Rekha Basu: Abortion book sale

Fifty years ago, some birth control advocates were puzzling over how to fill a $3,000 budget gap facing the Planned Parenthood Committee of Des Moines, which provided reproductive health care and education at low or no cost. United Way had refused before, according to Jim Vickery, a board member at the time. A bake sale wouldn't do it. The money from lunches that female volunteers cooked and sold didn't come close to meeting the need, at a time when Mother's Day Dinner at the Kirkwood could be had for $2.25. Nor had the attempted movie screenings born much fruit. They needed something big.

It was Maddie Glazer (later Levitt), the late philanthropist, who suggested selling used books.

It was a stroke of brilliance.  [Not to be confused with the stroke of death] The first Planned Parenthood Book Sale, held at the vacated site of the former Katz drug store at Seventh and Locust, brought in $2,650 over five days. Interest was so great, in fact, that by the second day, an appeal went out for more donations above the 10,000 books originally set out. Joan Mannheimer was the sale's first chairperson. "We knew nothing, practically," she said. "We worked long and hard. We were simply overwhelmed."  [LOL, do you think any of them were ever read?]

The beauty of the idea [ideas are beautiful but not babies] was that it benefited everyone: People had books they no longer had use or space for, which others could buy at a greatly reduced price. There were no labor costs since volunteers picked up and sorted the books and ran the sales at vacated storefronts: The drug store, the Salvation Army basement, a shoe and two furniture stores. Each of Planned Parenthood's approximately 24 board members was asked to come up with 300 books to sell, according to Vickery, a former insurance company president who joined the board that year. He quips that his late boss, Jim Green, brought him on because, "I think he thought after four children, my wife and I needed further education."  [With the dawn of the internet it is very hard to sell Planned Parenthood as just one charity amongst many.  Planned Parenthood is controversial, despite Rekha Basu damage control efforts.]

When the following year's sale opened, the Register reported, "Customers, some with a purposeful gleam in their eyes, others browsing at random, poured into the store at 809 Walnut seeking bargains in books."

Whatever that "purposeful gleam" referred to - Cheap books? Contraception? Sex?- the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, which opens next week for its 50th year, has been a bonanza. Now it's held twice, in fall and spring, at the 4-H building. Combined, the sales bring in nearly half a million dollars a year. Another mark of its success is that the Iowa Right to Life Committee has responded by holding its own book sale on the same dates.  [And Iowa Right to Life exists without taxpayer funding, correct?]

Many have looked forward to the annual rite of fall at the Iowa State fairgrounds' Agriculture building, where the sale was housed for 35 years. Row upon well-organized row of tables is loaded with books of every genre and author, and browsers move about with shopping carts and boxes. Each sale now boasts of some 300,000 items including books, CDs, DVDs and games. Each one has 300 to 400 volunteers, in addition to the 125 year-round ones.  [Some of which can only otherwise be found in adult book stores.]

What drives those people to devote such time and energy to the often mundane work of collecting, sorting, pricing and selling old books? To understand, go back to a time when women "had no choice, no birth control," in the words of Laurie Sloterdyke, Planned Parenthood's events manager. Many of those women are still around, she says, "and they are very passionate about it."  [Oh yes that's right, it was women's fertility that caused them to be unable to vote, right?  Progesterone Pill Births Woman's Suffrage!]

In 1961, the birth control pill had just arrived on the market creating, according to Barbara Madden-Bittle, a former clinic staffer, board president and book sale chair, "a whole revolution for women." A nurse, she used to go door to door in low-income neighborhoods, educating women about birth control and inviting them into the clinic for exams. Some had multiple children and couldn't afford to feed more. For some, another pregnancy carried health risks.  [I wonder if they told women about the health risks of contraception?  I guess not.]

While some women went on the pill without telling their husbands, some husbands were thrilled because they could now have sex without worrying about a pregnancy, says Madden-Bittle. But it wasn't just about sex, she says. It opened up new choices for what women could do with their lives. [LOL!  What romance!]

Well before that, when the precursor to Planned Parenthood was founded as the Iowa Maternal Health League in 1934, women began coming to the clinic for other forms of birth control in the face of federal laws against dispensing it. Previously they had resorted to homemade devices to limit their family sizes. Mannheimer's late mother-in-law, Erma Mannheimer, was one of the four founders of the Des Moines clinic. "Erma told me that in the beginning, she used a sponge soaked in a spermicide with a string attached," said Mannheimer. Early on, her mother-in-law and the other three founders used to joke that if they were sent to jail, at least there'd be enough for a bridge game.  [Planned Parenthood, a long history of ethical legal practice.]

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who had opened the country's first birth control clinic in New York in 1916, regularly got arrested for publishing and distributing pregnancy-prevention information before a federal court ruling in 1936 eased the restrictions.  [Maybe because she wanted to wipe out all African Americans?]

The Iowa Maternal Health League founders were women of means who had personal physicians, but wanted to make services available to low-income women, according to a 1937 Register story. When clinic clients were offered birth control for the first time, some confused it with abortions. And when examined, some clients were found to be pregnant or in need of surgery without knowing it. The story said the pregnant ones were sent home to have their babies.  [Oh how times have changed.]

The 782 women who came through the clinic in its first two years had between them 479 abortions before coming. "I think that record speaks for itself of the desperation of women who are not able to know an efficient and harmless method for controlling the size of their families," Myrtle Eldred, a co-chairperson was quoted as saying. 

Hearing this history makes one realize how much about the ability to control our fertility we take for granted today - and what a subversive and courageous act it once was to help other women control theirs.  [Wouldn't it be interesting if abortion fans worked with their fertility instead of working against it?]

But it's a right that continues to need defending. Not only have some drugstores and pharmacists launched moves to deny contraception to customers, but Madden-Bittle, who worked for 22 years as a school nurse in Des Moines, has seen the rate of sexually transmitted diseases, and resulting infertility, steadily increase. She blames eight years of the Bush administration's abstinence-only requirement in schools for young people lacking accurate information and engaging in high risk, unprotected sex.  [LULZ!!! Did you know that Bush also single-handedly caused Hurricane Katrina to help out his Big Oil Buddies and brought in help from aliens at area-51 to poison corn crops?  Look at the numbers Ms. Basu, they don't lie.]

Madden-Bittle says the intense polarization that exists today around pregnancy prevention didn't exist back then - even after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973. Though the Catholic Church was strong, opponents weren't as well organized, she says. "Nobody dreamed it was going to get so toxic."  [I guess science is "toxic" when it doesn't agree with your world view]

In fact, in 1962, Monsignor J.D. Conway of Davenport said he opposed legislative prohibition on contraceptive prescriptions, noting, "You cannot legislate a moral thing."  [a moral thing like child porn??] And in the early '60s, 108 Iowa pastors joined with thousands around the country in supporting spacing children through planned parenthood to "improve the mental and physical health and economic status of the American family."  [And as the '60s crowd now crash and burn, it turns out the next generation chooses life.]

Today, in the face of growing backlash against doctors who do abortions, it's hard to find one outside of Planned Parenthood or the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City who still does, Madden-Bittle said. And she said Planned Parenthood had to buy a bullet proof vest for its doctor: "You don't know her name. You won't ever see her. She is not public."  [It's those damn kids praying and handing out fliers for sure!]

What is striking is how cyclical these issues are. Though each generation thinks it is uniquely modern and liberated, some of the same battles have been repeating themselves for 100 years. That's because, as other social movements come and go, the struggle by women to control their fertility - and thus, their lives - is a timeless one. And that has driven many generations to activism. For the Planned Parenthood book sale volunteers, sorting and selling books is just a non-subversive form of it.  [It is true, abortion and contraception have been around since before the time of Christ.  That is why the Catholic Church has always condemned them for 2000 years and counting, because they rob women of their true identity and destroy their bodies through the lie of consequence free sexuality.]

But will the effort continue to generate the same passion when the generation that witnessed its beginnings is gone? And what happens if technologies like Kindle and iPad someday make paper books obsolete? 

The history suggests that as long as women seek reproductive choice, people will find unique, creative and passionate ways to support it.  [Like stabbings a man with scissors or grabbing his crotch]

DesMoinesRegister via Is Anybody There