This spring, the GOP attempted to cripple family planning by voting to defund Planned Parenthood, but as Jodi Jacobson notes, Republicans were supportive of women’s health programs and family planning long before they denounced it. In May 1972, then-U.N. ambassador George H.W. Bush wrote a letter to “Alan Guttmacher (founder of the Guttmacher Institute) congratulating him on creation of a ‘family planning’ stamp commemorating (gasp!!) Margaret Sanger”:
As a congressman, Bush also advocated that family planning services be available to every woman, calling it a “public health matter.” He championed Title X funding, lobbied President Richard Nixon to enact the program, and described family planning as an effort “that help[s] further work of such worldwide importance, something for which this country can be justly proud.” “We need to make population and family planning household words,” he said in 1969. “We need to take sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather are using it as a political steppingstone. If family planning is anything, it is a public health matter.”
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