Marty Wiseman, a retired Mississippi State University professor of government and longtime friend of Blackburn’s, said that as undergraduates they often had “spirited but friendly debates” over cups of coffee and she would always take the conservative side while Wiseman leaned liberal. “I wouldn’t call AWS a feminist organization, but many chapters focused on issues that directly affected women, like the availability of birth control.” “Zero population growth was a huge issue in the early 1970s, and many AWS chapters were focused on this,” said Sartorius. The MSU chapter of AWS was not the only one focused on limiting world population growth, said historian Kelly Sartorius, an expert on women’s university education. “Marsha was the president, I think, so she would have been involved in making that decision.”
“I can tell you that the club officers decided which causes to take on and one of them was zero population growth,” Portis said. Sarah Portis, who was the adviser to AWS when Blackburn was chapter president and later taught at Auburn University of Montgomery, told NBC News she remembers there were discussions about ZPG. From the start, the organization, now called Population Connection, has advocated for birth control and abortion rights. Zero Population Growth, or ZPG, is an organization co-founded in 1968 by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, the author of the best-selling book “The Population Bomb,” which promoted both contraceptive use and abortion as a means of preventing over-population. In response to questions about Blackburn’s stances on abortion and birth control when she was an undergraduate student and for more insight into her tenure as AWS president, one of her aide’s replied in an email, “Senator Blackburn has always been a freedom-loving conservative and fought to protect the unborn.”
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