Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger
Born September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, Margaret Sanger and her 10 siblings were a Roman Catholic Irish family. Her father was a stonemason, and her mother stayed at home. However, her father was not a very hard-working man, preferring to take part in leisure rather than work. Her mother, although she delivered 11 children, had many miscarriages. Sanger believed this contributed to her mother's early death, and this gave her the passion to study birth control.
She believed women should consciously be able to decide when they would be a mother. With her thought,
"Every child should be a wanted child,"
she began to educate young women about pregnancy and persuaded them to promote birth control. Sanger wished to develop a pill that would prevent a woman from getting pregnant.
Through this passion she published a magazine called "The Woman Rebel," (first edition below) which almost landed her in jail. It was illegal to send birth control information through the mail, and due to the fear of her five-year sentence, she went to England. In one of the issues of the eight-page magazine, she said,"
"The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."
She believed women should consciously be able to decide when they would be a mother. With her thought,
"Every child should be a wanted child,"
she began to educate young women about pregnancy and persuaded them to promote birth control. Sanger wished to develop a pill that would prevent a woman from getting pregnant.
Through this passion she published a magazine called "The Woman Rebel," (first edition below) which almost landed her in jail. It was illegal to send birth control information through the mail, and due to the fear of her five-year sentence, she went to England. In one of the issues of the eight-page magazine, she said,"
"The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."
Sanger came back to the USA in 1915 because her charges were dropped. She continued to push for a woman's right to birth control. She opened a birth control clinic called the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau a year later and started fitting women for diaphragms. Nine days after the clinic opened, she and her staff were sent to jail for 30 days for providing information about birth control to women.
She later established the American Birth Control League in 1921, which was later replaced by Planned Parenthood. This was just another way of her fighting for a woman's right to choose. Sanger lived to see the first birth control pill, Enovid, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1960. Her husband provided much of the funding required for this project. In 1965, the government granted married couples the right to use birth control. Sanger died on September 6, 1966, in Tucson, Arizona, but in her lifetime she fought and gained the woman's right to birth control. |