Margaret Sanger
Part 2
In 1904, Margaret Sanger’s quest for public education about—and the availability of— contraception began due to her sister’s unwanted pregnancy. Margaret’s sister left the newborn in a snowbank, and Margaret rescued her. Also, when Sanger was a nurse, she witnessed a woman’s death from a self-induced abortion. The origins of these and similar unfortunate events included the 1873 federal Comstock Act and various state laws that made it a felony to disseminate information about contraceptives on the grounds that they were “obscene and illicit.”
In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight-page monthly newsletter that promoted contraception so each woman could become “the absolute mistress of her own body.” One of Margaret’s goals was to provoke a legal challenge to the federal obscenity laws that banned distributing information about birth control. Indicted for violating obscenity laws via the postal system, Sanger escaped to England. In 1915, she returned to face charges. Fortunately, they were dismissed.
The year 1916 was a busy one for Margaret Sanger. Her first book, What Every Girl Should Know, was a compilation of sex-education articles that she wrote between 1911 and 1913 for the socialist magazine New York Call.Sanger’s writings and public appearances led to her receiving hundreds of thousands of letters from women desperately seeking knowledge of how to prevent pregnancy. (In 1928, Margaret incorporated 500 of those letters into her book Motherhood in Bondage.)
During a seventeen-city speaking tour in 1916, when Sanger and six supporters distributed her “Family Limitation” pamphlets, they were all arrested and found guilty of obscenity. Three months later, Margaret and her sister, Ethel, opened the first birth-control clinic in the U.S., in Brooklyn, New York. On the clinic’s ninth day, both were arrested and soon convicted. During their incarceration, Ethel went on a hunger strike and Margaret spent ninety days in jail. Even Margaret’s estranged first husband, William, supported her efforts—he distributed birth-control information, for which he too was jailed.
By 1921, the above arrests helped the campaign gain allies, from whom cash flowed to help found and maintain the American Birth Control League (renamed, in 1942, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America). One of its devoted donors was John D. Rockefeller.
By 1948, Sanger made family planning a worldwide quest, and in 1952 she organized the International Planned Parenthood Federation. It became the world’s largest nongovernmental international women’s health, family planning, and birth-control organization.
Margaret’s overseas learning began in 1915 when she noted that some European countries had liberal contraception policies. In Holland, she discovered the diaphragm and began to import them. In 1922, Sanger traveled to China, Korea, and Japan. Appalled that the Chinese resorted to female infanticide, she worked with Pearl Buck to establish a family planning clinic in Shanghai. In 1932, favorably impressed with the Japanese diaphragm, Sanger ordered one, which the U.S. government confiscated. Sanger legally challenged the confiscation, which in 1936 resulted in physicians being allowed to obtain contraceptives. In turn, the American Medical Association, in 1937, adopted contraception as a normal medical service and a key component of medical school curriculums.
In the early 1950s, Sanger worked to provide funding for a birth-control pill. The noted biologist Gregory Pincus stated that this would not have occurred without her. In 1965, a year before her death, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the states could no longer restrict the advertising and sale of contraceptives and their use by married couples. This was Margaret Sanger’s final blessing, for her every goal had been accomplished.
Margaret Sanger was highly respectful of African Americans. In 1939, W.E.B. Dubois, one of the founders of the NAACP, worked with her to start up the Negro Project, which was intended to bring contraception and education about birth control to the community. I’m delighted that Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, revered her. It saddens me to see Angela Davis and some other African Americans trample upon her memory.
Between 1953 and 1963, Sanger was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize thirty-one times. In 1957, the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year. In 1981, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and has been posthumously honored in many other ways throughout the U.S. and in other countries.
It’s appalling that Planned Parenthood insulted this great woman by changing the name of the street where their headquarters is located from Sanger Street to Bleeker Street. I wish they could appreciate the fact that, by giving her all, Sanger gave them and countless other women the freedom to determine whether and when they would become pregnant. Margaret Sanger was the mother of Planned Parenthood!