Buddhism
Uploaded by maiohhmy on Dec 17, 2008
The Morality of Birth Control
In a time when women had no freedom other than being housewives and to birth babies, one woman took a stand for every woman’s rights as a human being. In the late 1800s birth control, a term coined by Margaret Sanger in her newspaper, Women Rebel, in 1914, was considered to be immoral by most religious groups. Sanger pleaded with society to implement some form of birth control to give aid to her fellow women who were looked on as nothing more than objects that would bend to the will of man. Margaret Sanger played an essential role in the political movement of women’s rights and freedom by advocating birth control contraceptives. Through the life that she led and the lessons she taught, many know her as the “one girl revolution”. Due to her strong influence in history, our society has increased health awareness for women, made sexual protection a choice for all people, and also introduced family modification as a choice for mankind.
During the early twentieth century, the rate of unwanted childbirth was very high. Women in poor neighborhoods lived their lives in an almost constant state of pregnancy. Margaret Sanger recognized the need for women to be able to control their childbearing and believed that unintentional childbearing caused many problems. She felt it led to poverty, abuse, crime, alcoholism, and joblessness and saw the effect it had on the women’s emotional states and decided to make a difference. She provided women with the means and the knowledge to control their offspring and she gave them hope.
In 1921, Margaret Sanger took to the podium in her town’s Town Hall. She began her speech, “The Morality of Birth Control” with a brief introduction of why they were all at the convention, and quickly hurtled into her effective monologue on why birth control and Planned Parenthood information must be put into effect. Although her speech was to originally take place one week earlier, it was postponed simply because one group of opponents of her speech’s subject sabotaged the meeting. Sanger supports the claims in her speech with her personal experience in the area of nursing, facts, and strong emotions to successfully demonstrate why birth control and planned parenthood information must be distributed among men and women in the United States.
Although Sanger’s current audience for the speech was her colleagues at...