many ways and to some (like some Christians) there is a perceived duty to discipline wives and daughters. So reform involves religious tradition and theology.

The American Catholic Bishops wanted the right of religious organizations who ran civil institutions like hospitals or universities to deny its female employees any insurance coverage for birth control while paying for Viagra for males. Artificial birth control methods were considered immoral by the Roman Catholic Church. The Bishops did not feel that their institutions should be required to follow the civil law if their religious precepts opposed it. Quinn observed that 99% of women in America use birth control and even 98% of Catholic women did. This is a wonderful example of how subtle a basic principle like separation of church and state can be. The churches themselves did not have to pay for birth control insurance, but other Catholic-related entities did. How far would the bishops take their view. If a spaghetti factory were owned by a Catholic Church, would it have to insure birth control like other spaghetti factories? What about if the factory were a public company and the church owned all the stock? Most of the stock? Part of the stock? There are no clear and simple answers to these questions.

McCain had lost the 2008 Presidential Race and was not going to run again. At this time he was trying to counterbalance the views of some of his party’s new presidential nomination candidates—all men—who wanted to reverse a woman’s Constitutional right to abortion and favored policies that would diminish women’s access to affordable birth control. Some people observed that his logic applied equally well to abortion, but he was at that time not in favor of abortion on demand but did support the right of a woman to choose an abortion in cases of rape, incest or medical conditions where childbirth would endanger the life of the mother.

This was a metaphorical way of criticizing the Republican Party for policies that had men controlling women’s bodies.

If a state or community legally decides that a fetus is a person, there are many situations where there is a conflict of interest between the mother to be and the fetus. A pregnant woman, having a single drink of alcohol, potentially dangers the fetus (called Fetal Alcohol Syndrome). Smoking is clearly hazardous to the health of the fetus (underweight babies and more infant mortality and even more SIDS deaths. A diet to keep a mother thinner may not be nutritious for the fetus, A few states and local government have started prosecuting pregnant women for their personal behavior that might be detrimental to the fetus—often the purpose is to assert the right of the state to regulate the behavior of the pregnant woman so that the state can control abortion.