Margaret Sanger Would be Proud: Oregon Pressures Poor Women Not to Have Children

State   |   Emily Conley   |   Nov 16, 2015   |   5:42PM   |   Salem, OR

“Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.” – Margaret Sanger, Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities

It’s no secret that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger saw birth control as a key component of creating a “cleaner race,” and advocated its use among those demographics she considered the “human weeds:” the poor, the handicapped or disabled, and the non-white.

She’d be proud of the way Oregon is implementing her ideology.

Oregon is the first state to offer Medicaid providers financial incentives based on a new metric of how many low-income women they can get to use “effective” birth control. Basically, that means the government is rewarding care providers for keeping poor women from having babies.

The metric is an initiative of the Oregon Foundation for Reproductive Health (OFRH), an entity of NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon. Care providers are to ask One Key Question: “Would you like to become pregnant in the next year?” If women say no, or they’re unsure, then the provider gives them contraception counseling.

This so-called “counseling” program is disturbing on many levels, particularly:

  • Care providers could make millions in incentives; pretty strong motivation to “counsel” women into using birth control.
  • Care providers are strongly encouraged to counsel women to use long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) – IUDs and implants that chemically sterilize women while in use and require a doctor’s administration and removal.  More doctor visits = more dollars.
  • And, data shows  there’s a racial bias to LARC: “clinicians recommend LARC more to women of color than white women and more to socioeconomically disadvantaged women compared to socioeconomically advantaged.”
  • Over half of the people who use Oregon’s Medicaid benefits are women, and a significant percentage are Hispanic and likely Catholic. Anytime they need government-subsidized healthcare, these women will be subjected to invasive questioning and counseling, despite the fact that using contraception is contrary to their religious beliefs.
  • In order for care providers to be rewarded, they will track women’s use of contraceptives from ages 15-50 and report it to the government for “evidence that the (health services provider) is providing high-quality health care.”

According to Michele Stranger Hunter, the executive director of the Oregon Foundation for Reproductive Health and the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon, this will happen  “at every point of service, whether you are a private practitioner, a public health program, a human service program, or a dentist. I got to love this – dentist.”

It sounds eerily familiar to the way China enforces its one- and now two-child policies in low-income areas: “Village family-planning officers vigilantly chart the menstrual cycle and pelvic-exam results of every woman of childbearing age in their area. If a woman gets pregnant without permission and is unable to pay the often exorbitant fine for violating the policy, she risks being subjected to a forced abortion.”

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Don’t live in Oregon? Don’t worry, this invasive program is coming soon to a state near you: 12 states are currently considering similar metrics, and the Department of Human Health and Services is working on a national roll out.

So, let me get this straight – we don’t want “bosses in the bedroom,” but having the government in there tracking what contraception women are using is okay? And we’re all about giving women “reproductive choices,” if by choice you mean bullying women into not reproducing?

Who’s really “pro-woman” here?

Instead of worrying about “cultivating our garden,” let’s take the approach often attributed to Mother Teresa: “How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.”

LifeNews Note: As Alliance Defending Freedom’s Social Content Editor, Emily Conley creates and coordinates content across all social media channels, including this blog. Reprinted with permission from ADF.

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