Margaret “Peggy” Goldwater holds a mural of her husband Sen. Barry Goldwater, who would become the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and a conservative icon. The mural was made of hundreds of small photos of the senator.
By Daniel Gonzalez || The Arizona Republic
In the early 1900s, babies in Arizona were dying at alarming rates from diarrhea and premature births.The infant mortality rate in Arizona was among the highest in the nation.
Most of the babies dying belonged to impoverished Mexican American and Native American mothers.
An effort to lower the number of infant deaths by making birth control more available came from what today seems an unlikely source: affluent, white conservative Republican women.
They were considered radicals at the time.
Among the most prominent was Margaret “Peggy” Goldwater. She was married to Barry Goldwater, who would become the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and a conservative icon.
Peggy Goldwater helped open the first birth control clinic in Phoenix in 1937. The Women’s Health Clinic was in an old house at 711 E. Adams St., a stone’s throw from where Chase Field baseball stadium now stands. Barry Goldwater helped paint the clinic’s walls.
The center Peggy Goldwater was instrumental in opening evolved into a network of birth control clinics throughout Arizona. That network is now known as Planned Parenthood of Arizona, part of the national Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Planned Parenthood today is closely associated with liberal/progressive Democrats, and is often vilified by conservatives because in addition to providing contraception the organization is the nation’s largest abortion provider.
But though the history has largely been forgotten, it was conservative Republicans such as Peggy Goldwater who largely were responsible for starting the birth control clinics that became Planned Parenthood.
That history has taken on new relevance in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June decision overturning Roe v. Wade, ending five decades of precedent guaranteeing abortion rights and opening the door for Republican-controlled states such as Arizona to ban or further restrict access to legal abortion. Some Republicans in Congress have also introduced legislation calling for a national abortion ban after 15 weeks.
