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Margaret Sanger (1879 - 1966)

Margaret Sanger was born into a world in which doctors were not allowed to give their patients information about birth control. The result for many women was frequent childbirth, miscarriage and illegal abortions. As the one of 11 children born into a poor family, Sanger experienced first hand the toll that too many pregnancies took on women. Her mother died of tuberculosis at a young age under circumstances Sanger believed resulted from the physical toll of bearing so many pregnancies.

Later, married and the mother of three, Sanger began delivering babies as a maternity nurse on the Lower East Side of New York in 1910. At that time it was almost impossible for Sanger's patients to learn how to prevent pregnancy. The federal Comstock law (passed in the 1873) and "little Comstock" state laws banned contraception and abortion as forms of "obscenity." Comstock laws drove information and effective supplies underground. Although wealthy women could still purchase what they needed from Europe, poor women who resorted to illegal abortions often did not survive.

Sanger's interest in sex education and safe contraceptive methods led her to Europe to learn how women there prevented pregnancy. Once back in New York, she wrote about these lifesaving measures in simple, non-clinical language. Her first tangle with censors came about because of a column she wrote on venereal disease. Undeterred, in 1914 she published articles advocating the use of contraception and was indicted by the federal government on nine separate violations of the Comstock law. With that, Sanger fled to Europe.

By the time she returned to the U.S. to face trial in 1915, the birth control cause was gaining popular support. The government eventually dropped the indictment, and Sanger traveled across the U.S. to promote reproductive choice.

The following year Sanger opened the first American birth control clinic, was arrested and jailed for 30 days. Continuing her work over several decades, and traveling to many states to teach others, she was shut out of pubic halls, arrested, and jailed. In New York her clinic offices were vandalized, supplies confiscated and records destroyed. She faced opposition from government, the Catholic Church and many physicians, yet she continued to lobby for birth control legislation.

But it was in the courts where change finally came. The case began in 1933 with the seizure of a shipment of pessaries (diaphragms) that Sanger had ordered from a Japanese physician. Three years later the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries that physicians were exempt from the Comstock law's ban on importing birth control materials. In effect, the ruling gave doctors the right to import, prescribe and distribute contraceptives.

In 1942 Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. was formed from the American Birth Control League, which Sanger had founded 21 years earlier.

When Margaret Sanger opened her first clinic in 1916, the infant mortality rate in New York City was 88.2 per thousand births. By the time of Sanger's death in 1966, the rate was 24.9. By 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, the rate was down to 19.9. Today, it is 7.8.

SOURCES:

A Tradition of Choice: Planned Parenthood at 75; copyright 1991, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc.

Katz, Esther, Margaret Sanger Papers Project

Sanger, Alexander C., Remarks, 2nd Annual "Planned Parenthood Votes! Washington" Awards Luncheon, 1998.