Gloria Feldt is the author of "The War on Choice," keynote speaker, and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She is currently working on a book with Kathleen Turner called "Take the Lead, Lady!"

Part one of a small series in honor of the Oct. 16 anniversary of the first American birth control clinic, with the purpose of exploring why birth control is still at stake today and what we must do to secure the right and access to it:

I'm not much for remembering dates. Birthdays and anniversaries tend to escape me, even my own. Maybe especially my own–some people call that denial.

But I have been thinking about the upcoming 90th anniversary of the first American birth control movement on Oct. 16. And I've been wondering what Margaret Sanger would think if she could spend a day with me checking out the state of the movement that dates its beginning with the opening day of that clinic on Amboy Street near Pitkin Avenue in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn.

It was four years before women would get the vote. Birth control was illegal and so therefore was her clinic which lasted 9 days and 464 patients before the police closed it down. In fact, the term "birth control" had been invented only a few years before that. Margaret initially referred to it as "family limitation". But then a friend of hers suggested "birth control", and by the time her periodical "The Woman Rebel" was published in 1914 expressly to challenge the Comstock laws which made even distributing information about contraception, never mind abortion, against the law, "birth control" had become the term of art.

Sanger understood the power of language in creating a movement. Decades later, when the merger of two national birth control organizations formed the organization which took the enormously successful name "Planned Parenthood", Sanger would complain that the new name was a euphemism for her mission which in her mind was unequivocally about making birth control available to all women and especially poor women whose miseries she said were "as vast as the skies".

I wonder what she would think about the terms "family planning" (too soft, I speculate), "reproductive rights" (too cold), and "choice" (nice enough but overused), "sexual and reproductive health" (promising because it acknowledges sex is involved, but perhaps too long). But the very fact that all these terms and more are used would most likely signal that we've become a movement that has lost some clarity of mission and perhaps some of its moral certitude along the way–something that despite her occasionally chameleon-like stances, Margaret never did. Sure, things are more complicated now. But no movement can progress without a clear clarion call that stirs the soul and calls people to action around a positive and forward looking agenda.

Future dispatches will take on more of the historical watersheds, current challenges, and what I think the agenda of the future should be.
© 2006 Gloria Feldt [email protected] www.gloriafeldt.com