We pride ourselves on moving forward. As a television pitchman, Ronald Reagan’s tag line was “Progress is our most important product.” A twentieth-century cigarette campaign told women “You’ve come a long way baby.” Well, now America is moving backwards. We are returning whence we came and bumping into heroes of those earlier fights along the way.
Margaret Louise Higgins was born in Corning, New York, in 1879. She watched as her mother carried 11 children and miscarried more than once. Margaret believed so many pregnancies and births weakened and eventually killed her mother. Anne Purcell Higgins died at the age of 40. Her husband lived into his eighties.
Margaret Higgins had a dream—a childish idea—about a magic pill that would prevent women from becoming pregnant until they wished to be pregnant. It grew into an adult commitment and Margaret Higgins Sanger lived to see her childhood dream realized. Sanger died in 1966 at the age of 86. The birth control pill was approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) in 1960 and legalized nationwide in 1965. Sanger did not live to witness abortion legalized nor to witness the long slog to undo all her work. Yet here we are—moving backwards toward that day when women will be less well-informed and less able to control their own bodies.
In 1912, when Sanger, a nurse, wrote her first pamphlet, “What Every Girl Should Know,” an anatomical guide, contraception was illegal. It was 1914 when Sanger coined the phrase birth control.
In 1916, Sanger opened the country’s first family planning clinic. It cost 10 cents, and for a dime, any woman who wanted it could get information from a trained nurse—information impossible to find anywhere else: a medically accurate explanation of how the reproductive system works, and instructions on how to use contraceptives.
It was all illegal—the clinic, the pamphlets, the dispensing of such information. Rather than back down in fear of legal reprisals, in 1917, Sanger wrote another informational pamphlet, “Family Limitation.” In it, she wrote much more directly, “it seems…sordid to insert…a suppository in anticipation of the sexual act (a diaphragm), but it is far more sordid to find yourself…burdened down with half a dozen unwanted children, helpless, starved, shoddily clothed…”
Under the Comstock Act of 1873, all Sanger did and wrote fell under the definition of pornography. Really. It was doubly illegal if you mailed the information. The Comstock Act of 1873 made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious, immoral, or indecent” publications through the mail. The law also made it a misdemeanor for anyone to sell, give away, or possess an obscene book, pamphlet, picture, drawing, or advertisement. The breadth of the legislation included writings or instruments pertaining to contraception and abortion, even if written by a physician. So when was this over-reaching law repealed? Never. It is still on the books. It was never again enforced after the 1965 legalization of contraception, but remember, it could be.
Anthony Comstock,, born down the road in New Canaan, Connecticut, was the US Postal Inspector and the self-styled suppressor of vice. From 1910 onward, Sanger challenged Comstock, bringing birth control information to women, in every way she could think of. Far from hiding her efforts, Sanger shouted them, “Mothers! Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them?” It listed the clinic’s address along with the exhortation, “Tell your friends and neighbors.” Worse she mailed birth control devises.
She was arrested for her activities at the clinic. She was offered a plea deal: stop it and walk free. She declined and served her thirty days. The clinic was eventually closed, but not through the law. The prominent men of New York went to the landlord and convinced him to evict her.
Sanger was far from done—so many laws to break so little time. Far more seriously, so many women were dying in childbirth and from botched abortions. So it would not be the last time she was arrested—there was so much to arrest her for. Sanger was indicted in 1915 for sending diaphragms through the mail, arrested in 1916 for opening the first birth control clinic in the country; Sanger would not be dissuaded. In 1921 the only “approved” birth control was in the hands of men—Chares Goodyears’ rubber condom. That year, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, the forerunner of Planned Parenthood.
In 1951 Sanger found herself in the American mainstream. Sanger hadn’t changed, America had. In 1951, she met Gregory Pincus, a medical expert in human reproduction, willing to attempt to develop Sanger’s magic pill. It must be absolutely effective against pregnancy and at the same time as cheap and as easy to administer as an aspirin. Katherine McCormick, the International Harvester heiress, underwrote the project. The pill was brought to the masses just as that sad little girl, who watched her mother wither and die, dreamed.
