Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) is a controversial figure to
many as one of the founders of what would become Planned Parenthood. She is
often associated with abortion and negative eugenics because of her role in the
birth control movement. Much of this is conflation of her position on these
topics, yet she remains a problematic figure in the women’s movement. With the
current attacks on the federal funding for Planned Parenthood, it’s time that
we pull back the curtain and begin to really delve into the story of Margaret
Sanger. Perhaps this will allow us to better understand why she is so important
to understanding the mission of Planned Parenthood.
I first become aware of Sanger while in my undergrad when
her autobiography was assigned reading in and interdisciplinary course: Private
Lives in Public Forms. Margaret Higgins Sanger was the daughter of Irish
Catholic immigrants. Her father, Michael Hennessy Higgins, was a Catholic, though
he would later become an atheist, activist in the women’s suffrage movement, and
proponent of free public education. While he studied medicine and phrenology, he
would ultimately earn his living as stonecutter. Her mother, Anne, died at an
early age (49) after 18 pregnancies in 22 years. Only 11 of these pregnancies
would result in live birth. It was Margaret’s belief that her mother’s death
was a result of the numerous pregnancies she endured.
Sanger would see this situation continually play out as a nurse
working with working-class immigrant women. These women were often suffering the
results of frequent pregnancies, miscarriages, and self-induced abortions
simply because there was not adequate access to information regarding
contraception. Access to information of this kind was prohibited under
obscenity laws such as the 1873 federal Comstock law.
The story that Sanger would often relate in her speeches
about the necessity of access to contraceptives was that of Sadie Sachs. This
perhaps fictional account of an encounter or conglomeration of multiple
encounters with a variety of women would become the bedrock of her campaign to
provide women with accurate and adequate access to means by which to prevent
pregnancy. Sadie Sachs was a 28 year old mother of three, a Russian Jewish
immigrant, whose husband, Jake, came home to find her three children crying and
Sadie unconscious from the effects of a self-induced abortion. After three weeks
of treatment for septicemia, Sadie would recover. When she asked about what she
could do to prevent future pregnancies, the doctor jokingly remarked that she
should ask her husband to sleep on the roof as there was nothing to be done to
prevent pregnancy but abstinence. The doctor likened her request to “wanting
her cake and eating it too.” Sanger would relate that she was again called to
the Sachs’ home three months later under similar circumstances of a comatose Sadie
who would die within 10 minutes of Margaret’s arrival. It was this moment that
Sanger said motivated her to no longer simply keep people alive in these
circumstances but instead to solve the root cause: lack of adequate access to effective
contraceptive methods.
Thus began Sanger’s crusade for access to contraceptives.
One of the common misconceptions is that Sanger advocated for women getting
abortions. Margaret was opposed to abortions as a societal ill and public
health danger. She believed that the practice would disappear if women were
given adequate access to other methods of avoiding unwanted pregnancies to
begin with, something that supporters of Planned Parenthood continue to argue
today. The access to contraceptives was also, in her view, a form of
working-class empowerment as well as female liberation. The liberation of women
from the fear of unwanted pregnancies would lead to fundamental social change regarding
gender equality.
Sanger would begin publishing columns and pamphlets
regarding sex education in 1911. While some objected to her frank and open
discussion of sex, many praised her candor in addressing the subject. This
would lead to her monthly newsletter in 1914, aptly titled The Woman Rebel, for which she would be charged with violating the
Comstock law regarding obscenity as this was distributed through the postal
service. She would later be arrested along with her sister, Ethel Byrne, for
distributing contraceptives in 1916 after opening a family planning and birth
control clinic in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. She was convicted
of illegal distribution of contraceptive and running a public nuisance. Her
trial judge held that “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that
there will be no resulting conception” was one not granted to women. Sanger was
defiant when the judge offered her leniency stating that she was unable to obey
the law as it existed. For this, she was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.
There is often a charge that Margaret Sanger was a notorious
racist. Much of this stems from a misunderstanding of her position and
misinterpretation of her work with the African-American community. In 1929, at
the behest of prominent African American leaders including James H Hubert,
leader of the New York Urban League, Margaret opened a birth control clinic in
Harlem. This clinic would receive the endorsement of W.E.B. Dubois due to
Sanger’s refusal to allow bigotry by her staff either in their treatment of
patients, hiring processes, or collaboration on interracial projects. This
would lead to her involvement with the Negro Project, an effort to deliver
birth control to poor African American people. As part of this project, she believed
that they should hire black ministers to try and help alleviate the notion that
the distribution of birth control was meant to eliminate the African-American
population. Her work with this community was even praised by Martin Luther King
Jr.
Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Sanger’s
legacy is her involvement with eugenics. In America, this practice of limiting
procreation of the unfit often took on racist overtones. She soundly rejected
that birth limitation should be determined by racial and ethnic factors.
Instead, she believed that this distinction should be made based on economic
factors and the ability to adequately care for the children. In personal
letters, Sanger expressed anger and sadness over the aggressive and lethal Nazi
eugenics program, even donating to the American Council Against Nazi
Propaganda.
However, while not racist, she did support the unethical and
morally reprehensible practice of sterilization for the profoundly retarded.
This certainly darkens her legacy in the advancement of women’s productive rights.
This does make her a problematic figure despite all of the positive
contributions she made to the cause of the American women’s rights movement.
For further reading:
The Autobiography of
Margaret Sanger
Woman and the New Race
by Margaret Sanger
The Pivot of
Civilization by Margaret Sanger
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