“The poor, century-behind-the-times public officials of this country might as well forget their moss-grown statutes and accept birth control as an established fact. …. birth control propaganda if it were carried out in a safe and sane manner, cannot sympathize with nor countenance the methods I have followed in my attempt to arouse the working women to the fact that bringing a child into the world is the greatest responsibility.’’
– Margaret Sanger, October 22, 1916
Margaret Sanger wrote about one of most important problem of her time. Prohibition for women to plan how many children they want have. Indeed, until the second decade of the twentieth century, women had little choice but to bear as many children as they conceived. Victims of rape, incest victims, prostitutes, unmarried women who have sex, and even married women who didn’t want to have more children – all of them had no safe, easily accessible, or medical reliable ways to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Women who used contraception were considered as amoral. According to the 1900 census, Maternal mortality was 99% higher than it is today; 40% of those deaths were caused by infection, half of those from self-induced abortion. At that time birth control was illegal for two reasons. First, Catholic doctrine expressly forbade the use of contraception. Secondary, because of Anthony Comstock, who formed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and had declared birth prevention, and distribution of birth control as immoral and obscene. These laws ensured that the practice of “birth control”, would remain dangerously uninformed and largely unobtainable, especially for people with low income.
Exactly at this time, Margaret Sanger established the clinic in the United States that become an incubator for the birth control movement. Margaret Sanger was an American activist, sex teacher, nurse and writer whose idea that women should live full, healthy lives and satisfy their dreams has changed the world. In the United States, she popularized the term “birth control,” opened the first birth control clinic and created organizations that have become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. [2] She had a revolutionary idea that women should control their own body – and, therefore, their own destiny. Sanger grew up in an Irish family of 11 children in Corning, New York.[3] Her mother’s story, who lost her health from many pregnancies, including 7 miscarriages, inspired Sanger to travel to Europe and learn birth control. At this time, birth control education was illegal in the United States. On return home, she planned to open a birth control clinic modeled on the world’s first such clinic, which she had visited in Amsterdam. In 1916, during her speaking tour, Sanger promoted birth control clinics based on the Dutch model she had observed during her 1914 trip to Europe. Although she inspired many local communities to create birth control leagues, no clinics were established.[4] Sanger therefore resolved to create a birth control clinic in New York that would provide free contraceptive services to women.[4] New York state law prohibited the distribution of contraceptives or even contraceptive information, but Sanger hoped to exploit a provision in the law which permitted doctors to prescribe contraceptives for the prevention of disease.[4]
On October 16, 1916, she, partnering with Fania Mindell and Ethel Byrne, opened the Brownsville clinic in Brooklyn, staffed by only female. Sanger’s clinic was located in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn—a densely populated, impoverished area. Population who lived in Brownsville were primarily working-class immigrants, a socioeconomic group that, in Sanger’s eyes, was most in need of access to birth control.
To advertise the clinic’s services, Sanger produced trilingual leaflets written in English, Yiddish, and Italian, in which were told: “Mothers! Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them? Do not kill, do not take life, but Prevent. Safe, Harmless Information can be obtained of trained Nurses at 46 Amboy Street…”[ 4] Her efforts were successful. The clinic was an immediate success. The women lined up to receive birth control information and advice from Sanger, Byrne and Mindell. On its opening day, 140 women visited the clinic. For the nine days, while it remained open, the clinic had a total of 450 visitors, and many of the women seen offered testimonials
One mother shared:
“This is the kind of place we have been wanting all the time. I have had seven children, two are dead, and my husband is a sick man. Do you know how I got bread for them? By getting down on my knees and scrubbing floors for the baker; that’s what I did when we couldn’t pay the bill. Seven children…that’s enough for any woman.”
—New York Tribune, 20 October 1916
Despite excellent reviews, in nine days Sanger was arrested and clinic was shut down. During the arrest of Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell, the three women resisted, creating a scene to publicly expose their violation of the law. In the trials that followed, Sanger obtained the platform she had been seeking.
“I absolutely believe she was doing it as a statement to violate the law and get herself arrested,” said the activist’s grandson and former president of Planned Parenthood of New York City, Alexander Sanger.
“She knew to change the law she had to break it.”
Her subsequent trial and appeal caused controversy. Sanger believed that in order for women to have more equal rights in society and lead a healthier lifestyle, they need to be able to determine when to have children. She also wanted to prevent so-called abortions from behind, [6] which were common at the time, because abortions were illegal in the United States [6]. Mothers unwilling to face another pregnancy or unable to support another child, resorted to back alley abortions, relied on charlatans, or used ineffective and often dangerous home remedies. The consequences often were, tragic. Sanger and most of her colleagues mentioned the physical danger and moral undesirability of abortion in their efforts to educate the public about the reasonableness of preventing unwanted pregnancies rather than either terminating them or allowing women to bring unwanted children. According Sanger’s point of view, although abortion sometimes was justified, but it should usually be avoided. She tends to treat abortion, infanticide, and excessively large families as tragedies that can be prevented by using reliable, safe, and convenient contraception. Sanger was sure that contraception is the only practical way to avoid it.
January 2, 1923, four years after the New York Court of Appeals opened the doors for physicians to prescribe contraceptives, Sanger opened a second birth control clinic, named as the Clinical Research Bureau. [4] In order to avoid persecution by the police, the existence of the clinic was not published, until December 1923. [4]. Finally, the existence of the clinic was announced to the public. But this time there were without arrests or disputes. This convinced activists that after ten years of struggle, birth control finally became widespread, in the United States. The Clinical Research Bureau was the first legal birth control clinic in the United States that quickly became the world’s leading center for contraceptive research. Fifteen years later Clinical Research Bureau merged with American Birth Control League, also established by Sanger, that studied the global impact of population growth, disarmament, and famine. The resultant group was known as the Birth Control Federation of America. [7] Efforts from Sanger and other birth control proponents led to a 1936 court ruling that birth control devices and information would no longer be classified as obscene, and could be legally distributed in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. [4] Although it took another 30 years for these rights to spread to married couples throughout the whole of the country, it was tremendous step toward making birth control available to everyone. Notwithstanding Sanger still was president of Birth Control Federation of America., she no longer possessed the same power that she had in the early years of the movement. In1942, despite Sanger’s objections, conservative forces within the organization changed the name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America,[8].
In 1948, Planned Parenthood awarded a small grant that was provided for group of biologists Gregory Pincus, John Rock, and M.C. Chang in order to conduct research into a birth control pill. In 1956, in Puerto Rico was carried out the first human trial of the birth control pill Although testing conducted was done without informed Puerto Rican women and had harmful side effects, , this step was critical to the pill’s development As time went on, the pill was refined to become the safe and effective birth control method used by
millions of women today. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale of pills for contraception on May 9, 1960. Within 5 years, 1 out of every 4 married women in the U.S. under the age of 45 had used the pill.[2] The pills soon changed the lives of women and families in the United States and around the world. Finally, was found a simple, effective and reversible way to prevent pregnancy. But the pills were still not available throughout the country. In some states, all forms of contraception are prohibited until 1970, when Public Health Services Act was accepted, which established public funding for family planning and sex education programs in the United States. This meant that Planned Parenthood and other family planning organizations involved in reproductive health could provide birth control and sex education services to more people, especially with low income.
Today, birth control no longer an interdiction point at issue, hiding in the shadows, opposite, this theme is a part of the public conversation and widely accessible to women of different socioeconomic backgrounds. Tracing its roots back from the Brownsville clinic for 100 years, Planned Parenthood now serves 2.5 million patients in about 600 centers across the U.S. This the nation’s leading provider of high-quality, affordable health care for women, as well as it is largest center of sex education. “We’re the only national network of [women’s] health care services and it all started with Margaret Sanger’s clinic in Brooklyn, “said Joan Malin the current president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of New York City.
1916, Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell began a century-long process; their actions ignited a series of changes in how the public would regard contraceptives and how the law would increasingly allow for birth control services. One hundred years later, we have these three strong women to thank for the advancement of our country’s relationship with birth control services.
References:
- Margaret Sander “Hotel Brevoort Speech”, 17 Jan. 1916
- Attacks on Planned Parenthood are Treat to Woman’s Health. Scientific American, June 7, 2018
- Planned Parenthood, https://www.plannedorg
- Engelman, Peter “History of Birth Control Movement in America”
- Benjamin Hazel, “Lobbying for Birth Control” Public Opinion Quarterly, January 1, 1938
- Vicki Cox “Margaret Sanger” Infobase publishing, January 1, 2009
- NYU Margaret Sanger Paper Project “Birth Control Clinic of America”, October 12, 2011
- MS Papers: “Planned Parenthood”, October 14, 2011