By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
Margaret Sanger founded the birth control movement and Planned Parenthood. Born in 1879, Margaret Louise Higgins was the sixth of 11 children. She watched her mother die at age 50 after 18 pregnancies. She married architect William Sanger in 1902 and worked as a young nurse in New York. She had compassion for the many women, often migrants from Europe, who knew that another baby meant more hunger in their family. Those women were poor, without any method to prevent pregnancy except abstinence. And Sanger worked under a male-doctor dominated healthcare system that would not allow advising married mothers to “just say no.”
Sanger wrote brochures describing ways to prevent pregnancy and discussing gonorrhea and syphilis. She mailed them to the poor community, violating federal statutes for distributing “literature of illegal character.” Her actions eventually changed public opinion and postal censorship soon ended.
Sanger fought for decades to get contraceptives approved. And she secured funding for the research that led to the birth control pill. In spite of being demonized by anti-abortion groups today, Sanger was opposed to abortions. She had seen far too many deaths in her early nursing work that were due to back street abortions. In “Woman and the New Race,” Sanger wrote: “while there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”
In her book “Family Limitation” Sanger wrote: “no one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable but they will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. This is the only cure for abortions.” Simply, with good sex education and available contraception, Sanger believed there would be no unwanted pregnancies and therefore no widespread need for abortion.
Sanger succeeded in making contraceptives legal and available. She witnessed science move forward.
In 1923, scientists Allen and Daisy of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis isolated estrogen in mice and rats and determined it was produced in the ovaries. By the 1940s, researchers discovered how other hormones (follicle stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin) controlled the typical menstrual cycle.
Three researchers in Europe first synthesized the male hormone testosterone in 1935.
Tijo and Levan at the University of Lund, Sweden, determined that normal females have XX chromosomes and normal males have XY and published their research in 1956.
Meanwhile, John Money at the Johns Hopkins Psychohormonal Research Unit studied enough patients to realize that there was a separate feeling of maleness or femaleness that was realized by age six that was separate from sexual attraction after puberty. Money pulled a term from language studies and 1955 saw the first use of “gender” for this feeling of masculine or feminine identity. It was a brain difference. And sometimes it did not match chromosomes or anatomy.
But when did this brain difference develop? When Roger Gorski at U.C.L.A. injected testosterone into a pregnant rat, the resulting female babies grew up acting like males. Gorski located a region in these female rat brains that resembled male, not female brains. Dick Swaab and his team in the Netherlands then located this brain difference in male and female human brains in 1985.
Margaret Sanger had died in 1966 at age 87, a few months after the U.S. Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut ruled that birth control was legal for married couples. She had every reason to believe that all children in the future would be wanted and loved. —That sex education would become widespread. —That the many solid discoveries by science that would come later would provide for an educated citizenry who intelligently planned their families. And the limited need for abortions would only entail medical or social issues such as rape or incest.
Science succeeded. But society failed. There is little to no modern sex education describing our advanced understanding gained in these last fifty years.
We now live under the tyranny of the ignorant where many states have science-ignorant legislators and governors who know nothing beyond the simple anatomy of the 1800s.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities during 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.