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Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966) was an American nurse, outspoken birth control activist, and an important figure in the Women's Rights Movement. She repeatedly risked scandal and imprisonment by acting in defiance of the Comstock Law of 1873 which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices. Sanger died at the age of 87 in Tucson, Arizona only a few months after the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision, the apex of her 50 year struggle: the legalization of birth control in the U.S.
Sanger distributed the pamphlet "Family Limitation" to poor women. In 1920 she published "What Every Girl Should Know", which was later widely distributed as one of the Haldeman-Julius "Little Blue Books". It not only provided basic information about such topics as menstruation, but also acknowledged the reality of sexual feelings in adolescents.
She criticized the censorship of her reproductive literacy message by the civil and religious authorities, justified on moral grounds, as an effort by men to keep women in submission. She was particularly critical of the lack of awareness of the dangers of, and the scarcity of treatment opportunities for, venereal disease among women. She claimed that these social ills were the result of the male establishment's intentionally keeping women in ignorance.
She was forced to flee America in 1914 due to public outrage. Having returned to the country she founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and Planned Parenthood of America in 1942.
Sanger was an atheist and singled out the Christian church for its opposition to her message, blaming them for obscurantism and insensitivity to women's concerns. The fact that she founded Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider, has led some to condemn her as an abortion advocate, although abortion was illegal during Sanger's lifetime, and Planned Parenthood did not then support the procedure or lobby for its legalisation.
Sanger was an avowed socialist, blaming the evils of contemporary capitalism for the unsatisfactory conditions of the young working-class women. Her views on this issue are evident in the last pages of What Every Girl Should Know. She strongly believed in more assertive public health and eugenics measures. She deplored the contemporary absence of regulations requiring registration of people diagnosed with venereal diseases (which she contrasted with mandatory registration of those with some infectious diseases like measles). In a mix of socialist and eugenic thought, she blamed the influence of economic considerations on choice of spouses for causing suboptimal human breeding.
Her views in these areas were by no means unique. Socialism was in her lifetime one of the most influential political ideologies. It formed an ideological basis for the establishment of welfare states in Britain and in Scandinavian countries, particularly in Sweden, with many positive effects on public health. However, the policies that socialism inspired in Sweden also included forcible sterilization of individuals deemed unworthy of reproduction due to mental illness or an expected inability to raise children properly. Considered enlightened then, today such measures would be deemed egregious violations of human rights. Indeed, forced sterilization was heartily endorsed by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his 8-1 majority opinion in Buck v. Bell in 1927. In addition, Prescott Bush, the patriarch of the Bush family, was a well-known supporter of the eugenics movement and an open supporter of Planned Parenthood.
Ethical debates over reproduction and public policy continue today: some disagree over the merits of particular ethical or political theories, others over divergent measurements of the impact of health policy. The American "culture war" over sex education versus abstinence is an example.
Although her social views are no longer of popular interest, she is remembered by many as the founder of the birth control and abortion movement in the USA. She remains an iconic figure to the pro-choice movement, feminists and, more generally, liberals, and a profoundly distasteful one to those who espouse pro-life or generally conservative views. In recent years, Sanger has been criticized for advocating eugenics and for appearing at a Ku Klux Klan rally, both of which her critics associate with racism.
Quotes
- "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body."
- "Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression."
- "Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers -- and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it."
- "The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through religious appeal. We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro Population and the Minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Margaret Sanger commenting on the 'Negro Project' in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, December 19, 1939.
- "Whereas the great majority of mothers realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth. Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant." Maragert Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization
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