Gloria Feldt is a leading expert in women's rights, women's health, and politics from where the personal meets the political.

Part two of a small series in honor of the Oct. 16, 2006, 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:

Fresh out of ob/gyn residency at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston in the late 1960's, a young physician went to Nigeria to teach obstetrics. Dr. Allan Rosenfield was distressed to his core by the state of health among the women he saw. So when the Population Council, a U.S. based nonprofit organization, offered him a position working with the Thai Health Ministry to help start Thailand's family planning program, he jumped at the opportunity.

He visited training programs for traditional birth attendants in rural Thailand, where he concluded maternal health would not be significantly improved unless women could also get emergency care for complications and contraception to prevent pregnancies from coming too close together. He saw the dire consequences of unsafe abortion.

He noticed that the women he saw in Thailand were relatively more empowered than women in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and in Muslem societies. Still, he observed that women's lack of power to say "no" to unwanted sex and childbearing in any society kept them from being able to say "yes" to other aspects of their lives.

What Rosenfield witnessed in Asia and Africa was analogous to what Margaret Sanger and other early leaders of the reproductive rights and health movement in the U.S. saw here at the turn of the 20^th century. His response to what he saw was similar as well.

"Women are dying and we're not really doing anything about it," he thought. That solidified his lifelong commitment to women's reproductive health, in the U.S. and globally. He joined Columbia University in 1975 as founding director of the Center for Population and Family Health and for the past 20 years has been dean of Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. He's known widely for "putting the M back into MCH (Maternal and Child Health)."

But Rosenfield's perspective on reproductive justice couldn't be more different from the two men President George Bush has appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

Roberts has dismissed the notion of a right to privacy which is central to the right to birth control as well as abortion. Alito deftly sidestepped revealing his opinions on much of anything during his hearings, but has been unabashed in his personal anti-choice beliefs, or so his mother told the press. Alito holds the seat formerly occupied by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor but clearly sits far to her right.

The appointments of Alito and Roberts have made another man, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the pivotal swing vote on which reproductive justice will stand or fall. All eyes were on Kennedy November 8 when the Court heard arguments in Gonzales v Carhart and Gonzales v Planned Parenthood. These twin cases challenge the 2003 Federal abortion ban statute. The legal principle at stake – whether women's health gets the primary consideration in judging restrictions on abortion – will affect birth control access as well.

A photo of President Bush signing the Federal ban bill into law surrounded by an all-male cheering section quickly became an icon that flew around the internet, infuriating women who understood this ban to be another attempt to strip them of their right to make their own childbearing decisions and strip doctors of the latitude to give women the best care for their health and fertility.

In 2000, when former Justice O'Connor held its center, the Court struck down a Nebraska statute almost identical to the 2003 abortion ban.

Women's leadership in securing reproductive health and rights is and should be central. Yet it is a man, Dr. Leroy Carhart, whose name is etched in American jurisprudence as the plaintiff who caused the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm the primacy of women's health in laws affecting reproductive decisions in that 2000 Stenberg v Carhart case. Carhart, a retired military man, knows what it is to fight for freedom at home and abroad. That's why his name is again pitted against U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the current case.

Carhart and Rosenfield are just two of many men whose contributions have immeasurably expanded women's access to reproductive rights, health, and justice. Some, like Dr. Herman Biggs, the crusading Chief Medical Officer for the New York City Department of Health during the early 20^th century, supported Margaret Sanger in her work a decade before the American Medical Association came out in favor of contraception. Dr. John Rock – a devout Catholic fertility researcher – and Gregory Pincus – the first person to in-vitro fertilize mammals and a recent posthumous inductee to the inventors' Hall of Fame – developed the birth control pill that so revolutionized family planning and family life.

Author Larry Lader chronicled Sanger's life and later became a feisty champion for abortion rights. Rev. Carleton Veazey today leads the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, an organization that claims hundreds of male and female clergy among its membership.

Many courageous male doctors provide women the full range of reproductive health services, including abortion, despite harassment and even violence. Men like Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, a leader in minority public health, who works diligently for the empowerment of women, minorities and the poor; Dr. George Tiller, who has been shot in both arms by violent demonstrators but never intimidated from his work, coined the phrase, "Trust women"; and Dr. Joseph Booker, the doctor for "the last abortion clinic in Mississippi", who also writes poetry about the importance of his work to women's lives and health.

So what is it that makes the difference in points of view? I asked Allan Rosenfield about this. He reflected, "From what I saw, I simply got more and more concerned about women's issues, maternal deaths, and the need for family planning. And the HIV pandemic has been a continuum. My greatest satisfaction has come from my overall focus on women's health and being identified as a champion of issues around the empowerment of women."

He seems astonished by the tributes he's received over the past year since he was diagnosed with Amotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (A.L.S.). Many of these testimonials have observed that his work has saved hundreds of millions of women's lives around the world.

The stark contrast between men like Allan Rosenfield and men like Justices Roberts and Alito raises the question of men's roles in an issue that at its most primal level affects only women's bodies and right to life.

Or, as my daughter reminded me once when I was waxing on about the need for male responsibility to reduce unintended pregnancies, "Mom, no matter what you say, it's still the girl who gets pregnant." True, it takes two to tango, but it is a two-edged sword to think of birth control, reproductive health, abortion, and related matters as solely women's issues and to cast them in male versus female terms.

We can all be grateful for the men like Rosenfield who advance reproductive health, rights, and justice because they have seen the direst need and were touched by what they saw. And we can ask: if Justice Kennedy and perhaps even Justices Roberts and Alito had a chance to view the world through Rosenfield's lens, would they too come to see things in such a way that the extreme danger they pose to women's reproductive rights today might be transformed into affirmation of women's fundamental human right to make their own childbearing decisions?

© Gloria Feldt 2006

Future dispatches will take on more of the historical watersheds, current challenges, and what I think the agenda of the future should be.