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The No-Brainer Syndrome : the HPV Vaccine and Male Circumcision Recommendations as the Latest Weapons in the Fight Against HPV, HIV and AIDS

2008-03-16T13:25:00.004-04:00

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, called the new HPV vaccine, Gardasil, approved last year by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), ”a no-brainer.” Many advocates in the blogosphere use the same phrase, “no-brainer”, to describe the World Health Organization (WHO) 2006 recommendation for male circumcision as an HIV/AIDS prevention strategy, at least in sub-Saharan Africa. Most health professionals agreed, even if they didn’t use the exact phrase.

The public disagreed. A mere 10% of girls in the U.S. have been vaccinated so far with Gardasil and few men in Africa have had “the snip”. Within the past weeks the Virginia Legislature has taken steps to repeal its mandate for the HPV vaccine for schoolgirls, and the Health Minister of South Africa has refused to endorse male circumcision as part of its national AIDS program.

So, are these recommendations “no-brainers” or not?

They aren’t, for three reasons: 1) rents did not rush to get their daughters vaccinated.

Aside from safety, effectiveness and cost issues, some parents and public health officials had additional concerns:

Efficacy ― while the vaccine does protect against HPV-16 and HPV-18 (the strains that cause 70% of cervical cancer), by so doing the vaccine may be unleashing other HPV strains which can infect the woman ― thus, the ultimate efficacy of the vaccine against all HPV infections and, ultimately, against cervical cancer may be less than the initial studies indicated;
Misallocation of Funds ― money to pay for Gardasil as part of the Medicaid program or some other government program would have to come from somewhere, perhaps leading to a reduction in health prevention or treatment of HPV itself. There is an argument that whatever millions are spent on HPV vaccination might be better spent on a more comprehensive STI prevention program, including condom use and more extensive Pap screening.
Risk Compensating Behavior ― conservative groups argued, only somewhat disingenuously, that HPV vaccination would inevitably lead to adolescents engaging in more, earlier and unprotected sex, thereby causing more transmission of HPV and other sexually transmitted infections. Vaccinated, and unvaccinated, adolescents might have a reduced fear of contracting HPV, and might thus engage in more and riskier sex. This is known in the public health world as “risk compensation”, and occurs when there is a perceived change (i.e. reduction) in the risk of acquiring a disease or being involved in an accident, for instance with drivers with seat belts and air bags driving faster. The fact that there is still a multiplicity of sexually transmitted infections out there (including other HPV strains) that Gardasil does not prevent, and thus that there should be no false sense of immunity, has not dissuade these conservative groups from their campaign. This argument might be, in theory, a valid concern, but remains unproven.

Male Circumcision

In 2007 the World Health Organization announced that it was recommending male circumcision “as an efficacious intervention for HIV prevention.”

Circumcision has a long and often contested history ― socially, culturally, medically and religiously ― which the WHO was well aware of, yet in 2007 two studies, one in Kenya and one in Uganda, were halted early by medical authorities, when the preliminary results showed a 53% and 51% reduction in risk respectively in acquiring HIV infection by circumcised males as opposed to uncircumcised males. The case for circumcision was so clear that it appeared to be a “no-brainer”, even though scientists have no proof of how circumcision might actually work as an HIV preventative. Possible explanations include the keratinisation, or extra layers of skin forming on the penis, that occurs after circumcision serving as a retardant to HIV transmission, or the susceptibility to HIV in the Langerhans cells in the inner foreskin. Langerhans cells are immune cells which act as a reservoir and replication site for the HIV-1 virus. They also appear in other parts of the male and female genitals, including the clitoris. There was no suggestion by WHO that these cells, or the surrounding skin on the organs that contain them, be excised. The WHO circumcision recipe for the goose is not one for the gander.

Some policy makers raised similar objections to circumcision as those raised against HPV vaccination:

Efficacy ― the WHO itself emphasized that circumcision was not 100% effective, and that, in fact, the HIV infection rate in circumcised males in the African clinical trials was still unacceptably high. There was no evidence that male circumcision protects female partners, or the partners of men who have sex with men. Both these sad facts have been born out by subsequent trials. Circumcised men who are HIV positive transmit the virus to their partners at the same rate as uncircumcised men. In fact, there was an observed increase in infection in the female partners of circumcised men who commenced sexual intercourse before their circumcision wounds had healed, despite extensive counseling of the couples to abstain until they got a go-ahead from a nurse.
Misallocation of Funds ― some public health officials argued that a more effective use of funds was the current armament of HIV prevention strategies, such as ABC, especially the “C”. It is hard to imagine an effective public health campaign that urged circumcision and continued condom use ― why should a man go through circumcision if he still has to wear a condom?
Risk Compensating Behavior ― there is a real prospect of an increase in risky sexual behavior by those circumcised, including reduced condom use and more sexual partners. In Africa the widespread male dissatisfaction with condom use and an innate desire for multiple partners and large families would likely be the chief motivators for males to seek circumcision in the first place, so that they would have a ready excuse not to wear condoms.

A final danger for women is that there might be a conflation of male circumcision with female genital mutilation, especially if the theory of the Langerhans cells (which appear in both the foreskin and the clitoris) is proven. The conflation in some parts of the world of male and female circumcision as a cultural marker or initiation rite is already problematic. It would be horrific if the call for more males to be circumcised in cultures where it is not practiced led to more female genital mutilation.

HPV Vaccination and Male Circumcision: Case Studies in the Failure of Public Health

So, here we have two new, expensive public health recommendations relating to sexually transmitted infections, one for females and one for males. Neither is a “no-brainer.” Each is less than 100% effective, and has the real possibility of greater harm: Gardasil if the vaccination unleashes other HPV strains and circumcision if males have sex before the wound heals and if they embark on more partners without wearing condoms. Each risks draining resources from other prevention strategies, and each could harm women especially.

Cervical cancer can be caught and cured with pap smears, and HIV by a comprehensive ABC program. HIV in Africa is mostly transmitted by female prostitutes. Thailand embarked on a program to require condom use in brothels. Africa has not. The HIV prevalence rate in Thailand is now far lower than in Sub-Saharan Africa. ABC can work. The circumcision recommendation is, I believe, more a comment on the world’s failure to implement ABC than on the benefits of the procedure, just as the HPV vaccine recommendation is a sad commentary of the U.S. and the world’s failure to have a comprehensive public health system that gets Pap smears to every woman.

The foregoing is abridged from a longer article of the same title that can be found at www.AlexanderSanger.com
A citation for the proposition for the potential unleashing of other HPV strains caused by HPV vaccination is as follows: George F. Sawaya, MD and Karen Smith McCune, MD, Ph. D, HPV Vaccination: More Questions More Answers,

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/356/19/1991.pdf

This editorial states in part:

"In contrast to a plateau in the incidence of disease related to HPV types 16 and 18 among vaccinated women, the overall disease incidence regardless of HPV type continued to increase, raising the possibility that other oncogenic HPV types eventually filled the biological niche left behind after the elimination of HPV types 16 and 18."

No Brainer

2008-02-27T00:35:00.007-05:00

The No-Brainer Syndrome : the HPV Vaccine and Male Circumcision Recommendations as the Latest Weapons in the Fight Against HPV, HIV and AIDS

Nonetheless, I wondered if they were right - mainly because in my experience the words "no-brainer" usually indicates more about the state of the grey cells of the person uttering the phrase than about the state of the choice that is faced.

Then I noticed the coincidence that Gardasil and male circumcision were each targeted to a single sex: Gardasil to females, and circumcision to males (a second HPV vaccine Cervarix was approved in Europe for both sexes). Was each recommendation the result of some murky sexist plot or was it just a sexist coincidence? And what did it matter?

I also noticed that there were no lines around the block for either medical service. A mere 10% of girls have been vaccinated so far with Gardasil and few if any men have had "the snip". Within the past weeks the Virginia Legislature has taken steps to repeal its mandate for the HPV vaccine for schoolgirls, and the Health Minister of South Africa has refused to endorse male circumcision as part of its national AIDS program.

So, after all the fanfare, what is going on here, and can we learn any public health lessons?

The Two Epidemics

The HPV- Cervical Cancer Epidemic - Cancer of the cervix is the second most common cancer of women worldwide, with 555,000 new cases and 260,000 deaths annually. Most cases (80%) of cervical cancer occur in the developing world.

Almost all (99%) of cervical cancer cases are linked to HPV, the human papillomavirus. There are over 100 different types of HPV (over 30 of which are transmitted sexually) that can infect women and men. Two types (HPV 16 and 18) cause 70% of cervical cancer, and two other types, HPV 6 and HPV 11, cause 90% of genital warts. Merck's Gardasil targets these four strains, while GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix (approved in Europe and elsewhere but not yet approved by the FDA) mainly targets HPV 16 and 18.

About 3 in 4 men and women will develop HPV in the United States during their lifetimes, but fortunately about 90% of those infected will clear their HPV infection within two years without medical intervention. Currently, 27% of women ages 14-59 have HPV. Every year, about 11,000 women in the U.S. are diagnosed with cervical cancer, and about 3,700 women die of the disease - a high a number but, compared to the number of women with HPV, a tribute to the healing powers of nature and the U.S. Pap smear screening program, even though for some populations of women the program is as porous as a cotton condom.

In the developed world, about half of women have been screened for HPV/cervical cancer within the last five years, but only about 5% in the developing world have. As a result, the death rate from cervical cancer in the developed world has plunged in the last half century but has not in the developing world.

There have been recent studies linking HPV to a rise in oral cancer in men. See http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/356/19/1944?ijkey=qVEw4puuEh6zQ&keytype=ref&siteid=nejm

Men (73%) are far more likely than women to have oral cancer, which hits 35,000 people a year in the U.S. and kills 8,000. The rate for males has increased since 1973, even though there has been over a decrease in tobacco use during that time, which should have resulted in, but didn't, a reduction in the incidence of oral cancer. That leaves the rise in oral sex as the culprit. Currently, oral sex causes as many cases of oral cancer in men as smoking does. In contrast, the rate of HPV-related upper throat cancer among women has fallen since 1973. Studies do not reveal any reduction in oral sex performed by females during that time, in fact quite the opposite. So what is happening? Are women requiring condoms on their male partners before performing oral sex? No. As you might imagine, governments are not champing at the bit to fund studies on oral sex, but the few that there are say that condom use during oral sex occurs only slightly more frequently than a lunar eclipse. One British study from 2003-2005 found that 80% of 16-21 year old university students did not use condoms during oral sex, whereas most did during vaginal sex. In the U.S. a 1996 study found that 86% of high school student never used a condom during oral sex and 8% used one sporadically. One suspects that the self-reporting nature of these scientific studies exaggerated the frequency of condom use.

See http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/psrh/full/3800606.pdf

The HIV/AIDS Pandemic - At the end of 2007 there were about 33 million people living with AIDS (about equally divided by gender), with 2.5 million persons newly infected in 2007 and 2.1 million deaths. The majority of HIV infections worldwide are transmitted by heterosexual sex.

There has been a gradual reduction over the past few years in new HIV cases globally, reflecting the natural trend of the epidemic and behavioral changes in at-risk populations. There has also been a reduction in the number of deaths annually, due mainly to greater access to more effective treatments.

The Magic Bullets

Both epidemics, HPV and HIV, have certain similarities: both are viruses, both are transmitted sexually, both have a high death toll and both flourish because of the molasses-like pace of change, or lack thereof, in the human sexual behavior needed to thwart them. The ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful, Condoms) approach has been effective in some countries, mainly resulting in more condom use, in Africa and elsewhere, but alas, condom use is not universal for many reasons - cultural, sexual, economic and otherwise, including the prosaic fact that the worldwide condom supply is both erratic and insufficient. Alas, even when condoms are available and used, they are not universally effective against HPV/genital warts. Thus HPV and HIV march on.

So why the public health establishment embrace of techno-fixes, seeming magic bullets in the fight against HIV and HPV? Why not devote the money to manufacturing and distributing more condoms along with educational messages?

A combination of factors are at work, including impatience and frustration on the part of health officials with the lack of headway against the diseases. One researcher stated, "It has been claimed that primary prevention based on an educational, social and rights-based response has failed, and what is needed is a more thoroughgoing engagement with the principles of ‘traditional' public health medicine."

There is pressure to find a solution, any solution, especially one that will attract funding. This has led to an increased emphasis on "biomedical prevention", i.e. vaccines and surgery, which involve as little human behavioral cooperation as possible, like fluoride in the water supply. For example, there have been recent suggestions that antiretroviral drugs be rolled out to otherwise healthy populations in Africa. In the past month, it was also proposed that antibiotics be given to all aboriginals in Australia to prevent the further spread of sexually transmitted infections (this was before the Australian government's apology for its treatment of aboriginals; perhaps a new apology is in order). Meanwhile, multiple teams of scientists with dreams of Nobel Prizes dancing in their heads are hard at work on the holy grails/magic bullets of a female microbicide for HIV prevention and a HIV vaccine. These appear to be far in the future, but hopefully one or both will appear before the next solar eclipse in New York (April 24, 2024). See P. Aggleton, ‘Just a Snip'?: A Social History of Male Circumcision, Reproductive Health Matters 2007: 15 (29): 15-21.

So, for starters, what science has given us are a vaccine and circumcision. Neither are 100% effective. And, just as fluoride does not obviate the need for brushing one's teeth, the WHO made it clear that the HPV vaccination and male circumcision were not cure-alls and that condoms were still needed.

Perhaps for this reason, the reception by men and women for these "new" technologies was less than clamorous.

The HPV Vaccine-Gardasil

Gardasil is recommended for young females, preferably ages 11-12, who are not yet sexually active and hence not already infected with HPV. The vaccine has been approved by the FDA for all females ages 9-26. Three doses are required over a six month period, and thus repeat visits to the doctor. The vaccine was approved for girls only, since Merck did not have enough boys in its clinical trials to prove safety and effectiveness for them. Trials for boys are continuing, and reportedly a second application to the FDA is due from Merck in 2008 to have Gardasil approved for males.

It is not known whether it was Merck's decision to concentrate on girls in its initial trials, whether there was true difficulty recruiting boys for the trials, or whether the vaccine is simply not as effective in boys as girls. There is a public health argument that since cervical cancer is the ultimate target of the vaccine that it should be targeted to girls. And, assuming that there are limits to public funds for HPV vaccination, one argument to be made against the vaccination of boys is that the cost thereof would be better spent reaching all girls ages 11-12, thereby providing, eventually, what is called "herd immunity," which occurs in a population when at least 70% of its females are vaccinated. Thus, the decision to concentrate on females has grounding in public health theory.

Alternatively of course, all funding could have been directed at immunizing males and allowing their herd immunity to protect females. The New York Times recently speculated that there would have been few takers for this among boys and their parents. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/fashion/24virus.html?scp=1&sq=herd+immunity&st=nyt

As with any vaccination, there are side effects. The injections are painful. The CDC reports that there have been other reported side effects, including fever, nausea and dizziness, but that these and others are "relatively very rare, in the context of 7 million doses distributed across the U.S." Both Europe and the U.S. are investigating a few deaths following the administration of the vaccine, which are, at the moment, not believed to be directly related to the vaccine, but coincidental.

Effectiveness. In clinical trials for the 16-26 year old age group, Gardasil was virtually 100% effective against the four strains of HPV that it targets. Merck reported that the effectiveness lasted five years.

There are, however, certain unknowns. The effectiveness beyond five years, and thus the need for, and the effectiveness of, boosters is unknown. Also, since relatively few girls between 11 and 15 were in the clinical trials, the safety and effectiveness for that target age group is unproven. The effectiveness for women who already have been exposed to HPV is also unknown, but is believed to be nonexistent. Finally, there is concern that while the vaccine does protect against HPV-16 and HPV-18, by so doing the vaccine may be unleashing other HPV strains which can infect the woman. Thus, the ultimate efficacy of the vaccine against all HPV infections and, ultimately, against cervical cancer may be less than the initial studies indicated (Merck did not test, and the FDA did not require them to, the vaccine as a preventative against cervical cancer, just HPV infection).

Public Reception. To date, after over a year of availability in the U.S., only about 10% of women ages 18 to 26 have received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine.

Why the low numbers? Public awareness is low about HPV in general, about its connection to cervical cancer and about the HPV vaccine in particular. This lack of public awareness about vaccines is not confined to HPV. There is similar low awareness about the new shingles vaccine, and an even lower vaccination rate (2%).

Cost is another deterrent. The three doses cost $360, plus doctor's fees. However, most insurers cover the vaccine, but there are varying co-pays. Many, if not most, uninsured will be covered though various public vaccine programs. Availability of the vaccine may not be universal since the initial cost for the clinic or doctor's office is high. Cost and availability are not the only deterrents. In Ontario, where the vaccine is free and widely available, only half of girls have been vaccinated - five times the U.S. rate but not universal.

Faced with public resistance and in order to maximize its revenues, Merck embarked on an extensive lobbying campaign to have the HPV vaccine required for admission to school, like other childhood vaccines, such as measles and whooping cough. Texas, by executive order, and Virginia and the District of Columbia by legislative action responded to Merck's lobbying and made HPV vaccination mandatory for girls entering the sixth grade (though the District's law still needs Congressional approval to take effect).

Then a backlash set in. The Texas legislature recently overturned the Governor's order, and one house of the Virginia legislature passed a bill delaying the implementation of its legislation. Most other state legislatures have either rejected a mandate or are taking a wait-and-see approach, even though one chamber of the Kentucky Legislature last week passed a mandate. At least four provinces in Canada have free but voluntary HPV vaccination programs in schools for 7^th and 8^th graders.

The backlash against mandates was fueled by a combination of factors.

There were parental concerns about the long-term safety and efficacy of the vaccine, especially for the 11-15 year old age group. Merck is currently conducting more trials to study this population.
Budgetary concerns. Gardasil is expensive. Funds to pay for it as part of the Medicaid program or some other government program will have to come from somewhere, leading to a reduction in health prevention or treatment of some other disease. There is an argument that whatever millions are spent might be better spent on a more comprehensive STI prevention program, including condom use and more extensive Pap screening. It has not gone unnoticed that Gardasil protects against only 70% of HPV-causing strains, while condoms protect against all of them, plus other STI's.
There is also a growing concern with the safety of all vaccines in general, and especially with childhood vaccines, with parents demanding the right to opt their children out of any mandated vaccine (all state vaccine mandates have an opt-out provision). This deferral to parental rights did not satisfy some conservative groups, which, while they didn't openly oppose the FDA approval of Gardasil and stated publicly that they welcomed vaccines against HPV, did oppose any state mandate that all girls be vaccinated, even with a parental opt-out.
Finally, there's sex. Girl sex in particular. Conservative groups argued that HPV vaccination would inevitably lead to adolescents engaging in more and earlier sex, thereby causing more transmission of HPV and other sexually transmitted infections. They argued that vaccinated, and unvaccinated, adolescents will have a reduced fear of HPV, even though Gardasil does not prevent all HPV strains, and will thus engage in more and riskier sex. This is known in the public health world as "risk compensation", and occurs when there is a perceived change (i.e. reduction) in the risk of acquiring a disease or being involved in an accident, for instance with drivers with seat belts and air bags driving faster. The conservative argument is identical to their argument against birth control - that a reduced fear of pregnancy leads to more sex and thus more pregnancy. The fact that there is still a multiplicity of sexually transmitted infections out there that Gardasil does not prevent, and thus that there should be no false sense of immunity, has not dissuade these conservative groups from their campaign.

I suspect that it is the realization that their daughters may be sexual beings is too much for some parents to take. Their response is to bury their heads in the sand and refuse to vaccinate their daughters. This raises the question whether the HPV vaccine would have had an easier road to acceptability if it had been targeted to boys first and their epidemic of genital warts. I wonder if fewer parents would have blanched at being confronted with their sons being sexual beings and thus would not have objected as vociferously to the vaccine, which could then slowly have been rolled out for girls. Even if never rolled out for girls, the male herd effect protecting girls would have occurred after 70% of males were vaccinated. See The New York Times story referred to above.

That said, I can only imagine the screaming if Merck had filed for males first. The company clearly saw an easier path to riches by treating girls first, even though there may have been a less antagonistic conservative response if sons were called upon to be vaccinated before daughters.

Now that millions of doses have been administered in the U.S. and Europe, Gardasil will get its real world clinical trial. Preventive medicine is supposed to save lives and money in the long run. We will see if it does.

There will not be mandates, at least in the short run, in the U.S. Europe will probably lead us in that regard. It is likely, therefore, that a familiar health care pattern will repeat itself: wealthy, well-educated, more prosperous American girls who get advised to by their private physicians will get vaccinated at greater rates than lower-income and minority girls who won't. This will repeat the same disparity that currently exists with cervical cancer itself. Pap screening programs do not reach those marginalized in our society. The incidence of cervical cancer is 1.5 time higher for African American and Latina women in the U.S. than white women. Cervical cancer is highest along the Mexican border, in Appalachia, among Native Americans and in rural areas, exactly where the public health system is weakest. That is why mandates in a way make sense, especially since school drop-out rates for lower income and minority girls begin earlier than for more affluent, white girls.

Male Circumcision

In 2007 the World Health Organization announced that it was recommending male circumcision "as an efficacious intervention for HIV prevention." The CDC has yet to make a recommendation for the United States.

See http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/circumcision.htm

Male circumcision is a different medical animal than a HPV vaccination. It is surgery. It is more expensive - in the U.S. the cost is in the thousands of dollars with insurance coverage variable and no government programs to cover the uninsured (some states, including recently Florida, have dropped infant circumcision from Medicaid coverage). Medical benefits, if any, and side effects are hotly debated. The side effects include pain, shock, hemorrhage, infection, and accidental disfiguration. There is also the hotly debated issue of loss of sexual sensitivity and increased friction and pain during intercourse, not to mention other psychological complications.

Circumcision has a long and often contested history - socially, culturally, medically and religiously. It is not "just a snip," as some advocates put it. It is virtually universal among Jews and Muslims, and less so among Christians and rare among other religions. Circumcision, or the lack thereof, is a literal marker of identity, of coming of age and of maturity, of being a member of a group, tribe, nation or religion. It may have originated, some anthropologists argue, as an intra-sexual control mechanism, designed to reduce male and female sexual sensitivity, so as to better control adolescents and to confine their sexual activity to within culturally-approved bounds. Circumcision is thus nothing less than a cultural and sexual minefield. Getting acceptance for an HPV vaccine will be a walk in the park compared to getting acceptance for circumcision in some societies.

Effectiveness. In 2007 two studies, one in Kenya and one in Uganda, were halted early by medical authorities, when the preliminary results showed a 53% and 51% reduction in risk respectively in acquiring HIV infection by circumcised males as opposed to uncircumcised males. The case was so clear that it appeared to be a "no-brainer". Another earlier clinical trial in South Africa showed a 60% reduction in risk. These studies confirmed, or appeared to, earlier observational studies that circumcised males had a lower incidence of HIV. The WHO called the evidence compelling and the case proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Interestingly, there is no agreement on how circumcision might actually work as an HIV preventative. There are a variety of theories including the keratinisation of the penis that occurs after circumcision serving as a retardant to HIV transmission. Another is that there is a susceptibility to HIV in the Langerhans cells in the inner foreskin, although one researcher published a paper a few weeks before the WHO recommendation came out arguing that langerin produced by Langerhans cells blocked HIV transmission. See http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n3/abs/nm1541.html;jsessionid=B7086F8AE0A92211B2E59C3669A60A66

Langerhans cells also appear in other parts of the male and female genitals, including the clitoris. There was no suggestion by WHO that these cells, or the surrounding skin on the organs that contain them, be excised. The WHO circumcision recipe for the goose is not one for the gander.

The WHO emphasized that circumcision was not 100% effective, and that, in fact, the HIV infection rate in circumcised males in the African clinical trials was still unacceptably high. There was no evidence that male circumcision protects female partners, or the partners of men who have sex with men. Both these sad facts have been born out by subsequent trials. In a recent study, the CDC announced that circumcision offers no protective benefit to U.S. black and Latino gay and bi-sexual men. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22096758/

The WHO took pains to point out that circumcision did not replace other HIV prevention strategies, including delay of sex, abstinence, reduction of partners, condom use and HIV testing and counseling services and treatment.

The WHO recommended that the target population be men in countries with high HIV prevalence and low circumcision rates, i.e. sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on men ages 12-30 and older men with a high risk of acquiring HIV.

Public Reception. There as been no stampede for circumcision. As with the HPV vaccine, cost is a factor, as well as the lack of public education on the benefits of male circumcision. Some public health officials argued that a more effective use of funds was the current armament of HIV prevention strategies, such as ABC, especially the "C".

To date, no U.S. state has announced a circumcision campaign, much less proposed a mandate. Recently, Rwanda and a few other African countries announced campaigns to promote male circumcision, while Brazil has stated that it will not. At the moment the campaign in Rwanda is voluntary, though it has been reported that men in the army will be required to be circumcised in order to be promoted.

The WHO estimate of the efficacy of male circumcision was immediately challenged by scientists who raised the specter of risk compensation, i.e. an increase in risky sexual behavior by those circumcised, including reduced condom use and more sexual partners. Shades of Gardasil! Risk compensation is likely, some scientists believe, because of the widespread male dissatisfaction with condom use and because males, and females, they argue, have an innate desire for more than one sexual partner. In fact, the distaste for condoms, combined with a desire, in parts of Africa at least, for a large number of children, might be the chief motivators for males to seek circumcision in the first place.

While, as the WHO carefully pointed out, circumcision does not obviate the need for condoms, it is hard to imagine an effective public health campaign that urged circumcision and continued condom use - why should a man go through circumcision if he still has to wear a condom? That said, in the birth control arena there have been campaigns for dual protection, i.e., both the male and the female using contraception, though with mixed results.

There are two other major dangers for women here. It was recently reported that females do not get HIV protection from male circumcision. Circumcised men who are HIV positive transmit the virus to their partners at the same rate as uncircumcised men. In fact, there was an observed increase in infection in the partners of circumcised men who commenced sexual intercourse before their circumcision wounds had healed, despite extensive counseling of the couples to abstain until they got a go-ahead from a nurse. However, there was an observed decrease in other sexually transmitted infections in the males, but not in their partners.

See http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/CROIMeeting/tb/8221

This study, which the researchers were careful to point out did not reach statistical significance, shows the intractable nature of human nature and risk compensation in action. The couples had been warned about not commencing intercourse before the wound healed and had been given condoms, and yet…. So, here we have a medical strategy designed to reduce HIV transmission, which, in fact, in this study increased it. Has the recommendation for circumcision been revisited, revised or withdrawn? No. Will it, if a larger study confirms these results?

A second danger for women is that there might be a conflation of male circumcision with female genital mutilation, especially if the theory of the Langerhans cells is proven. The conflation in some parts of the world of male and female circumcision as a cultural marker or initiation rite is already problematic. It would be horrific if the call for more males to be circumcised in cultures where it is not practiced led to more female genital mutilation. This would be compounded if Langerhans cells are seen as the culprit, since there might be a call for the removal of the clitoris which, like the foreskin, contains these cells.

As a disease preventative, circumcision has, so far, fallen short of expectations. There is some evidence in the U.S. or U.K. associating circumcision with reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections. See http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/circumcision.htm. Studies in Africa are reportedly not rigorous enough to have a firm conclusion.

The real world experiment of the United States, which has the highest rates of circumcision in the developed world (65%) and also high rates of STIs and of heterosexually-transmitted HIV infection, should give one pause. The adult HIV prevalence rate in the U.S. is 0.6%, compared with 5% in sub-Saharan Africa. In the Middle East and North Africa, where circumcision is virtually universal, the HIV adult prevalence rate is 0.6%, though reliable statistics are hard to come by.

Circumcision, Biology and Human Evolution

There is already a concern among scientists that Gardasil, which only protects against four strains of HPV, may be unleashing the other strains to infect women. This is an example of evolutionary biology in action. Viruses will do their utmost to survive. We may be breeding new strains of HPV that will need new medicines and vaccinations. We are marching into the biological unknown with HPV vaccination, as perhaps we are with any vaccination.

Circumcision also involves unanswered biological questions. Unmentioned in almost all the debates pro and con circumcision is the question of the biological function of the foreskin in the first place. Have we evolved out of whatever purpose it once had, like a protective effect in the days of yore when humans didn't wear clothes? Is the foreskin therefore some vestigial piece of the anatomy like an appendix? If we have evolved out of its original function, why hasn't the foreskin disappeared? Parenthetically, scientists are beginning to discover biological functions for the appendix, and now believe that it is not vestigial at all, but related to the functioning of the immune system.

All primates, indeed virtually all mammals, have a foreskin or prepuce, both males and females. If the foreskin has a "pathogenic burden", why has it continued through evolutionary time and why has humanity propagated so successfully despite it? The foreskin must confer some reproductive advantage. For instance, the foreskin might contribute to the lubrication of the penis, making it easier, for vaginal intromission (penetration). It may also serve to protect and clean the penis, contributing to penile hygiene.

Not surprisingly, the debates over the usefulness, utility and importance of the foreskin quickly turn into issues of gender and the battle of the sexes. There is one school of biological thought that argues the male penis is not just a sperm delivery device, but also a sperm removal device. It has been reported that some females (one in eight in one study) copulate serially with one or more men within a 24 hour period and that, as a result, there is what is known as "internal sperm competition" to see which man's sperm gets to fertilize the egg. This battle is literally the survival of the fittest swimmer, or perhaps it is the last sperm standing that wins.

See http://www.springerlink.com/content/8nbw6ldv8r6vgqb0/

Some scientists theorize that the penis of the last man is able to remove some of the sperm of the previous male before depositing his own. A male with a penis that is designed to not only deposit his sperm but remove the sperm of the preceding male would have more offspring and thus his genital characteristics would be transmitted to the next generation. There is an argument that the shape of the male penis with its head larger than its shaft acts as a roto-rooter in evolutionary sperm competition. Perhaps the foreskin contributes to this function, though I have seen no scientific research pro or con this.

Other arguments for the existence of the foreskin involve sexual pleasure - the foreskin adds to it for the male, or so it is alleged. Studies vary on this one, and, as you might imagine, the debate is heated. See for example http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/mg19426015.500-does-circumcision-harm-your-sex-life.html

Assuming for the moment that an uncircumcised male has more sexual pleasure, why on earth would any male, or any parent of a male, seek to reduce his sexual pleasure? Well, lots of reasons, and argument. To the extent the lack of a foreskin retards male orgasm and thereby reduces premature ejaculation, it makes for longer intercourse and more female pleasure. There are numerous arguments and purported "studies" with some arguing there is more, and some less, male and female pleasure in circumcised and uncircumcised. The foreskin perhaps evolved as a result of female sexual choice, if more females found sex more pleasurable with uncircumcised males.

No matter what the biological or evolutionary implications are for circumcision, I suspect that males are going to be most concerned about their own sexual pleasure. They are not going to be thinking about the role of the foreskin in human evolution, alas. Circumcision is a risk. It can not generally be undone. The appendix is generally not removed prophylacticly; it is removed when infected. It is a difficult argument for males to say that any part of their body, much less one that contributes to sexual pleasure, should be surgically removed when it is not diseased. It is like saying that all males are born defective and need surgical fixing. It is a decision akin to that that some women with genetic markers for breast cancer must make in deciding whether or not to have a mastectomy. It is a drastic measure.

HPV Vaccination and Male Circumcision: Case Studies in the Failure of Public Health

So, here we have two new public health recommendations relating to sexually transmitted infections, one for females and one for males.

Even though one is a vaccination and the other surgery, each has certain common characteristics.

Cost--- Each is expensive. This is not only a deterrent but may deflect funds from other prevention measures.

Side Effects--- Each has serious potential side effects, though they are rare.

Effectiveness--- Each is not 100% effective. This may result in risk compensating behavior and either less protection than envisioned or even more infection.

Culture--- Each has cultural/gender sensitivities: each is about sex, the vaccination with the sexuality of girls and circumcision with male sexual prowess, pleasure and identity.

Public Health Impact--- Each may not be the best, or most cost-effective, way to target the disease. Cervical cancer can be caught and cured with pap smears, and HIV by a comprehensive ABC program. HIV in Africa is mostly transmitted by female prostitutes. Thailand embarked on a program to require condom use in brothels. Africa has not. The HIV prevalence rate in Thailand is now far lower than in Sub-Saharan Africa. ABC can work. The circumcision recommendation is, I believe, more a comment on the world's failure to implement ABC than on the benefits of the procedure.

Unintended Consequences--- As a biological matter, there are unintended consequences with each. HPV strains not caught by Gardasil may be proliferating when their sibling strains are vaccinated out, leading to more HPV infection. The solution is ever more vaccines for the HPV strains not currently covered. Risk compensation is a real threat to the real world effectiveness of each intervention, though I believe the problem is vastly more acute with circumcision with the real possibility of reduced condom use by circumcised men.

Just last week the oft-ridiculed South African Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, questioned whether the evidence was strong enough to recommend a government circumcision program as part of HIV prevention. She made the comments in the context of a meeting with traditional healers, many of whom view circumcision, along with other HIV remedies, as a Western attempt to force foreign values on South Africans. She noted that the Xhosa ethnic tribe has a high HIV rate even though almost all Xhosa men are circumcised. She failed to mention that the infection rate is even higher among Zulus, who are not circumcised. Whatever her reasoning, or lack thereof, her opposition to circumcision may be a case of a stopped clock telling the correct time twice a day.

It seems to me that male circumcision is a pretty expensive "fix" when we don't know how male circumcision works to prevent HIV transmission through the foreskin and penis in the first place. See the CDC article referred to above to the theories. If scientists could figure this out, then perhaps there is a less drastic, more cost effective or direct way to prevent transmission rather than by circumcision.

It is difficult to imagine that the path for human health and wellbeing is the removal of a part of the body (male circumcision) that nature has given us. But, given that there has been a real world experiment with Jews and Muslims for millennia, male circumcision does not appear to cause lasting harm in terms of morbidity or mortality or reproductive success, and, so far as we can tell, the Muslim HIV prevalence rate is relatively lower.

It would seem that we will continue to muddle through with a dual health care system for HPV and HIV prevention. In the developed world, there will be little demand for, or call for, circumcision and only slightly more for HPV vaccination. Preventive efforts will continue on ABC prevention - including behavior change, condom use and smarter decision making. And they will be slow to show results. In the developing world where there is less cancer screening and more sexual partners and less condom use, there will be a greater call for vaccination and circumcision. Since males in Africa, and females too, want more children than in the West, any perceived reduction of the need to wear a condom will most likely meet with favor. I suspect that there will be less than unanimous support for circumcision in general and probably too many violations of the no-sex-until-the-circumcision-wounds-have- healed guidelines.

The real world for HPV vaccine and male circumcision is a lot messier than the studies would indicate. Neither is a "no-brainer." Science not only has produced incomplete information, it may have produced wrong information for real world use. It would have been preferable in the roll out of each intervention to have it be part of a program directed towards both sexes. In the case of HPV vaccine to have it tested thoroughly on boys and girls ages 11 and up. This would have reduced the imbedded cultural/gender fears of parents about their daughters being sexual beings. Additionally, though scientifically difficult, it would have been preferable to have a HPV vaccine that worked against all HPV strains, not just a few.

In the case of HIV, since the target is Sub-Saharan Africa where prostitution is the main mode of infection, a more extensive campaign, a la Thailand, directed at female prostitutes and brothels requiring condom use would have been salutary. This is hardly easy or in itself a "no-brainer," but the alternative is waiting until the epidemic exhausts itself. Not a pretty picture.

A citation for the proposition for the potential unleashing of other HPV strains caused by HPV vaccination is as follows: George F. Sawaya, MD and Karen Smith McCune, MD, Ph. D, HPV Vaccination: More Questions More Answers,

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/356/19/1991.pdf

This editorial states in part:

"In contrast to a plateau in the incidence of disease related to HPV types 16 and 18 among vaccinated women, the overall disease incidence regardless of HPV type continued to increase, raising the possibility that other oncogenic HPV types eventually filled the biological niche left behind after the elimination of HPV types 16 and 18."

Update on Abortion and Crime

2008-02-09T01:29:00.000-05:00

Two recent articles, one pro and one con, examine the alleged relationship between legalized abortion and crime. See my post of Nov. 18, 2007.

Christopher L. Foote and Christopher F. Goetz in The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime refute the analysis done by John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt in their 2001 paper.
See http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0515.pdf

Donohue and Levitt respond in Measurement Error, Legalized Abortion and the Decline in Crime: a Response to Foote and Goetz and confirm their original findings.
See http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/donohuepublications.htm

The debate goes on.

The 2006 Great Teen Birthrate Spike ─ The Story That Wasn't

2008-01-05T16:20:00.000-05:00

The headlines screamed: "Teen Birth Rate Rises for First Time in 14 Years!" And that was from the CDC. The newspapers were even more dramatic: "Teen Pregnancy: It's Baaaack!" read one headline.

Most newspaper stories quoted our side blaming the Bush Administration's "abstinence-only" sex-ed policy for the rise in teen births. No question but the CDC report gave us a golden opportunity to criticize this misguided policy.

But, were we right?

What did the CDC report actually say? First, the CDC press release said that the teen birth rate rose 3% from 2005 to 2006 and that this is the first rise in the teen birth rate since 1991.

Buried in the CDC press release, but in the first sentences of the actual CDC report, entitled "Births: Preliminary Data for 2006", was the revelation that all births, adult and teen combined, rose 3% from 2005 to 2006. In other words, the teen "General Fertility Rate" (to use the exact terminology) rose at the same rate as the national General Fertility Rate.

The CDC also reported that the national Total Fertility Rate (another technical measure estimating the average number of births that a group of women would have over their lifetimes) rose to 2.1, the highest rate since 1971, and the first year that the TFR has been above the replacement rate since then.

The CDC also noted that the non-marital birth rate rose 7% in 2006 to 38.5% of total births. Be prepared for next year when it breeches the 40% barrier!

So, one interpretation of the CDC report could be that teens were behaving just as the adults were ? having more babies in 2006.

But do teens always behave as adults do, baby-wise? Not exactly.

As the CDC noted, the increase in the teen general fertility rate was the first since 1991 (the teen birth rate had fallen by about one-third since 1991 until its 2006 rise). What had the adult birth rate done since 1991? Like the teen birth rate, it had fallen since 1991 (and even before) until 1997, falling 10% during those years (less than the teen rate but still a significant drop). Then the adult birth rate began a slow rise, about 1% or less a year, until the big 3% jump from 2005 to 2006. Still the coincidence, if that is was it was, of the teen and adult birth rates each rising 3% in one year after diverging for the last eight years is remarkable.

It leads one to ask why birth rates rise and fall and what might make different groups rise while others fall or, conversely, what might make an entire nation's birthrate for adults and teens rise or fall together. There was little discussion of this issue at all in the press coverage. What there was, on the part of most advocates, was placing the blame on abstinence-only sex-ed, as if this misguided policy sprung fully formed in 2005 wreaking birthrate havoc in 2006, and as if nothing else had happened that might influence the childbearing decisions of teens.

Unfortunately, abstinence-only sex-ed has been around for a lot longer than since 2005. States have had their own abstinence-only programs for years, and substantial Federal funding for these programs took off with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Funding has totaled over a billion dollars since then. The results? A Congressionally-mandated evaluation report released in April 2007 showed no effect on age of intercourse, number of sexual partners, contraceptive use, STI infection rates or pregnancy rates. Other evaluations have shown that abstinence-only sex-ed may deter contraceptive use.

My view is that abstinence-only sex-ed is worthless at best, and dangerous at worst, and that it is quite a stretch to say that after ten years it is responsible for a one-year 3% rise in teen pregnancy, after teen pregnancy declined for the first nine years of substantial Federal funding for the program.

As one researcher told me, "We are particularly cautious in making assumptions about the role of abstinence education in this increase because the basic trends run counter to a simple association between the two. Consider that significant funding for abstinence-only education has been around since 1997 and that most years between then and now have witnessed major declines in teen pregnancy. Thus we feel that to assign none of this earlier decrease to abstinence education while assigning all of the recent increase to abstinence education would not be well grounded in empirical evidence..."

I think it safe to say that, if abstinence-only sex-ed programs had any effect on the teen pregnancy rates, up or down, it cannot be quantified.

Virtually alone in a pro-choice sea of condemnation of abstinence-only sex-ed, the National Campaign Against Teen Pregnancy issued a statement saying that no one really knows why the teen pregnancy rate spiked in 2006. They noted, correctly, that we do not have the data for 2006 on the extent of teen sexual activity and contraceptive use, nor do we have pregnancy rates and abortion rates. All we have are childbearing rates. Hence, we don't know if the teen childbearing spike was caused by more sex, less contraception, more pregnancy or less abortion, or some combination of the above. And we don't know what might have caused each of these indices to change from 2005 to 2006.

Researchers have known for years that pregnancy rates, adult and teen alike, arise from many complex factors - socio-economic, cultural and technological. A view of teen pregnancy rates in Latin America might be instructive. In general, unlike the USA, teen childbearing rates have been on the rise in Latin America since 1990. For instance in Brazil, the largest country in the region, the proportion of women age 15-19 who have children rose from 11.5% to 14.8%. Uruguay was the worst performer in the Hemisphere, with the rate rising from 8.4% to 13.9%. For Latin America as a whole, the percentage of live births to teens is 18%, while in Africa it is 17%. In Latin America, while adult fertility continues to decline, adolescent fertility is rising.

There has been economic growth, industrialization, modernization, urbanization in Latin America, along with the spread of modern contraceptives. All this has led to the reduction in the adult fertility rate, but not the adolescent rate. From a gender standpoint, girls in Latin America are in school as much as, or even more than, boys. But there are profound cultural factors that encourage, or at least don't discourage, early childbearing. Adolescents also have difficulty accessing contraceptives (only about 20% of youth use modern contraception) and sex-ed is spotty, even worse than the USA. Meanwhile lifestyle changes have brought on earlier maturation and sexual initiation. While clandestine abortion is widely available, for the very poorest in Latin America early unprotected sexual activity can lead to pregnancy and childbirth.

One mystery is the effect of the availability, or not, of emergency contraception. In the USA it is now available "behind the counter" without a prescription. In Latin America EC availability is not uniform, but a prescription is not needed if a woman can find an agency or store that has it. In the USA EC has become increasingly available since the mid-1990's yet the spike in teen childbearing rates in 2006 occurred despite this. The change in status in the USA from prescription-only status to behind the counter status only came in August 2006, so we will have to wait to see what effect this has on teen childbearing rates, if any, in 2007 and beyond.

In conclusion, the rise in teen childbearing was the story that wasn't in 2007. We don't know what caused it, any more than we know what caused the decline in the 15 previous years. We can make educated guesses. But blaming abstinence-only sex-ed, tempting as it is, is not one of them. My guess is that there was a confluence of factors that led women, adult and teen alike, to decide that 2006 was a good time to have babies.

Abortion and Crime: An Update

2007-11-18T01:40:00.000-05:00

In Chapter Two of Beyond Choice, on pages 66-67 in the hardback, I discussed, in the section on eugenics, the abortion/crime controversy, citing the 2001 study by Donohue and Levitt, which found that the legalization of abortion resulted, twenty or so years later, in a reduction in the crime rate because potential criminals were being aborted rather than born. I also cited contradictory studies that found no effect, or the opposite effect, of abortion on crime. I concluded saying that “The best that can be said is that the case for the alleged causal connection between the legalization of abortion and a decrease in crime rates is unproven.”

Since the publication of Beyond Choice, there has been much heat and somewhat less light on the issue. Most notably there was the publication of Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner in 2005. A reader suggestedthat I should revisit the entire issue based on Freakonomics. So, here goes.

I will spare you the gory econometric details of the argument. While I have an MBA and studied statistics and did regression analyses, that was many years ago and on a computer that took up an entire room. Fortunately for me, the American Enterprise Institute conducted a symposium on this issue on March 28, 2006. A transcript is available on the AEI website. Much of it is accessible to the non-economist.

http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.1285/transcript.asp

Since that symposium there have been papers and responses written by many of the symposium participants and by a few new entrants intothe fray. This battle is not over.

Levitt was not present at the AEI symposium, but John Donohue was, where he defended his and Levitt’s 2001 paper as well as two subsequent papers which corrected errors in the 2001 paper that had been pointed out by his critics. Virtually every economist (or their co-author) who has studied the issue was present. None agreed with Levitt and Donohue entirely, and some disagreed completely and came to the opposite conclusion. All of theten panelists were male, a comment perhaps on the state of the economics profession and/or what kind of economist wants to enter this particular debate.

The lag time between a woman’s decision whether or not to have a child (or give it up for adoption) and the time when criminal behavior becomes apparent is between 15 and 25 years. This is the first problem in trying to identify causation versus correlation. There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip during 25 years. Other antisocial or delinquent behaviors of unwanted children may be manifested earlier, such as poor school performance, alcohol and drug abuse and health problems. The challenge for policy makers andacademics is to isolate one factor― the legalization of abortion―and to calculate its impact, if any, in the subsequent anti-social manifestationsof being unwanted. The Levitt model reportedly had over 1100 different variables, including one imagines, poverty, single parenthood, peer pressure, neighborhood, family, church attendance, social programs, father’s involvement, sibling influence ― the list is almost endless.

Donohue and Levitt argue that legalizing abortion would affect the crime rate twenty years hence through two mechanisms: 1) the cohort size effect, i.e., fewer children being born and thus fewer potential criminals being alive twenty years later and 2) the selection effect, i.e., abortions will be more common for children who were unwanted. Unwanted means in this case that the parents (or mother) did not have the means or disposition to care for the child, and that there would be less of an investment (time, money, effort) in the child, who would therefore have a higher propensity to become a criminal.

On its face, the argument seems to make sense. Women who have abortions do not want to be a mother at that time, if ever. They want to invest in the children they already have or in later children born at a time when they can be a better parent. Abortion, by definition, can affect either the absolute number of children born or their timing, or both. Earlier research, though not by economists, seemed to show that unwanted children did have a higher propensity for poor school performance and delinquent behaviors.Advocates of legal abortion have in the past used this as an argument for notcriminalizing the procedure.

There is a problem with the terms “unintended” and “unwanted” however. When do we make this judgment and who makes it? Is a potential child “unintended” and “unwanted” at the time of sex, at conception, or at three or six months gestation? Is it “unwanted” at birth, at age two, at age 13? Different parents may have different answers at different times. And isn’t it possible that a parent’s idea of wantedness can change, perhaps multiple times, during a child’s prenatal and postnatal life? And which parent are we talking about? Mother? Father? Both?

Aside from upbringing, genes and all the other factors that effect a child’s decisions as to their life course, there are societal factors influencing crime levels: in the case of the US in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s there were efforts to put more police on the street, longer jail terms, better policing, the good economy and the devastating Crack Epidemic. It is a challenge to control for all these intervening effects.

In addition, there are problems of measuring abortion both before and after legalization. Pre-Roe,and pre-1970 in New York and a few other states, legal abortion was difficult to access, though there were therapeutic abortions available to a greater or lesser degree. Criminal abortion was a major enterprise. How to measure the extent of legal and illegal abortions before it was decriminalized is a major problem since statistics weren’t kept. And even after legalization, not every state has accurate records.

Then there is the people problem. People move. A lot. People go across state lines to get abortions and move to other states to live. It is hard to measure a state’s abortion rate in the first place, even the legal abortion rate after Roe, and hard tokeep track of the families who move in and out of state and to discern in all cases if a crime is committed by a person born in the state or elsewhere.

On top of these data problems, there is the issue that the legalization of abortion does more than decriminalize the procedure. Some academics argue, and I cite this in Beyond Choice, that abortion can act as an insurance policy and lead to more risky sex, thus more pregnancy, more abortion and unwanted children. These academics argue that legalizing abortion leads therefore to an increase in crime.

One economist from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston argued that state crime levels were converging in the 1990’s and that abortion had nothing to do with it. Their regression analysis showed that it was the high crime states that were seeing their crime rates drop, not the high abortion states.They also found that property crime levels increased even as violent crime was falling.

Other analysts noted that young males between the ages of 17 and 25 commit the majority of crimes. If abortion did reduce crime, crime rates would have dropped first among young people, but they didn't. The number of crimes committed by older people dropped first in the 1990’s. Furthermore, while the rate of homicide committed by young men dropped, the rate of aggravated assaults among the young increased, and the rate of homicides committed by young females -- which should have been equally affected by abortion as males – did not drop.

The economists at the AEI symposium seemed to agree that there were all these data issues, modeling issues and econometric issues, and others too arcane to discuss here. Donohue and Levitt believe they have solved these issues. The rest disagreed. In sum, most economists present agreed that the evidence for an abortion/crime link is “pretty weak”, “really inconsequential”, not “statistically significant”, and “rather bleak”. The model that Levitt used is what economists calls “sensitive”, not “robust,” meaning that anytime one thing changes, the coefficients of the abortion/crime link change dramatically.

Nonetheless, Donohue and Levitt are sticking to their argument and producing new papers answering their critics. The moderator of the event said later, trying to be diplomatic, that: “I think the consensus position is that the abortion effect probably explains some of the crime decrease but most likely not nearly as much as Donohue and Levitt estimate and no one has much confidence in the precise size of the effect.”

My conclusion remains what it was in 2004 in BeyondChoice. The proposition that there is a connection between legalizing abortion and a subsequent reduction in the crimerate remains unproven.

It was pointed out at the AEI symposium that there is perhaps reluctance on both the Left and Right to validate the Levitt thesis: the Right because it gives societal legitimacy to abortion and the Left because it smacks using racial profiling and eugenics to support the legalization of abortion.

I framed my discussion of the abortion/crime link in BeyondChoice by saying that “eugenics disguised as social engineering wasn’t dead yet.” This comment followed a long discussion of the Norplant saga where the Philadelphia Inquirer, after stating that those having the most children are the least capable of supporting them, suggested incentives for the poorer members of society to use Norplant. And after my discussion of the abortion/crime link, I said that “At its worst, this argument is eugenics in new clothing.”

One reader has suggested that I maligned Levitt by associating him with eugenics.

The AEI conference was notably free of policy recommendations by the panelists, even coded ones. Levitt denies that his theory has racial implications. A moderator (not Levitt) did raise policy questions by saying that the debate over the abortion/crime link could inform the debate as to whether or not the states should cover abortion in their Medicaid program or whether parental consent laws should be enacted, as both these provisions affect the ease of access by the poor and the young to abortion, those whom, under Levitt’s thesis, would be most likely to give birth to future criminals. I have not read anything where Levitt or his co-author make any policy recommendations, nor any statements that sound like eugenics.

That said, the American Enterprise Institute is not an academic, non-partisan think tank. They want to affect policy in Washington. I doubt they would sponsor a symposium that would conclude with an endorsement of Medicaid-funded abortions. Economists too have political opinions, as do we all. Eugenics and the fear of eugenics lurk all around the abortion/crime debate. Only rarely does it surface explicitely.

Former Education Secretary William Bennett, hardly a supporter of legal abortion, entered the fray on his radio show in 2005. Here is the transcript of a section where he and a caller discuss Freakonomics:

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well--

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

If that isn’t eugenics in new clothing, I don’t know what is.

I end up where I began. I don’t see much of a role for economists analyzing the after-effects of biological imperatives, especially effects not seen for a quarter century. It may sell books and get academics tenure and speaking fees and air time on cable TV, but I don’t think the debateon an abortion/crime link adds much of relevance to the real world that women especially find themselves in when they need to decide between reproducing now or later or not at all. Women do the best they can in difficult circumstances. Society should be trying to make their circumstances less dire, less difficult, less fraught. Now that’s a topic for a symposium.

As Goes New Jersey… We Hope.

2007-09-20T21:55:00.000-04:00

Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court, in an unanimous decision, ruled that a doctor, prior to performing an abortion, was not required to tell his patient that the embryo inside her was “a complete, separate, unique, irreplaceable human being,” with the implication that abortion he was about to perform was the same as murder. The patient, Rosa Acuna, had filed a malpractice action against her doctor, Sheldon Turkish, after her abortion, claiming emotional distress, and asserted that he should have told her, as part of the informed consent process, that it was a “scientific and medical fact” that the abortion would result in the “killing of an existing human being.” The plaintiff claimed further that her doctor had a duty “to explain that the procedure (would) terminate the life of a living member of the species Homo sapiens, that is a human being.”

The court found that there was not even a remote consensus in New Jersey that the plaintiff’s assertions were medical facts, as opposed to religious or moral beliefs, and without this consensus the court said it would not impose this new legal duty on doctors. The court affirmed that the common law in New Jersey requires only that the physician must provide the patient only “material medical information, including gestational stage and medical risks involved in the procedure.”

The battleground in this case was the patient’s (a woman’s) right of self-determination. The plaintiff asserted that no woman can make an informed decision unless she is given the biological facts of the pregnancy. The defendants, in turn, asserted that requiring a doctor to make the statements that the plaintiff requested would place an undue burden on the woman’s right to self-determination.

The framing of the plaintiff’s arguments follows directly from the anti-choice strategy used in the Gonzales v. Carhart case decided by the Supreme Court last April. There Justice Kennedy adopted in his majority opinion the assertions by abortion opponents that abortion causes emotional harm to women:

“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. … Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow. See ibid.
In a decision so fraught with emotional consequence some doctors may prefer not to disclose precise details of the means that will be used, confining themselves to the required statement of risks the procedure entails. From one standpoint this ought not to be surprising. Any number of patients facing imminent surgical procedures would prefer not to hear all details, lest the usual anxiety preceding invasive medical procedures become the more intense. This is likely the case with the abortion procedures here in issue….’Most of [the plaintiffs’] experts acknowledged that they do not describe to their patients what [the D&E and intact D&E] procedures entail in clear and precise terms’)….
It is, however, precisely this lack of information concerning the way in which the fetus will be killed that is of legitimate concern to the State. Casey, supra, at 873 (plurality opinion) (“States are free to enact laws to provide a reasonable framework for a woman to make a decision that has such profound and lasting meaning”). The State has an interest in ensuring so grave a choice is well informed. It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.
It is a reasonable inference that a necessary effect of the regulation and the knowledge it conveys will be to encourage some women to carry the infant to full term, thus reducing the absolute number of late-term abortions. The medical profession, furthermore, may find different and less shocking methods to abort the fetus in the second trimester, thereby accommodating legislative demand. The State’s interest in respect for life is advanced by the dialogue that better informs the political and legal systems, the medical profession, expectant mothers, and society as a whole of the consequences that follow from a decision to elect a late-term abortion.” From Justice Kennedy’s Majority Opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart

The New Jersey case, Acuna v. Turkish, may not make it to the U. S. Supreme Court, although her lawyer says that he will file for certiorari, but a similar case from South Dakota might. In the latter case, it is a law passed by the state legislature that requires physicians to make the statements that Rose Acuna wanted her doctor to make. The South Dakota case will raise the constitutional questions that the New Jersey court was able to avoid, including questions about free speech and the extent to which the Gonzales case has gutted the Casey decision. Justice Kennedy seems to give great weight to the fact-finding judgments of state legislatures, even when they are clearly biased and one-sided. If the court acknowledges the procedural validity of the South Dakota legislature’s finding that it is a biological “fact” that an embryo is a member of the species homo sapiens and thus a human being, who is the Supreme Court, under Kennedy’s rationale, to dispute it.

I have had pro-choice obstetricians and abortion providers tell me that, medically, when a woman is pregnant, there are two patients, the woman and the embryo or fetus or unborn child. Any treatment of one must be balanced against the risks to the other. This is not remarkable. The anti-choice folks are trying to slide from this, using sleight of words, to saying that the fetus is a separate human being, a member of the species homo sapiens, that abortion is murder and that the 14^th Amendment must prohibit it. This is not a new argument, but it has been updated with arguments that the unique DNA of the fetus means that the fetus is a unique human being. This, Rose Acuna argued, she needed to know before she was able, as a woman, to make an informed decision.

In Gonzales, the Supreme Court upheld the ban on an abortion procedure without making an exception for the woman’s health. It thus ruled that states could enact restrictions on abortion to protect a woman’s mental health, while putting at risk her physical health - an interesting calculus that we have not seen the last of. Small cases that nibble around the edges of Casey, like Rose Acuna’s, will continue to rise and probably be decided in favor of ideology and morality, posing as medicine, at least if the abortion restrictions are enacted, after kangaroo hearings, by a state legislature or Congress. We can hope that not too many of these cases get to the Court until its make-up changes.

Sanger Didn't Say That

2007-07-22T23:58:00.000-04:00

Historians and others who should know better keep misquoting my grandmother. Here is the latest example from Harvard. My response comes first and the offending article follows.

Harvard Magazine July-August 2007

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/07/p2-cambridge-02138.html

SANGER DIDN’T SAY THAT

In your excerpt, “An Earlier Bid for Mastery,” of a book by Michael J. Sandel (May-June, page 25), Sandel quotes my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, as saying, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.” My grandmother never said this. The quote comes from a 1919 editorial in American Medicine that followed an article by my grandmother. This quotation has been falsely attributed to Margaret Sanger for decades. One would have thought that Bass professor of government Sandel and your editors would have checked the original source material. Is that what they supposedly teach at Harvard?

Alexander Sanger
Chair, International Planned Parenthood Council
New York City

The article my letter refers to is as follows:

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/2007/05/an-earlier-bid-for-maste.html

Harvard Magazine May-June 2007

An Earlier Bid for Mastery

New genetic knowledge may let us manipulate our nature: beef up our muscles, brush up our memory, make designer children. What’s wrong with that? Bass professor of government Michael J. Sandel proposes an answer in The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Harvard University Press, $18.95). Along the way, he recalls the eugenics movement (and contributions to it by Harvardians Charles Davenport, A.B. 1889, Ph.D. ‘92; Theodore Roosevelt, A.B. 1880, LL.D. ‘02; and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., A.B. 1861, LL.B. ‘66, LL.D. ‘95). In 1910, biologist and eugenic crusader Davenport opened the Eugenic Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

In Davenport’s words, the project was to catalog “the great strains of human protoplasm that are coursing through the country.” Davenport hoped such data would provide the basis for eugenic efforts to prevent reproduction of the genetically unfit.

Reprinted from War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Carrie Buck, ordered to undergo sterilization

…Theodore Roosevelt wrote Davenport: “Some day, we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” Margaret Sanger, pioneering feminist and advocate of birth control, also embraced eugenics: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.”
…By the 1920s, eugenics courses were offered at 350 of the nation’s colleges and universities, alerting privileged young Americans to their reproductive duty.
But the eugenics movement also had a harsher face. Eugenics advocates lobbied for legislation to prevent those with undesirable genes from reproducing, and in 1907 Indiana adopted the first law providing for the forced sterilization of mental patients, prisoners, and paupers. Twenty-nine states ultimately adopted forced-sterilization laws, and more than 60,000 genetically “deficient” Americans were sterilized. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sterilization laws in the notorious case of Buck v. Bell. The case involved Carrie Buck, a seventeen- year-old unwed mother who had been committed to a Virginia home for the feeble-minded and ordered to undergo sterilization. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinion for the eight-to-one majority upholding the sterilization law: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices…. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Referring to the fact that Carrie Buck’s mother and, allegedly, her daughter were also found to be mentally deficient, Holmes concluded: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Attention Andover Students

2007-02-23T11:14:00.000-05:00

Please use the following link to access the complete Power Point presentation on Abortion in the United States:
http://www.guttmacher.org/presentations/ab_slides.html

Eugenics, Race, and Margaret Sanger Revisited: Reproductive Freedom for All?

2006-11-28T14:43:00.000-05:00

In winter 2001, the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York City sponsored an exhibit, “Perfecting Mankind: Eugenics and Photography,” where posted on the wall was a quotation ascribed to my grandmother, Margaret Sanger: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.” My grandmother never said this. The quotation actually came from a 1919 editorial in American Medicine that followed my grandmother’s review of an article. This quotation has been repeatedly and falsely attributed to my grandmother over the decades since. After I objected, the ICP promptly removed the offending quotation from the exhibit, but only after countless gallery visitors had seen it.

Misattributions, misunderstandings, and outright falsehoods about eugenics, race, and Margaret Sanger have too often been the norm in the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries. Issues of race permeate current American arguments about abortion and reproductive rights. Abortion opponents, including some African Americans, liken abortion to slavery or the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Such imagery is not new. My grandmother called women subject to “involuntary motherhood” slaves.

Some of the most prominent men of the early twentieth century endorsed eugenics. At the First International Eugenics Congress in London in 1912, the attendees included the type of men my grandmother wanted to win over for birth control—Alexander Graham Bell; Winston Churchill; Charles Eliot, immediate past president of Harvard University; and Havelock Ellis, her friend-to-be. While attended by an overwhelmingly white, male, well-to-do audience, the impulses of the attendees and of those who supported eugenics should not be classified as necessarily class, gender, or race based. Eugenics in its infancy was seen as a tool for societal and human improvement. Reformers saw it as a way to enlist science, biology, and genetics in service of healthy human reproduction and outcomes and thereby to improve the health and quality of all children being born. At its least offensive, eugenics called for improved prenatal care. At its most offensive, it called for involuntary sterilization. The downfall of eugenics came when reformers began to use it as a program of social control, promoting government intervention and coercion in human reproduction. This shift points to an ongoing issue in modern science—how to use science for good and how to define what that good is.

The entry point for eugenics into political discourse came from societal disapproval of certain sexual activities, specifically masturbation. Social, religious, and cultural fears and taboos, portrayed as medical “opinion,” said that masturbation was bad for the human body and psyche, not to mention sinful. Masturbation was never, however, illegal. Doctors in the late nineteenth century developed methods of sterilizing both men and women, including the vasectomy; one physician began experimenting in an Indiana prison, illegally, by sterilizing those men he diagnosed as “chronic masturbators.” The doctor, Henry Clay Sharp, performed vasectomies, circumcisions, and castrations on the inmates, presumably mostly white, sometimes doing over one hundred procedures in a year.

Sharp’s zeal for his job led him on a crusade to legalize what he was doing and to expand the class of those to whom he could legally do it. In a 1902 paper, Sharp wrote: “I therefore suggest that you endeavor to secure such legislation as will make it mandatory that this operation be performed on all convicted degenerates. It renders them powerless to reproduce their kind, and it is an undoubted fact that the progeny of degenerates becomes a charge upon the state.” In 1907, Indiana became the first of thirty states to legalize compulsory sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles” if procreation was deemed “inadvisable” by a committee and there was “no probability of improvement of the mental condition of the inmate.”

At the same time as doctors and reformers were pushing for so-called negative eugenic legislation, some early feminists and birth controllers were also using eugenics to advance their cause. They used eugenic arguments in favor of eliminating involuntary motherhood and of permitting motherhood by choice, which in their view would produce healthier children. Late nineteenth-century feminists were of the opinion, as unscientific as it was, that unwanted children, the products of involuntary motherhood, were likely to be morally or physically defective. They argued that every child had a right to be born healthy—an argument Margaret Sanger used repeatedly throughout her life: “Every child should be a wanted child.”

While not entirely correct from a biological point of view, this argument contained the seeds of a larger valid point. Women know when they want to have a child. They know when they are ready to take on the physical and emotional burdens of pregnancy and child rearing. My grandmother argued that “women are natural eugenicists.” All women want healthy children that will survive to adulthood and have children of their own. Bringing science to motherhood and children’s health was seen as a natural extension of the so-called purity crusade in which many feminists were engaged at the turn of the twentieth century. This pursuit of mental, moral, marital, and physical health was expanded to encompass voluntarily producing healthy children. It is interesting to note that in those times many feminists talked of making motherhood a profession and more scientific. In their view, motherhood was woman’s major contribution to the human race, and improving motherhood’s status and outcomes was a method of improving women’s lives.

At this time, women’s colleges were producing a steady stream of graduates who were not only delaying childbearing but also having fewer children. President Theodore Roosevelt attacked this trend in 1905 as “race suicide,” calling it decadent and a sign of moral decline, and labeling the woman, or man, who avoided having children as “criminal against the race.” The fact that a president of the United States attacked birth control, a decade before the term had been coined and a decade before my grandmother entered the fray, made the prevention of conception a major national issue. The arguments Roosevelt and others used against birth control, in addition to eugenic ones, were similar to those first used by the Know-Nothings in the early nineteenth century that birth control would lead to the decline in Yankee hegemony and that the United States needed a growing population to fulfill its manifest destiny, as well as antifeminist and religious arguments that birth control enabled women to avoid their duty to the human race and was unnatural and sinful for both men and women.

Among the political results of eugenic thinking in the early twentieth century were immigration quotas and restrictions and restrictive marriage laws, including a resurgence of antimiscegenation statutes, which prohibited marriage between blacks and whites. Additionally, before 1920, almost one-half of the states prohibited marriage between “imbeciles, epileptics, paupers, drunkards, criminals, and the feebleminded.” Various words were used at the time to classify persons of low intelligence: for example, feebleminded, moron, imbecile, and idiot. Whether there was a hierarchy of intelligence levels understood in these words remains unclear, but they seem to have been interchangeable. Today, these terms refer specifically (and derogatorily) to persons with severe mental retardation. Then, such terms were applied across the board to persons with mental retardation, persons with other disabilities, and sometimes people whose behavior did not conform to social norms. Such people were deemed “unfit,” which became the code word among eugenicists for people who should not be allowed to reproduce. In 1913, the year my grandmother began her birth-control work in earnest, thirteen states had compulsory sterilization laws for the unfit. The number would grow to thirty.

Into this milieu came my grandmother. She was an intelligent women but not a formally educated one. I doubt she had read or studied evolution, natural selection, or genetics. She came from one of the classes that Protestant eugenicists looked down upon and discriminated against—Irish Catholics. She was also poor and female. She had married a Jew. She had a criminal record from her days as a labor organizer. She had inherited diseases. No eugenicist would call her “fit.” She had three children.

Margaret Sanger was truly committed to improving the lot of poor, immigrant, and non – English speaking woman in America. As a nurse, she saw their living conditions firsthand. She saw the abysmal poverty, unsanitary environments, and endless stream of unwanted children. She had seen all this growing up with ten brothers and sisters, a father who could not provide a steady income, and a sickly mother dying before her time. She herself had been deathly ill with tuberculosis, and repeated childbearing would have killed her, just as it had her mother. While she may have appeared to espouse elitist views about reproduction as the years passed, her views were directly descended from her life experiences in poverty-stricken upstate New York and the Lower East Side of New York City.

Margaret Sanger was an amalgam of views on reproduction. As a radical in the early years, she believed that both the inherent unfairness of the capitalist economic system and a disadvantaged environment, including poor living conditions that lead to poor health and lack of education, prevented poor people from improving their lot. And yet she believed that it was up to poor people themselves to extricate themselves from poverty—after all, she herself had done so. She believed that women wanted their children to be free of poverty and disease, that women were natural eugenicists, and that birth control, which could limit the number of children and improve their quality of life, was the panacea to accomplish this.

Eugenics at that time was not only “scientific” but also much more respectable than birth control, which under my grandmother’s leadership was seen as the cause of radical, feminist lawbreakers. Eugenics was there to be co-opted and used. At the time, it must have seemed a winning strategy, since not only would eugenics give birth control a scientific patina but my grandmother also hoped to convert eugenicists who opposed birth control into supporters. Still, substantial philosophical differences existed between my grandmother and the eugenicists, particularly around the issue of women’s autonomy.

In one of her earliest pieces on eugenics in the February 1919 issue of Birth Control Review, my grandmother laid out those differences:

Before eugenists [eugenicists were originally called eugenists] and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods. . . . We who advocate Birth Control, on the other hand, lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health. The eugenist also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. We hold that the world is already over-populated. Eugenists imply or insist that a woman’s first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state. . . . We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she should bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother.

This statement outlined my grandmother’s support of some of what eugenicists stood for and her objection to other parts of their agenda. She stated that she shared the goal of the “elimination of the unfit,” but by mostly voluntary means. She asserted that a woman is best judge of whether and when to bring a child into the world. When a woman makes this determination, children will be healthier and better cared for. In other words, women are natural eugenicists.

That said, my grandmother advised, but did not mandate, that birth control be used in the following conditions:

1. If the parents have a transmissible disease such as epilepsy or alcoholism.

2. If the mother had heart or kidney disease so that the pregnancy could endanger the woman’s life.

3. If the parents already have a subnormal child.

4. There should be an interval of two or three years between children in order to give the woman time to rest from her last birth.

5. No woman should have children until she has finished her adolescent period and attained age 22 or 23.

6. There should be no more children than can be brought up decently and properly provided for.

7. Children should not be born until the young couple has two years of married life so that their marriage and relationship can mature.

Most of these guidelines are much akin to the commonsense advice a mother might give a daughter. She also claimed that birth control would improve marriages, family life, and one’s sex life. But that wasn’t enough. She went on:

No permanent peace is possible without a grasp of the population problem. Birth Control is not merely an individual problem; it is not merely a national question; it concerns the whole wide world, the ultimate destiny of the human race. . . . In his last book, Mr. Wells speaks of the meaningless, aimless lives which cram this world of ours, hordes of people who are born, who live, who die, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions. All that they have done has been done better before. Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth.

My grandmother’s reference to some of humanity as “human weeds” is among her most troubling. To call it elitist and unhumanitarian would be an understatement. Yet she also recognized the inherent biases of eugenics. When she objected to “cradle competition” between the fit and the unfit, the eugenic solution to the race problem, my grandmother said:

In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the idea of the “fit” and the “‘unfit.” Who is to decide this question? The grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should indeed not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails. . . . The official policy it has pursued for years has been inspired by a class-bias and sex-bias.

One can feel the tug of values here. Under strict eugenic principles, my grandmother herself would have been prevented from being born. Her father was an Irish Catholic alcoholic, her mother suffered chronic poor health, they were poor, there were already five children by the time she came along, and a subsequent child would die shortly after birth. The only eugenic factors in her favor were that they were white, spoke English, and were not a burden on the government. Some strict eugenicists of the day would nevertheless have prevented Margaret Sanger’s parents, or Margaret Sanger herself, from having more than one or two children.

All the while maintaining that birth control should be voluntary and educational, Margaret Sanger attempted to establish social norms for childbearing and motherhood and, in some instances, went beyond this to endorsing legal restrictions on childbearing. Some eugenicists endorsed the sterilization of criminals. My grandmother did not. Putting aside the fact that she was a criminal herself, having been arrested and jailed multiple times, and could be classified a repeat offender and thereby subject to sterilization, she stated:

As for the sterilization of criminals, not merely must we know much more of heredity and genetics in general, but also acquire more certainty of the justice of our laws and the honesty of their administration before we can make rulings of fitness or unfitness merely upon the basis of a respect for law. The fact that a man is for the purposes of society classed as a criminal tells me little as to his value, still less as to the possible value of his offspring.

In general, she opposed both negative eugenics and positive eugenics. She not only felt that we did not know enough scientifically to make informed judgments about reproduction but she also believed that, no matter what the law says regarding marriage and reproduction, humans will find a way around it. As she once said, negative eugenics “must resort to compulsory and restrictive legislation, which, as events prove, is ineffective and ineffectual.”

She did, however, call for the sterilization of the insane and the feebleminded. She felt that these people, however defined, were incapable of understanding birth-control information and making an informed and rational decision about whether to become a parent. She believed that the feebleminded give birth to more feebleminded, and that the only way to break the cycle was to prevent them from having children.

She also called for a ban on the immigration into the United States of various “unfit” people. She endorsed keeping “the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded idiots, morons, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.”

She further endorsed segregation of “illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, [and] dope-fiends” as long as necessary for them to develop moral conduct so that they could return to society. It is not clear why she thought “unemployables” or poor people needed to develop moral conduct when she stated in other contexts that the environment, societal, and economic conditions were largely responsible for poverty. This belief appears to be a case of what we now call blaming the victim, but which fell right in line with my grandmother’s opinion that almost anyone could work their way out of poverty.

At her core though, she remained a feminist:

Compulsory motherhood is the cornerstone of the subjection of women and the subjection of women is the basis of all the evils of over-population. Birth is the woman’s problem, and she must be put in a position to solve it for herself. She must have the right to her own body, and the right to choose when she will bear a child. If this right be made absolutely hers, there will be an end to the bearing of children for whom the world has no room and no opportunities; there will be an end to the bearing of diseased and defective children.

The ironies of race, eugenics, and birth control are legion. So are the tragedies. Eugenics found fertile soil in the United States because of our history of competition between differing ethnic groups for political, economic, and cultural power. Eugenics did not begin as an anti-black program. The first eugenic laws were enacted because of white men masturbating. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld eugenics laws in a case involving a white woman. Margaret Sanger tried to co-opt eugenics in a bid for respectability. It failed miserably and the damage continues to this day.

My grandmother’s entire career shows that she was motivated by a desire to save the women she took care of as a nurse—the poor, the uneducated, the immigrant. There was no motivation to eliminate them. She wanted every child to have the chance that hers did—poverty combined with having too many children were the root causes of racial degeneration, not heredity or ethnicity or race. Her emphasis on childbearing served to reinforce the notion that the fertility of the poor, and by extension that of the black race, was a proper subject of social and governmental control. The dangers inherent in this view are still with us.