Dear Kayla

I’m really happy to explain my views, because I believe we are standing at a crossroads, and our rank and file has not had the necessary self-education about the science involved in changing our bodies through drugs and surgery or broad-based political and philosophical discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of re-defining sex and gender.  (I am deeply concerned about transgender civil right; I think these studies and meetings/conferences/forums need to happen immediately.)

I’m also glad that both the Open Letter and the Response are carefully written and show great respect to those who disagree.  Unfortunately, up to now, careful thinking and respect has been in short supply in this debate.

I would like to continue talking about this with you and anyone else who would like to be involved.  I want to hear what you think, and I’m happy to explain why I think as I do.  If you’re interested, let me know. 

I found the Response very interesting and thought it brought out some valid points about the rights of transgender people, but it bothers me that the Response did not respond to the thrust of the Open Letter which had to do with the effects that the proposed changes in terminology would have on the practice of midwifery, on the health and well-being of birthing mothers and babies and their families, or what impact it would have on the political strength of the midwifery movement.  Instead, they changed the conversation to focus very narrowly on the justice or injustice that transgendered people suffer in our society and to suggest that the change of terminology would somehow be the first and most significant change that we have to make and that it would somehow end misogyny and social injustice.

One reason I know that most people, including medically-trained doctors, midwives, and other practitioners lack the necessary understanding of how our natural hormones work in the body and how the hormone-like drugs that are being used to prevent pregnancy and to bring about changes in people’s secondary sex characteristics is that over 30 years ago,  the Feminist Women’s Health Centers (FWHC) undertook to learn enough about hormones to enable us to write a chapter for our book, “Women’s Bodies in Women’s Hands.”  (That chapter was never published.  It was cut and the shortened version was published as “A New View of a Woman’s Body”.)

To remind you, the FWHC learned much about the healthy functioning of our female bodies through self-examination in groups.  But, to write this chapter, we did much, much more.

We formed a “hormone team”, which consisted of Lorraine Rothman, inventor of the Del’em, Kathy Hodge, Suzann Gage, illustrator of A New View and me.  We met all day, five days a week for months while the rest of our group kept the health center going.  We read scientific papers and journals.  Al Rothman, Lorraine’s husband, came up to L.A. from Orange County, at least one day a week to spend the day answering our many questions.  Al was a professor of Biology at University of California at Fullerton.  

We immediately learned that human beings, like all animals, aren’t cut out of a cookie cutter.  Of course, in self-help, we had seen that although we were all females, our bodies looked different, and we were all normal and healthy.  Our menstrual cycles weren’t all “28-day”.  Our genitals had a wide range of difference.  We realized that the concept of “male” and “female” was an oversimplification, albeit a very practical one.  We also realized, as feminists, that the Patriarchy exaggerates the differences between males and females, and that both males and females produce estrogen and testosterone.  Males and females are not “binary” (a mathematical term meaning that all units are either one thing or the other), however in the course of embryonic development, two normal curves develop.  How many people have ever taken a course in elementary statistics?)  Most people (about 60%) who present as males fall into the “normal-type curve”.   There is the same normal-type curve for females.  I don’t know if pre-historic societies created gender roles to fit in with their social and economic structure, but today’s world, gender roles definitely further patriarchal militarism, male dominance and female submission.  As a feminist, I challenge these restrictive roles, although I believe that as females gain more real power in the society, both individually and collectively, the oppressiveness will decrease and the content of these gender roles will change. 

I believe that white male supremacists are the most powerful force in the world, and they use their wealth and power to enforce these norms.  As a feminist, I battle against their ability to harness our reproductive capacity to further their nationalistic and imperialistic agendas.  Any discussion of sex and gender that doesn’t start off with this awareness just ends up defining the problem as social conditioning and the solution as changing public opinion.   

In our hormone study, we learned how little science really knows about how our body functions, and how the medical profession generally relies on their “detail salesmen” to tell them about drugs.  We found the average doctor knew less than we did—and that was frightening.  That was over 30 years ago, but our scientific understanding of hormones and the complexities of their relationship to our body’s functioning does not justify the reckless experimentation with hormone-like drugs to prevent pregnancy or to change our outward appearance.  Our present knowledge of GMO’s does not justify experimentation in changing the genetic structure of plants to make bigger profits.  We all know the capitalistic motivations of the scientists who promote GMO’s and other technological innovations like fracking, but most of us do not know the motivations of those who promote population control.

The books and blogs I’ve read on this issue gives the impression that the authors can explain these issues with the laywoman well enough to arm us with answers, not just questions.  I know how hard we worked, and I know how all the analogies that people use to explain these phenomena distort and mislead more than they enlighten.

I believe that the understanding of what is “sex” and “gender” is fundamental to having a sound theoretical base for our feminist struggle.  It is a spectacle of see us constructing manifestos out of the poorly understood and adequately researched “biological facts”, especially if it’s to push an agenda that doesn’t deal with the problem that all females (those identified as females in ultra sound in utero) are either being destroyed on the basis of their sex or raised to perpetuate their oppression.

Now, getting to the Open Letter and the some specifics of the response.  To me, the midwifery movement is much, much more than giving women “choices”.  To me, it’s restoring birth to its rightful place in human society.  The respondents mischaracterize the Open Letter’s exaltation of birth as a biological event, relegating it to “merely” being biological.  The biological reality of birth is the essential precondition of everything else.  It is awesome.  I’m concerned that de-emphasizing the fact that unless a human being is born with ovaries and a uterus, it cannot produce a new human being will weaken Midwifery’s powerful support of each woman’s right to birth without outside interference.  We females are the ones that the patriarchy is controlling; we are the ones that must work collectively to fight our struggle to regain control.   

I could say that this gender discussion is a side-show, and some people in power have been and no doubt will no doubt continue to use it for that.  But, actually, I think it’s very important.   

Right now, I can only hope we’re in an awkward phase and eventually we’ll be able to accommodate the needs of anyone, male, female or intersex, who wants to live in that way without undermining the gains of the feminist movement. 

Especially as it relates to the birth issues and the philosophy of midwifery, I think that, much as we respect the rights of mothers to drink and smoke and use drugs, we seek to keep environmental toxins and technology away from the birthing process.  This is a fundamental distinction between us and the male-dominated medical profession.  I believe that accepting the use of hormone-like drugs and surgery in our sexual and reproductive organs as being healthy will weaken our position as guardians of the birth process and clouds our thinking.

Please forgive my wordiness!  As Mark Twain said in a long letter, “I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.”

Warm regards,
Carol

Cape Cod Meeting Population Control Handouts

Pill Popular with Slate's Beyerstein but Feminists Have Doubts

By Carol Downer

The women’s health movement has had a healthy skepticism about all the invasive methods of birth control developed in the last half century--IUD’s and various type of pills.  Women stormed the Pill hearings in 1970 because they saw that no women were participating in the research or the government approval process, and they were leery of women taking a powerful drug - it stops the reproductive machine in its tracks - to control fertility.  Safe, effective methods of birth control existed that women had used in certain societies for many decades.

Lindsay Beyerstein, in her review of Holly Grigg-Spall’s “Sweetening The Pill” seems unaware of our protests, including Barbara Seaman’s explosive work, “The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill”.  Our efforts, mostly through the National Women’s Health Network, have continued over the years, forcing the drug companies to improve their inserts and to lower dosages, so that some of the more catastrophic complications that showed up right away have been substantially lowered.  Still, today, no women’s health advocate will dismiss Holly Grigg-Spall’s questions about the way that the Pill has been marketed, the way it’s been pushed by population control organizations in their clinics and the implications of millions of women taking a pill that may change their emotional hard-wiring.  Furthermore, the net social result of millions of women walking around having drug-induced feelings of sadness and depression is unfathomable.

Feminist health activists’ lack of enthusiasm about the Pill has continued, but women have voted with their feet.  They’ve embraced the Pill.  Even the harshest critics of the Pill, the Feminist Women’s Health Centers, have given out the Pill freely since they opened their doors in 1973 because women want it.  The National Women’s Health Network focuses its efforts on making the Pill as safe as possible, not on restricting its distribution.  Regarding screening out women with high risk of complication, we say, “There’s no woman sick enough to justify keeping her from taking the Pill; there’s no woman healthy enough to protect her from suffering severe side effects of the Pill.”  We know the realities of our lives, and we respect the calculations any woman makes when she determines what birth control method she will use.  After we’ve made sure she has the most up-to-date information available, we fight for her right to choose whatever method she thinks best.

We know, from running our women’s clinics, that an inordinate number of women are taking anti-depressants.  No one is really doing the kind of research that would give us answers as to what is causing that widespread experience of depression.   

So, why does Slate, a progressive on-line magazine not pay respectful attention to a serious book which questions the safety of a pill being taken by millions of women at a time when the research into the actions of hormones in our body are at an infant stage?  Aren’t we progressives worried about government approval of routine genetic modification of the public’s food supply. (Oh, I forgot. The government regulators that Beyerstein places her trust in did approve GMO, didn’t they?) 

Does Grigg-Spall’s book not merit respectful review because it calls into question the popular myth of the benefits of the Pill?  Lindsay Beyerstein claims, “The pill ushered in a new era of educational and professional attainment for women.  As a discreet, highly-effective, and fully female-controlled form of birth control, the pill allowed women to plan their families, space their births, and even delay childbearing long enough to establish themselves in careers.”  

This statement reads like the drug company’s promotional ad.  It’s misleading.  When comparing the Pill with non-invasive methods of birth control, they’re about equal in effectiveness when used properly, and about equal when not used properly!  Running abortion clinics, we find that about as many women become pregnant taking the Pill as using other methods especially if one takes into consideration the oft-occurring situation where a woman suffers a side-effect of the Pill which causes her to quit and before she can institute a new method, she’s pregnant! 

She says it’s wonderful that the Pill is a female-controlled form of birth control.  When I asked Dr. Hugh Davis, inventor of an IUD, why they hadn’t tried a birth control pill on men, his answer was, “We couldn’t get the (reproductive) tracts.”  Even if most women envision themselves as having a career, isn’t the real feminist battle to change society so that having a baby is not a career-derailing event?

Or is Grigg-Spall dismissed because perhaps she thinks that today’s woman is not really that thrilled to drop her children off at a day care center so that she can plug through a day that’s as dreary as their father’s?  Or maybe Beyerstein is unaware of the science of demography, or the machinations of industrialists, or the schemes of social planners who are funded by elite foundations?  She should read Betty Friedan who spent two years looking at the files of public relations firms and interviewed the manufacturers who hired them to discover how much the “Feminine Mystique” was created by the post World-War II media to convince American women to stay home and buy more household furnishings and appliances to support “patriarchal capitalism”.  Oh, where is Betty when we need her!

My favorite explanation is that Beyerstein’s intemperate review comes from her fear that Grigg-Spall wants to make women, including herself, revel in her bodily procreative functions, thus making her into an incubator.  (Beyerstein makes a gratuitous side swipe against women who want to breast feed or not have epidurals.)  I don’t get that implication.  I believe that Grigg-Spall is sharing her concern that the social pressures and inequality of opportunity that women have that leads them to take the Pill is resulting in their enduring years of feeling sub-par.  She is impressing the reader with the enormity of the monkey wrench that the Pill is throwing into the functioning of our bodies.

Beyerstein dismisses Grigg-Spall’s experiences as irrelevant, and insists that only scientific studies, (note: funded by the manufacturers), are to be trusted.  Well, the second wave of feminism was founded on the rock of “the personal is political”.  It was when we sat in a circle and shared our individual stories that we realized our position in the whole scheme of things.  I do not think that Grigg-Spall has “proven” that the Pill is creating generations of Stepford Wives, but I wish that there was some research designed to find out what’s going on with women today who sometimes seem to lose their revolutionary zeal.   Taking a hormone-like drug that makes one feel blue may not be the whole explanation, but it deserves looking into.

Lastly, is it inaccurate for Grigg-Spall to say that the Pill is equivalent to castration?  Well, no one would deny that it is temporarily castrating, that is, when a woman is taking the Pill, her gonads are not working.  But, over a period of years, the Pill can permanently stop the ovary from ovulating.  Now, that’s castration.  Maybe that doesn’t bother some people.  But, remember, hormones, which are manufactured in the ovary circulate through the blood and go into each and every cell of our body.  These incredibly tiny molecules (about which we know appallingly little) cause changes in each cell, different depending on the function of the cell.  These changes are poorly understood and new ones are being discovered every day. 

I would hope that Slate finds another reviewer who understands that birth control and abortion are hotly-debated topics that are hotly debated global population policy forum.  A woman’s decision regarding her sexuality and reproduction are private decisions, however a battle rages between the camp which wants to engineer women’s choices such that they choose to have fewer children, the camp which wants to engineer those choices in the direction of fewer children, and the women’s health movement which is working to change society so that women can have true choice, because society would provide support for any child they would have.  Without that perspective, Slate finds itself in the company of the first camp.

Response to Carol Downer's "Margaret Sanger Award"

Women's Health in Women's Hands received the following comment on its Facebook page.  It was a response to an announcement of Carol Downer's Margaret Sanger Award (awarded by the Veteran Feminists of America).  

You must be so proud..."We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." -Margaret Sanger

Here is Carol Downer's reply:

Yes, I am so proud to be getting the Margaret Sanger award, because I know, from extensive reading about Margaret Sanger’s lifelong work to put birth control in the hands of all women, that she was not a bigot and she certainly did not harbor any genocidal tendencies. She did, however, make alliances with those wealthy elites who seek to control population, especially those of people of color, to deal with the dangers of overpopulation, rather than give up their prerogatives. She did make mistakes, but she would not have countenanced anything that would “exterminate the Negro population”, a phrase she was clearly using to mock intemperate accusations that she was anticipating.

I know that she worked tirelessly to urge women of all nationalities, cultural backgrounds and ethnic groups, to use birth control to limit their families. I read the quote that you rely on to show her genocidal tendencies to in fact show her awareness of not only the genocidal implications of use of birth control to wipe out undesirable populations, but also her awareness that those who oppose birth control for nationalistic or religious reasons often yell “racism” to cover their own pro-natalist motivations. She says “we don’t want the word to get out”, not “we don’t want the word to go out”.

If you knew more about Margaret Sanger, you would know that she was a fiery socialist from a working-class background, and her earliest work focused especially on poor people, mostly white working-class women. When wealthy white women took over her organization, directing it in much more conservative direction, she abandoned her grassroots approach. She re-married a very wealthy man, Noah Slee, the inventor of 3-in-1 oil which put her on par with them.

The reason that I continue to admire Margaret, even though she was closely associated with Planned Parenthood, which has a spotty record on forcing birth control on vulnerable populations, and even though she and her very wealthy associate, Katherine McCormick, were the prime movers in the development of the birth control pill, is that I know that she always stuck up for the right of a woman to control her own body--that was her bottom line.

Furthermore, and this is the most important reason that I admire her despite her compromises and mistakes in choice of allies is that I see the leaders in the women’s movement, and other progressive movements, making the same mistakes today--and this includes women of color and the movement that challenges gender stereotypes. They accept funding from the same elites that Margaret did, telling themselves that they can take their money without accepting their influence, and they seem less aware than Margaret was about the political price they are paying for this easy money. I respect and admire these groups as well, despite the mistakes that I believe they are currently making.

I recommend that you educate yourself about the field of population control and the propaganda wars being fought on both sides, those that want to limit population growth and those that want to increase it. Whoever put out that incendiary quote, completely out of the context, had a motive, and I can guarantee you that it was not to promote the rights of people of color or the rights of women.

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Battle Against Population Controllers Unite

Battle Against Population Controllers Unite
Radical Feminists & People Of Color
By Carol Downer

Originally Published in Women's Health Movement Paper, July 1980

The U.S.'s clear (though unofficial) population policy until a mere ten years ago has always been extremely pronatalist (pro-birth), at least as far as the white population goes. Pushing women to have large families goes back to England and Europe and the struggle of the newly formed nations over territory and colonial possessions. Napoleon introduced many policies which rewarded men for its immediate acceptance and use by European men and women, the national leaders pressured the Catholic church for its support. In 1869, Pope Pius IX decreed that all abortion, from the moment of conception on, was murder. Queen Elizabeth passed the first law against abortion. The peasants in England were being forced off their lands into cities to live in abject poverty. Their culture, was lost. The European population swelled to the point where people literally sold themselves into slavery to get to America, the land of opportunity. While Indians were being massacred to wipe them off the face of the earth, white settlers were forced into childbearing to the point that it was common for white men to outlive two or three wives. The doctrine of "Manifest Destiny" demanded that whites settle and occupy the continent from coast to coast.

Then after World War I, a movement to reduce the population grew which adopted the theories of Malthus, an Englishman who, in the early 1900's had predicted that without the "natural" means of birth control (wars, floods, and pestilence) the poor of the earth were going to multiply much faster than the resources of the earth could support. This birth control movement was supported financially by American ruling class families, such as the Rockefellers, the Mellons, Fords and executives such as Cass Canfield, head of Harper and Row Publishers.

After World War II, the birth control movement took its cause to the public in huge ad campaigns, couching its concerns as fear of a population explosion and world hunger. In fact, the birth controllers were extremely afraid of a rebellion of the Third World, whose resources they were plundering. And, as the political awareness of the people of color living in the inner city increased, they were also afraid of a revolution.

Planned Parenthood, started in the 1950's, sponsored early experimentation into the Pill in Puerto Rico. They found out that the Pill would prevent pregnancy. Because of their studies on animals, they also knew that it caused many other undesirable effects, such as shrivelling up the ovaries causing sterility and early menopause, and cancer. They went ahead anyway. Today, millions of women around the world are subjects of the largest uncontrolled medical experiment in history. Planned Parenthood physicians also developed other procedures, drugs and devices, equally dangerous and totally physician-controlled. To mention just a couple, the IUD, Depo Provera, and mini-laparotomy for surgical sterilization of the woman.

The population controllers ultimate weapon against the fertility of the poor and Third World people is surgical sterilization. It is here that we can see most clearly their racist, imperialist motives. In the last 20 years, a third of Puerto Rican women have been sterilized, while during the same period, middle class white women were being denied sterilization in this country. In one example among many, one white woman, a wife of a psychiatrist, stood on the hospital window ledge after delivering her fourth child and threatened to jump unless they allowed her to be sterilized.

Antinatalism (attitudes and policies against birth) had spread so much in the U.S. that by the end of the '60's abortion laws were liberalized in California, New York, Washington and Hawaii. The abortion reform movement was not and still is not guided by feminist leadership. National abortion organizations meet in New York City at the Population Council in a large conference room under the watchful eyes of John D. Rockefeller, III, whose portrait hangs on the wall. Rockefeller, until his death, was the Pope of the antinatalist movement. He provided much of the funds in its early years. After 1950, the U.S. Government provided more and more of the financial backing, especially in the Third World. The Agency for International Development has a population department, which aggressively pushes birth control as part of any foreign-aid package to "underdeveloped" countries. For example, Depo Provera, the Dalkon Shield and self-abortion kits are outlawed in the U.S., but distributed abroad by A.I.D. Ray Ravenholt, Director of the Population Department, publically admitted that A.I.D. was trying to stave off world revolution by mass sterilization of women in poorer countries. Ha has been subsequently removed from that position.

The Feminist Women's Health Centers have led the fight against the population controllers since their early beginning in 1971. They exposed Harvey Karman, and infamous abortionist who has performed experimental and very harmful abortions on women of Bangladesh, poor black women in Philadelphia and poor Latin women in Los Angeles. They also have raised the consciousness of the women's health movement and many liberal people who had not recognized the imperialistic motives that underlay the popular appeal to concern about over-population and world hunger. They attended the Menstrual Regulation Conference in Hawaii in 1973, where Ravenholt, A.I.D., Batelle Corporation and the Pathfinder Fund, were trying to sell Third World physicians on early abortion. Ravenholt proposed to drop self-abortion kits on the rice paddies. The FWHC opposed this plan; subsequently it was squelched by Kennedy's Subcommittee on Human Experimentation.

Feminist and people of color formed an alliance in New York City to get regulations adopted to combat sterilization abuse. In 1977, they were victorious, as the guidelines were approved to be used in New York City Hospital. The group, called The Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, has formed chapters throughout the U.S. and has succeeded in getting similar guidelines adopted by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. This victory is a stunning blow to the population controllers, who are looking to sterilization as a preferable alternative for poor women. The upholding of the Hyde Amendment in July of 1980 will deprive poor women the financial help they need to have access to abortion. The inevitable consequence is that many will choose to be sterilized rather than risk getting pregnant. This is an excellent example of how population controllers use a variety of social control tools to shape the population growth. Today, it is fairly easy for middle-income women to get abortions. Teenage women of all ethnic groups have been targeted and many are coerced into abortions. Low-income women, which is often synonomous with women of color, will be coerced into sterilization.

Radical feminists are natural allies of those oppressed groups that are the target of population controllers. The Women's Health Movement recognizes the connections between imperialism and its logical expressions, racism and sexism. Unfortunately, many women of this generation have bought the anti-natalist propaganda that their decision to not have children is a sign of their liberation, rather than recognizing that it is necessary for them to maintain a decent standard of living, and that they are subject to many societal pressures to limit their fertility, even if they have to use dangerous methods to do so. It is a job for radical feminists to help women to understand how they are being manipulated.

A common perception is that feminists are anti-male and anti-family. Unfortunately, there are many right-wing feminists who do hold such limited views. However, radical feminists support the true from of the family and do not direct their energies against the individual man, but rather at the multi-national corporation which are indeed run by patriarchal ruling class families. These ruling class families have attempted to destroy everyone else's families, going so far as to redefine the family as the nuclear family. Feminists oppose the nuclear family, which locks people into rigid roles in an oppressive unite, and want to establish a society where all individuals can live in a mutually supportive, loving environment where they are cared about and nurtured.