Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, an anti-abortion rights Republican who just lately dismissed as “constitutionally unsound” a longstanding Supreme Court ruling that legalized contraception, was as soon as the chief of an on-campus ladies’s group that promoted birth control.
Blackburn, whose maiden identify is Wedgeworth, was president of the Associated Women Students (AWS) chapter at Mississippi State University from round April 1972 by means of February 1973, in response to minutes of the AWS conferences that have been obtained by NBC News from the college’s archives. She graduated from MSU in 1973 with a bachelor’s diploma in Home Economics.
During Blackburn’s tenure as president, the AWS “sponsored” a “birth control program” that was held on campus on Dec. 5 and Dec. 7, 1972, the place information about contraception was offered to feminine college students, former AWS members mentioned.
Marie Naklie, who preceded Blackburn as AWS president, mentioned such applications have been “more informational than anything, for women to be more aware that these issues were out there and that they were being debated.”
Blackburn’s AWS chapter additionally sponsored applications the place hot-button points and organizations that she has stridently opposed as senator — together with abortion and Planned Parenthood — have been introduced and debated, former AWS members mentioned. AWS was a scholar authorities affiliation based in 1913.
Blackburn, who is 70 and initially from Laurel, Mississippi, raised no objections to the group internet hosting these discussions for different ladies at MSU, in response to accessible minutes from AWS conferences.
“Don’t forget, there were so few women on campus,” Naklie mentioned. “I think in AWS there were never more than 25 to 30 women total. I don’t remember those programs being particularly well attended.”
Naklie, who graduated in 1972 and went on to a trailblazing profession as a chemical engineer in Texas, mentioned she doesn’t know the place Blackburn stood on birth control on the time.
Blackburn seems within the two photographs for AWS within the 1972 version of MSU’s yearbook, The Reveille. One is a group shot of the entire membership’s members and the opposite exhibits the 4 ladies who served because the membership’s officers.
The yearbook blurb states that the group sponsored applications aimed toward younger ladies on the topics that “included venereal disease programs, Big Sister-Little Sister, fire safety, and Zero Population Growth.”
In response to questions on Blackburn’s stances on abortion and birth control when she was an undergraduate scholar and for extra perception into her tenure as AWS president, one in every of her aide’s replied in an e-mail, “Senator Blackburn has always been a freedom-loving conservative and fought to protect the unborn.”
Zero Population Growth, or ZPG, is a corporation co-founded in 1968 by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, the creator of the best-selling ebook “The Population Bomb,” which promoted each contraceptive use and abortion as a method of stopping over-population. From the beginning, the group, now referred to as Population Connection, has advocated for birth control and abortion rights.
Sarah Portis, who was the adviser to AWS when Blackburn was chapter president and later taught at Auburn University of Montgomery, advised NBC News she remembers there have been discussions about ZPG.
“I can tell you that the club officers decided which causes to take on and one of them was zero population growth,” Portis mentioned. “Marsha was the president, I think, so she would have been involved in making that decision.”
The MSU chapter of AWS was not the one one centered on limiting world inhabitants development, mentioned historian Kelly Sartorius, an professional on ladies’s college training.
“Zero population growth was a huge issue in the early 1970s, and many AWS chapters were focused on this,” mentioned Sartorius. “I wouldn’t call AWS a feminist organization, but many chapters focused on issues that directly affected women, like the availability of birth control.”
Marty Wiseman, a retired Mississippi State University professor of presidency and longtime pal of Blackburn’s, mentioned that as undergraduates they typically had “spirited but friendly debates” over cups of espresso and he or she would all the time take the conservative aspect whereas Wiseman leaned liberal.
“You caught me by surprise,” he mentioned when advised that Blackburn had been a frontrunner of AWS when it sponsored birth control seminars and that ZPG gave the impression to be on the agenda. “In our discussions I never got the feeling that she was anything but pro-life. In fact, I have been fascinated by how she staked out a position as a conservative Republican so early on and never wavered for 50 years.”
But Wiseman mentioned she was a powerful supporter of President Richard Nixon on the time and would have aligned along with his politics.
“If Richard Nixon supported it and she knew it, I think she would have supported it,” he mentioned. “She was all in with Nixon and the Republican Party.”
In a 1969 deal with to Congress, Nixon warned that unchecked inhabitants development was “one of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century” and inspired “family planning.”
Blackburn mentioned in her 2020 ebook, “The Mind of a Conservative Woman,” that her conservative political leanings have been nonetheless forming when she was an MSU undergraduate.
“I certainly had not fully arrived as a conservative by the time I went off to college,” Blackburn wrote on web page 28.
In March, Blackburn sparked hypothesis about where she stands on birth control when she took situation with the 1965 Supreme Court ruling generally known as Griswold vs. Connecticut, which legalized entry to contraception.
In feedback criticizing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Blackburn said, “Constitutionally unsound rulings like Griswold vs. Connecticut, Kelo v. the City of New London, and NFIB vs. Sebelius confused Tennesseans and left Congress wondering who gave the court permission to bypass our system of checks and balances.”
Most Americans are strongly in favor of birth control, together with folks who, like Blackburn, are adamantly against abortion, polls have proven over a few years.
Blackburn, a married mom of two grown kids and grandmother of 1, didn’t clarify how the Griswold ruling could be “constitutionally unsound” and didn’t deal with questions on her personal place on birth control.
Shortly afterward, tweets claiming that Blackburn believes birth control ought to solely be allowed for married {couples} began circulating.
Blackburn’s spokesman responded on Twitter by referring to a May 9 tweet from CNN fact checker Daniel Dale.
”She didn’t say birth control ought to solely be for married {couples},” Dale wrote. “Rather, she criticized as ‘constitutionally unsound,’ the 1965 Griswold decision that ensured married couples’ access to birth control.”
In “The Mind of a Conservative Woman,” Blackburn decried Planned Parenthood’s “tragic agenda” and labeled abortion as “barbaric.” She additionally insisted within the ebook that she is “on the record as opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment.”
“The Constitution of the United States guarantees me the same freedoms and protections under the law as any other American citizen,” she wrote. “I don’t need an ERA.”
The Constitution doesn’t explicitly acknowledge ladies’s rights. And whereas Congress handed the ERA in 1972, it fell three states in need of the 38 wanted to ratify it with a purpose to change into a part of the Constitution.
Mississippi was debating the ERA when Blackburn was in school, and the minutes from April 26, 1972, confirmed that throughout her presidency, AWS hosted a discussion board on the proposed constitutional modification that was deemed “a success.”
“I remember working for ERA to pass because it made a difference in my career,” Naklie, a former classmate, mentioned. “Before ERA I couldn’t get a job interview even though I was at the top of my class. But that opened the door for me, gave me a chance.”
Naklie mentioned she doesn’t keep in mind AWS advocating for the ERA or the place Blackburn stood on the problem.
“At the time, most of the women on campus were majoring in things like primary school education or home economics and they weren’t trying to establish careers in fields that were dominated by men,” Naklie mentioned. “So they didn’t have as much vested in seeing the ERA passed. I’m sure Marsha is for equal rights for women. Just not sure she was for the ERA.”
Around the time Blackburn was in school, AWS had greater than 250,000 college students and chapters at universities throughout the nation, Sartorius mentioned. Chapters started to fold in 1972 after the passage of Title IX, the federal civil rights legislation that prohibited sex-based discrimination in faculties — and eradicated the necessity for a separate scholar authorities group for girls.
Naklie mentioned essentially the most urgent situation throughout her tenure wasn’t birth control.
“What I remember was pushing to get the curfew moved past 10 p.m.,” Naklie mentioned. “This was a different time. The ratio at Mississippi State was seven guys for every woman. And we were required to be back in our dorms by 10 p.m.”