Margaret Sanger

On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger unlocked the door of a rented storefront at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.¹ She had advertised in English, Yiddish, and Italian.¹ By morning, the line of Jewish and Italian immigrant women stretched almost around the block.¹ For ten cents, each woman received a pamphlet and a short lecture on contraception.² Nine days later, an undercover policewoman walked in.³ On the tenth day, police raided the clinic, arrested Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, and their interpreter Fania Mindell, and charged them with distributing information on contraception in violation of New York state law.¹ Sanger refused to get in the police car. She walked herself to jail.⁴

Sanger had moved back to New York City in 1912 after a fire destroyed the family home in Hastings-on-Hudson, and took work as a visiting nurse in the tenements of the Lower East Side⁵. The women she saw there — immigrant mothers worn down by repeated pregnancies, miscarriages, and what she described as desperate five-dollar back-alley abortions⁶ — were, in her telling, everywhere. She could not help them legally. The Comstock Act, passed in 1873, classified contraceptive information as obscene and barred it from the U.S. mail.⁷ In 1913, she searched public libraries for anything that might instruct women on how to avoid conception. She found nothing.³

She recounted, in speeches for the rest of her life, a woman she called Sadie Sachs: a patient Sanger had nursed back to health after a self-induced abortion, who begged the attending doctor for information on how to prevent another pregnancy. The doctor told her to have her husband sleep on the roof.³ A few months later, Sanger was called back to Sachs's apartment. Sachs had attempted another abortion and was dead.³ Sanger would later say that she threw her nursing bag in the corner and resolved she would not take another case until she had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth.³

The Brownsville clinic was not an accident. Sanger knew it would be raided — she had deliberately broken a state law that classified contraception as obscene — and she had prepared for the arrest to be a press event. When her sister Ethel Byrne was convicted first and sentenced to thirty days in a workhouse, Byrne went on a hunger strike and became the first American woman prisoner subjected to forced feeding.¹ Sanger made certain the story shared the front page of the New York Times with news from World War I.¹ At her own trial, Sanger packed the courtroom with the women who had visited the clinic; mothers arrived carrying babies. The court upheld her conviction but issued a ruling that would reshape the landscape: physicians could now prescribe contraceptives to women for medical purposes.¹ That loophole was the lever Sanger needed. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League.⁸ In 1923 she opened the first doctor-staffed birth control clinic in the United States, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in Manhattan, which by the 1930s was serving over 10,000 patients per year.³

That institutional success was shadowed by views Sanger held through the central decades of her career. She was an active eugenicist who, in speeches and publications from the early 1920s through the 1930s, advocated for the compulsory institutionalization of people she classified as mentally or physically unfit and endorsed involuntary sterilization in at least limited circumstances — positions consistent with the mainstream progressive eugenics movement of her era. Historians disagree on whether those commitments were sincere beliefs or tactical positioning to build legitimacy for the birth control cause. In 2021, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed Sanger's name from its Manhattan clinic on those grounds.

By the early 1950s, Sanger was in her seventies, had spent forty years promoting the diaphragm, and believed it was still the least popular birth control method in America — expensive, awkward, and avoided by most women. Neither pharmaceutical companies nor the federal government wanted to fund contraceptive research. On June 8, 1953, Sanger took her friend and ally, philanthropist Katharine McCormick, to a small lab on the outskirts of Worcester, Massachusetts, to meet a biologist named Gregory Pincus⁹, who had been working largely outside the academic mainstream after losing his position at Harvard¹⁰. At the end of their first meeting, McCormick wrote Pincus a check for $40,000.⁹ McCormick would eventually invest approximately $3 million in the research.¹¹ Pincus later said that Sanger's role was essential in the development of the pill.³ The FDA approved Enovid, the first oral contraceptive, in 1960.⁶ Sanger was eighty years old.

Margaret Sanger died in 1966⁵, fourteen months after the Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down state laws prohibiting birth control for married couples.³ The organization she built now operates nearly 600 health centers across the United States.¹³