In researching the book Coat Hangers and Knitting Needles, two of the most depressing things were the fight to keep birth control away from women. The second was the individual women's stories. Even when I was engaged my doctor told me to come back for a diaphragm after I was married.
Fertility Fights
What frustrated Sanger was how many women she met had tried self-induced abortions. Most had been told when they asked their doctors how to prevent pregnancy—abstinence.
When Margaret Sanger became active in fighting for women to have access to birth control, she was often ignored. The message that too many children could destroy a family because of inadequate resources took years to reach lawmaker’s ears.
Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879-1966) made the term “birth control” popular. Much of her early adult life was spent crusading for women to have access to birth control. To do it, she had to break the law.
Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins in Corning, New York. Her father, Michael H. Higgins, was an Irish immigrant who left the Catholic church. Although he wanted to be a doctor, he ended up working as a stonemason.
Her mother, Anne, emigrated from Ireland during the potato famine. The couple had 11 children and seven unsuccessful births. Anne died at 49.
How being a child from such a large family shaped Sanger’s attitudes about birth control is conjecture.
Her older sisters helped Sanger go to Claverack College and Hudson River Institute. She started nurses training at White Plains Hospital.
She married William Sanger in 1902. They had three children.
After a fire destroyed the Sanger couple’s home in Hastings-on Hudson, the family moved to New York City.
The marriage ended in 1921. Although she remarried, she continued her work under the Sanger name.
Not Preventing Pregnancy Led to Abortions
Sanger worked in the slums as a visiting nurse. Her husband was an architect. Both were social activists. What frustrated Sanger was how many women she met had tried self-induced abortions. Most had been told when they asked their doctors how to prevent pregnancy—abstinence.
The advice was unrealistic and unsatisfactory.
Sanger considered women controlling their own fertility mandatory. Her method of activism to promote her belief that contraception and empowerment were linked was through the written word.
She created pamphlets, which could not legally be distributed through the mail because of the Comstock Laws. Instead she used family-planning and birth control clinics such as Harlem Birth Control, which she founded, boosting distribution to several hundred thousand copies.
The clinic had all-female doctors and a 100% African-American advisory council. Later, African-Americans were added to the staff.
She created a monthly newsletter, The Woman Rebel. Its slogan was “No Gods, No Masters,” borrowed from the Industrial Workers of the World who used it in the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike. Sanger’s pamphlets with detailed descriptions of contraception methods challenged the Comstock Laws.
The Postal Service suppressed seven of 11 issues of her newsletter. Sanger was arrested. She escaped to the U.K. in 1914. While there, she came under the influence of Havelock Ellis, who believed sex should be safe and pleasurable for women.
Sanger wrote two articles for New York Call that would produce some outrage for their frankness:
- “What Every Mother Should Know”
- “What Every Girl Should Know”
- They were published in book format in 1916. A1917 edition also had information on:
- Cervical caps
- Diaphragms
- Douches
Her book, Family Limitation, caused her to be prosecuted again under the Comstock Laws. It is still available in a 2017 edition. On Amazon, many of the reader reviews show a lack of understanding of the danger that this advice, the best available at the time, brought her.
It is hard to believe today that something like distributing birth control information would lead to 30 days in a workhouse and include force-feeding. That happened to Sanger’s sister and fellow birth-control advocate Ethel Byrne. Even more disturbing, at Sanger’s trial the judge said that women did not have the right to “to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.”
Sanger would be arrested eight times.
She refused to promise she would not break the law again. A victory of sorts happened when Judge Frederick E. Crane ruled in the New York Court of Appeals that doctors could provide contraception information. The catch was that they should only prescribe birth control for reasons of health.
In 1917 Sanger began publishing the Birth Control Review, which was designed to promote support to the medical and legislative communities as well as the middle and upper classes. It encouraged readers to join the American Birth Control League (she founded ABCL in 1921), which later became Planned Parenthood. Publication stopped in 1929. The themes were:
- Children should be conceived in love
- Children should be born of their mother’s conscious desire
- Children should be created only under conditions which make possible the heritage of health
Sanger had the financial support of John D. Rockefeller Jr. for her ABCL.
Her work was not limited to the U.S. She discovered that the method of family planning in Asia was infanticide, most often of a female baby. She worked with writer and 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature winner and fighter for women’s rights Pearl Buck to open a family planning clinic in Shanghai.
Sanger had internal political problems with one group. Recently, her belief in eugenics sparked criticism that surfaced again in the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign for U.S. president.
Sanger divided society into three groups:
- The educated and informed, who limited family size
- The intelligent and responsible, who wanted to control family size despite lacking some of the resources
- Irresponsible and reckless people with “religious scruples” She felt that the third group should be stopped from reproducing.
Her National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, a lobbying group to overturn restrictions on contraception, began in 1929.
Frustrated by lack of results, she ordered a diaphragm in 1931 by mail, which was confiscated.
Finally, in 1936, a court decision overturned part of the Comstock Laws. Doctors could order contraception products.
A greater victory came in 1937. The American Medical Association decided contraception was a medical service and was added to the curriculum of many medical schools.
She was nominated for but did not win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sanger died at age 86 from congestive heart failure, but she lived to see the Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision legalizing birth control for married women.
Today birth control in many forms is considered normal. Many people today cannot imagine that not only was birth control once considered immoral it could result in prison much as abortion today in some places.
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