Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler

to the hospital in Tucson. Following another prolonged convalescence, she emerged with a permanent, disabling case of angina, which caused episodic but extremely intense outbursts of chest pain brought on by the restricted flow of blood to her heart through clogged arteries. Corrective bypass surgery, which is commonplace today, was not yet standard medical practice, and she found herself uncharacteristically depressed, her anxiety about her health intensified by concern over the adequacy of her financial resources in the event of a protracted illness. The pyramiding expenses of doctors and nurses, along with other living costs and higher taxes, were taking a toll on her already diminished capital.
    Loyal friends in New York tried to cheer her up by placing her name in circulation for the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor she had long sought and one not uncommonly connected with the intensity of the promotional effort launched in a nominee’s behalf. In 1931, the reformer Jane Addams had received the award for her work with the International League for Peace and Freedom, and Margaret’s efforts on behalf of birth control and world population seemed no less worthy of recognition. Periodic campaigns would be mounted for ten years but would never generate more than occasional letters of interest from various members of the prize committee.
    As something of a consolation, Mary Lasker insisted in the fall of 1950 that Planned Parenthood present Margaret with the prize she and her husband had established to recognize pioneering work in family planning, much as the prestigous Lasker prize in medicine honored important research on disease. Margaret was far too weak to come East to accept the award, but Grant delivered her speech in her behalf.
    It was not his mother’s finest moment. Margaret’s standard remarks in these years painted a sentimental, historical portrait of the birth control movement, emphasizing her own early heroism. But, on this occasion, she added a coarse note to her assessment of what had been accomplished by lampooning costly government welfare programs for their failure to weed out the “feebleminded and unfit,” terms that were very much out of fashion following the tragic revelations of a decade of Nazi-inspired eugenic terror. Margaret proposed the idea that Planned Parenthood promote a program of “bonus” or “incentive” sterilization, calling on the federal government to guarantee a lifetime pension to any couple of “defective heredity” who would agree to the procedure. Pioneering research was just underway on the contraceptive effectiveness and safety of simple methods of tubal ligation, but sterilization still carried the stigma of coercion, and a new generation of leadership at Planned Parenthood wanted no association whatsoever with this dark legacy. Until the 1970s, Planned Parenthood would cautiously refrain from endorsing sterilization even under voluntary circumstances, and by then its use was already widespread among married American couples. Margaret’s enthusiasm for the procedure, coupled with an uncharacteristic carping about the costs of social welfare, eroded her credibility with younger reformers. She sounded like the American Birth Control League ladies she had once deplored, and she never mentioned the idea again.
    She was clearly losing patience altogether—for cautious bureaucrats unwilling to let her have her way, for individuals incapable of making responsible reproductive choices on their own. Her increasingly impulsive judgments may also have been the consequence of a tragic regimen of drugs and alcohol on which she began to rely more and more to diminish her pain and lift her spirits. To his subsequent regret, Stuart Sanger unwittingly prescribed a painkiller called Demerol for his mother, and she became dependent on it to the point of addiction. The drug was not always incapacitating or even apparent to most outsiders, but after