Margaret Higgins Sanger
- Born
- 14 September 1879
- Died
- 6 September 1966 (age 86)
Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator and nurse. She popularised the term birth control and she opened the first birth control clinic in America. She also established the organisation which evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger was born on the 14th September 1879 in Corning, New York. In 1900, she studied nursing at White Plains Hospital. Ten years later, she moved to Greenwich Village in New York City with her husband and three children. This area was known for its radical politics and Sanger joined the Liberal Club and the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party.
In 1912, she started a campaign to educate women about sex, and wrote a newspaper column called ‘What Every Girl Should Know’. She worked as a nurse on the Lower East Side where she met women who had undergone unsafe illegal abortions or who had tried to terminate their pregnancies themselves. At this point it was illegal for women to get contraception but Sanger had a vision of creating a ‘magic pill’ which could be taken in order to control pregnancy.
In 1914, she produced a monthly magazine that promoted women’s right to birth control. It was illegal to distribute information concerning contraception through the post and Sanger had to flee the country in order to avoid a five-year jail sentence. She went to England where she researched different forms of birth control, including diaphragms, which she later smuggled back to the United States.
In 1916, Sanger returned to New York and opened the first birth control clinic in America. She and her staff were arrested during a raid of the clinic nine days after it opened, charged with providing information on contraception and fitting women for birth control devices. Sanger spent 30 days in jail. She appealed her conviction and made history when the court modified the law so that doctors could prescribe contraception to female patients for medical reasons.
Sanger created the American Birth Control League in 1921, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She served as its president until 1928.
The first legal birth control clinic was opened in 1923, the Birth Control Clinic research Bureau.
Sanger founded the National Committee on Federal Legalisation for Birth Control in 1929, which aimed to make it legal for doctors to freely distribute birth control. In 1939, the US Court of Appeals allowed for birth control devices and related materials to be imported into the country. This was a big step in the journey towards readily available birth control.
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
Sanger retired and moved to Tucson in Arizona, however her retirement didn’t last long, as she turned her attention to birth control issues over the pond in Europe and Asia. In 1952, she helped to establish the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Sanger still strived towards her idea of a ‘magic pill’ to control pregnancy and recruited a human reproduction expert, Gregory Pincus, to work on the problem in the early 1950s, with the financial support from Katharine McCormick, the International Harvester heiress. Their research produced the first oral contraceptive, Enovid, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.
In 1965, the Supreme Court made birth control legal for married couples.