Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States, coined the term birth control, and founded the organisation that became Planned Parenthood. She was the sixth of eleven children of an Irish stonecutter in Corning, New York, and attributed her mother's death at fifty to eighteen pregnancies. Working as a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side she treated women after self-induced abortions, and her account of one of them, Sadie Sachs, became the founding story she told for the rest of her life. The Comstock Act classed contraceptive information as obscene matter, so her 1914 newspaper The Woman Rebel brought an indictment and she fled to England, where she met Havelock Ellis and Marie Stopes. The Brownsville clinic she opened in Brooklyn in 1916 was raided after nine days and she was jailed; the appeal produced a ruling that doctors could prescribe contraception for medical reasons, which was the opening the movement used for decades. She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and campaigned for the repeal of the federal restrictions, largely achieved by court rulings in the 1930s. In the 1950s she persuaded Katharine McCormick to fund Gregory Pincus's research, which produced the oral contraceptive pill approved in 1960, six years before her death. Her reputation is inseparable from her use of eugenic arguments, common on the American left and right of her time, and from a 1926 address to a Ku Klux Klan women's group in New Jersey that she described in her autobiography. She opposed abortion, arguing that contraception made it unnecessary, and the organisation she founded now provides it. Planned Parenthood removed her name from its Manhattan clinic in 2020.

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