Margaret Sanger: The Birth Control Revolutionary
Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) was a nurse-turned-activist whose work fundamentally changed reproductive rights worldwide. Born in Corning, New York, she was the sixth of eleven children. Her mother died at age 49 after eighteen pregnancies—a death Sanger attributed to exhaustion from constant childbearing. This experience became the foundation of her life's work.
Sanger trained as a nurse and worked in New York's Lower East Side tenements from 1910 to 1912. There, she witnessed the devastating consequences of illegal abortions and unplanned pregnancies among immigrant women. One case particularly affected her: Sadie Sachs, a 28-year-old mother of three, died from a self-induced abortion after a doctor refused to provide contraception advice, telling her to "tell Jake to sleep on the roof."[1]
In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, a militant feminist publication that openly challenged the Comstock laws—federal obscenity statutes that criminalized even medical discussion of contraception. The magazine's masthead declared "No Gods, No Masters" and resulted in her indictment on nine counts of postal obscenity violations. She fled to England under the pseudonym "Bertha Watson."
On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened America's first birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. Staffed by Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne (a nurse), and translator Fania Mindell, the clinic offered contraceptive advice and fitted diaphragms smuggled from Europe—all in direct violation of New York's penal code. Within ten days, 464 women visited the clinic, many lining up before dawn for services priced at ten cents per consultation.
On October 26, an undercover policewoman triggered a raid that arrested Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell. Byrne's hunger strike in prison—and brutal force-feeding—drew national sympathy. Sanger refused leniency in exchange for promising future compliance, cementing her reputation as a martyr for women's rights. Though convicted and sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse, the legal battle established that birth control could be discussed as a public health issue rather than obscenity.
In November 1921, Sanger convened the First American Birth Control Conference at New York's Plaza Hotel. When police threatened to shut down a planned public meeting at Town Hall, Sanger was arrested for disorderly conduct, generating front-page headlines. She capitalized on this publicity to incorporate the American Birth Control League (ABCL) on April 5, 1922. By 1924, the League boasted 27,500 members and ten branches across multiple states.
Sanger's vision extended globally. Her 1922 tour of Japan, China, and Korea marked the beginning of three decades of international advocacy. She organized the 1927 World Population Conference in Geneva and founded the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in 1952 during the Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood in Bombay.
In 1950, Sanger approached philanthropist Katharine McCormick with a proposal to fund hormonal contraception research. Her connection of McCormick with biologist Gregory Pincus initiated the development of Enovid, which received FDA approval as the first oral contraceptive pill in 1960—a revolution Sanger hailed as the "most important invention since the printing press."
Sanger's embrace of eugenic philosophy represents her most controversial legacy. Influenced by early twentieth-century scientific racism, she advocated "negative eugenics"—encouraging fertility reduction among those deemed "unfit." Her 1939 "Negro Project" proposal included troubling language about targeting "dysgenic groups." However, defenders note her explicit condemnations of Nazi racial policies and collaborations with African American organizations. The infamous 1939 letter stating "we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" was actually a strategic warning against racist misinterpretations of birth control access.
Following World War II, Sanger gradually retreated from organizational leadership while remaining an influential advisor. She moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1943 due to declining health from coronary issues. She lived to witness the Supreme Court's 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalizing contraception for married couples, establishing the constitutional right to privacy in reproductive decisions—a ruling that explicitly cited her decades of advocacy.
Sanger died of congestive heart failure on September 6, 1966, at a Tucson nursing home. Her memorial service featured tributes from Martin Luther King Jr., who credited birth control with empowering marginalized communities.
"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," she declared, encapsulating the revolutionary conviction that drove her life's work.[2]
Footnotes
Margaret Sanger with colleagues at the American Birth Control League, demonstrating the collaborative nature of the early reproductive rights movement