These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Before the 1980s, neither the ERA nor women’s health were partisan issues, except insofar as Republicans had historically offered more support to equal rights and family planning than had Democrats. Planned Parenthood, the birth control organization founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916, had forced her out decades before her death in 1966, objecting to her feminism. Beginning in the 1920s, its leaders had been more Republican than Democrat. By the 1950s, many were conservatives—Barry Goldwater and his wife served on the board of Planned Parenthood of Phoenix—family planning having become, politically speaking, a family value. In campaigning for the legalization of contraception, Planned Parenthood also enjoyed the broad support of both doctors and clergymen. In 1958, Alan F. Guttmacher, chief of obstetrics at Mount Sinai Hospital, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia, and a member of Planned Parenthood’s medical advisory board, challenged New York City municipal hospitals to reverse an institutional policy that forbade doctors from giving out contraceptives or contraceptive information. Hospital chaplains lined up behind him. In 1960, Planned Parenthood’s Clergymen’s National Advisory Council issued a statement, “The Ethics of Family Planning,” describing family planning as fulfilling “the will of God” by allowing married couples to enjoy intercourse for the sake of love.10 Efforts to legalize abortion were begun in the 1960s, not by women’s rights acti...