Margaret Sanger and the American Birth Control Movement

Introduction

Founder of the American birth control movement, Margaret Sanger is one of the most influential and respected women in American history. Her crusade for birth control and family planning — conducted at a time when she faced strong social, political, and religious opposition — created both change and controversy within American society. In addition to ensuring the universal availability of birth control and family planning education, her projects and research led to the creation of organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Planned Parenthood.

Early Life and Nursing Career

Born Margaret Louise Higgins on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, Margaret Sanger was the sixth of her parents' eleven children. Although her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, died from tuberculosis at the age of fifty, Margaret's belief that frequent pregnancies lay at the root of her mother's premature death was to exert an enormous influence on her life and work. Aided by her older sisters, Margaret attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute in 1896, then entered the nursing program at White Plains Hospital in 1900. In 1902 she met and married architect William Sanger, with whom she had three children, and the family settled in Hastings, a Westchester County suburb of New York City.

While nursing on New York's Lower East Side, Sanger witnessed the needless suffering of many poor women who were subjected to the pain of frequent childbirth, miscarriage, and abortion. This inspired her lifelong campaign for revision of archaic legislation that prohibited the publication of facts about contraception and birth control. In her own words: "I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky."

Advocacy, Legal Battles, and the First Birth Control Clinic

Although the death of her mother was a major influence on her life and subsequent work, it was her father, Michael Higgins, who instilled in her the strength to question everything and to stand up for what she believed. Early in her career, as she practiced nursing among the impoverished families of New York's Lower East Side, Sanger became aware of the interrelationships between overpopulation, high infant and maternal mortality rates, and poverty. These were problems she could neither accept nor ignore, so she set out to inform and educate women on the issues of contraception.

At that time, contraceptive information was so suppressed — in particular by the Catholic Church — that it was a criminal offense to send it through the mail. Condoms were available to the wealthy, yet society's perverse sense of justice declared that their only legal use was for protection from venereal disease during sex with prostitutes. Sanger sought the advice and support of doctors, but no one she approached wished to be associated with the stigma attached to birth control. Therefore, in 1912, she began writing a column on sex education for the New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." Censors deemed her column on venereal disease to be obscene and suppressed it, and many people, including members of the general public, considered her a criminal.

Undeterred, Sanger continued her campaign and, in March 1914, published the first issue of The Woman Rebel, a radical feminist monthly that advocated militant feminism, including the right to practice birth control. Three issues of The Woman Rebel were banned for advocating contraception, and in August 1914 she was indicted on nine counts of violating postal obscenity laws. After fleeing to Europe to escape imprisonment, she returned to New York in October 1915 to face the charges. When her only daughter, five-year-old Peggy, died suddenly in November, sympathetic publicity convinced the government to drop the charges against her.

After completing a national tour to promote the ideas of birth control, Sanger opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on October 15, 1916. However, after only nine days of operation, the clinic was raided, her staff and she were arrested, and she was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in prison. Although her subsequent appeal against this conviction failed, the New York State appellate court issued a ruling that exempted doctors from the law prohibiting the dissemination of contraceptive information to women, if prescribed for medical reasons. This loophole allowed her the opportunity to open a legal birth control clinic, and in 1923 the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau opened, staffed by female doctors and social workers. It served as a model for the establishment of numerous other clinics and became an important center for collating clinical data on the use and effectiveness of contraceptives.

Conclusion

American history is strewn with male leaders, innovators, and heroes. Margaret Sanger, therefore, stands out as one of America's most significant figures, not only because of her gender, but also for her tireless campaign for a cause viewed as a "women's issue" — birth control. Her significance in American history may be judged, by some, by the manner in which her work brought about a change in the way that religion viewed and dealt with the issue of birth control. For others, however, her lasting importance lies in the fact that her determination and humanity challenged the traditional way of thought and introduced concepts that shifted the course of American society.