In the wake of the recent budget-limit travesty, Bill Clinton opined that if President Obama was in a position to be stubborn and let the government close down, perhaps that would have been the GOP’s waterloo moment. Maybe instead the 2012 Presidential election will be the ultimate cratering of the Republicans, the final bottoming out before it can return to sanity and stop treating politics like a zero-sum game. If its Presidential campaign is a culture war and contraception is a centerpiece, the GOP will suffer a devastating loss. Maybe it can rise from that wreckage and become a party worthy of governance again.

The term birth control was coined by New York nurse Margaret Sanger, who is pictured above in a classic photo exiting a Brooklyn courthouse on January 8, 1917. She was on trial for opening a birth-control clinic the previous year, and she was guilty as charged. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which eventually became Planned Parenthood. Sanger wasn’t completely enlightened herself, embodying some of the biased views of her time regarding race and eugenics. But she did shine a light on the important area of women’s health. From a 1957 interview which Mike Wallace conducted with Sanger:

“WALLACE: Well let’s look at the official Catholic position…opposition to Birth-Control. I read now from a church publication called ‘The Question Box’ in forbidding Birth Control it says the following: It says the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children, when the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible–that is by Birth Control–it is used unethically and unnaturally. Now what’s wrong with that position?

SANGER: Well, it’s very wrong, it’s not normal it’s — it has the wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.

WALLACE: Well the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. Do you disagree with that?

SANGER: I disagree with that a hundred percent.

WALLACE: Your feeling is what then?

SANGER: My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It’s secondary. Many, many times and we know that –you see your birth rates and you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they’re not having babies every year.”