Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Hollywood is honoring the founder of America’s largest abortion provider.
On Tuesday, Comedy Central’s Drunk History aired its “Sex” episode. If you haven’t seen Drunk History, the show has semi-famous people get drunk and explain a story from history. While that “narrator” is slurring through the story, actors portray the scenes being described. The show can be amusing, but the history is – as you can imagine – terrible.
For the first sketch, a “drunk” actress Alison Rich narrated the life of Margaret Sanger, the founder of today’s Planned Parenthood.
While Rich told the story of Sanger’s pursuit for birth control, actress and Planned Parenthood supporter Amber Tamblyn (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) starred as Sanger. Rich began with Sanger’s career as a nurse and continued to the day when Sanger met suffragist Katherine McCormick, who funded Sanger’s endeavors.
Rich imagined Sanger’s words at a suffrage rally, with McCormick present.
“People think of sex as this, like, weird thing that we're not supposed to talk about,” Rich voiced Sanger as saying, “but sex is as basic to the human experience as eating and pooping, and those are two things that I love so much.”
She continued to 1957, where “boom!” they created “the pill,” with the help of biologist Gregory Pincus and obstetrician John Rock.
“So in the first year, 500,000 women get the pill. It was hugely successful,” Rich added. “And then by 1960, it was officially on the market as a form of contraception.”
According to Rich, the “development of the birth control pill is the single most important development in women's liberation.” Everything depended on it, she said.
“Women were like, we can go to college. We can join the workforce. We can experience the sexual revolution,” she stressed, “It's really important!”
While Rich admitted Sanger was a eugenicist, she added, “not everybody’s perfect.” Even Martin Luther King, Jr. “had affairs,” she concluded laughing.
While Sanger spoke openly against abortion, Planned Parenthood serves as the nation’s largest abortion provider. According to Planned Parenthood’s most recently published annual report, it performed 321,384 abortions and received $543.7 million in “government health services, reimbursements & grants” for the year 2016 – 2017.
