Birth control historian surprised Comstock Law cited

Lauren MacIvor Thompson has book coming out next year detailing early birth control movement

It’s surreal for many birth control and abortion historians that contemporary opponents of those rights have summoned misogynistic laws and figures from the past to justify taking them away. 

Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a historian who studies those topics and teaches at Kennesaw State University, certainly finds it strange that the past has seemingly repeated itself. She has a forthcoming book detailing the rivalry between Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett likely coming out next year. She took some time to speak to Repro Rights Now about her work and the current climate surrounding abortion politics. 

“I think in some ways, they're different,” Thompson said. “And in other ways, they're the same.” 

They are different because previous generations of antiabortion thinkers hadn’t equated abortion with murder. The typical sentence for criminal abortion was three years, which was given to the person who performed it and not the woman who had one. But past and current antiabortion activists share the desire to control women’s bodies. 

“When you ask them to really boil down their arguments, they end up sounding not a lot different than what many anti-vice crusaders were saying in the 19th century,” Thompson said. 

Thompson went into a little history of criminal abortion. Prior to the mid-19th century, it had been legal up to the point of what was known as the quickening, which was when the fetal movement first happened. That typically happens around the fourth to six months. 

Thompson studied the Comstock Act when she was researching Mary Ware Dennett. The case in which it was front and center was United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, a landmark decision in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that extended legal protections to doctors who might be threatened by importing birth control under the Comstock Act’s forbiddance of mailing contraceptives and abortion agents. 

Contemporary antiabortion activists have cited the law as a reason why mifepristone and misoprostol shouldn’t be permitted to be sent to women through telemedicine. The Comstock Act was never officially repealed. Contraception is protected through the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which was written by Supreme Court Justice William Douglas in 1965 and legalized birth control and established the right to privacy that later served as the basis for abortion rights. 

“I just never thought it would be something that I really had to talk about in the contemporary context of my work with birth control,” Thompson said. 

Thompson also criticized Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for citing Matthew Hale in his opinions. Hale was a 17th-century legal theorist who thought marital rape was legal and who prosecuted accused witches. 

“This is not somebody that I would argue that a Supreme Court justice should be looking at to inform contemporary legal understandings of a medical procedure,” Thompson said. “He's certainly cherry-picked the evidence.” 

Thompson took some time to explain some of the surprising history pertaining to early suffragists, who had views on abortion and contraceptives, but who downplayed it to make it more likely that women would get the right to vote. They wrote and spoke about voluntary motherhood. 

Thompson’s forthcoming book will argue for a greater emphasis on Mary Ware Dennett’s role in creating the birth control movement. The work will be called Rivals for Rights: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger and the Making of the American Birth Control Movement. 

“We need to rethink what we know about the early birth control movement and Margaret Sanger because it points out that there was this other person, this woman, Mary Dennett, who actually founded the first birth control organization in America,” Thompson said. 

Another thing I spoke to Thompson about was the depiction of Margaret Sanger as an intolerant eugenicist. This is something I’ve written about before and have disagreed with some of the decisions made by feminist leaders pertaining to her legacy. Activists and politicians of course will calculate–or miscalculate–whether embracing or rejecting the legacy of Margaret Sanger will in fact grow support for reproductive rights in the contemporary sense. But historians and journalists have to write the narrative about her as the research and evidence lead them regardless of the political pressures that exist today. 

Thompson said that it’s important to remember that most of America embraced eugenics at that time, including Sanger as well as all her allies and adversaries. In my research, I’ve found even black leaders like WEB Du Bois argued for advancing humanity through breeding better genetic traits. 

I plan on reviewing Thompson’s work when it comes out next year. It’s something to look forward to in the anticipated bombardment of books about the topic leading up to the presidential election.