Born Margaret Higgins, Margaret
Sanger was a feminist and an advocate of the usage of birth controls. She was
from a poor working class family and the 6th of 11 children. Her
mother died at the age of 40 and believed that the pregnancies and miscarriages
affected her health and were the causes of her death.
Margaret attended Claverack College
and Hudson River Institute in 1896 and took up nursing in White Plains Hospital
in 1900. Two years after, she got married to William Sanger and had 3 children.
In 1910, she moved to Greenwich
Village in Manhattan and started a publication promoting women’s right to birth
control. She started her campaign about sex in 1912 by writing a newspaper
column entitled What Every Girl Should
Know .Because of Obscenity Laws, she was forced to flee to England and
worked in the women’s movement until 1915. While she’s there, she found out
about other forms of birth control and smuggled it back to the United States. A year after she got back, she opened the
first family planning clinic in Brooklyn, Birth Control Clinical Research
Bureau, which promotes birth control. (http://www.biography.com
n.d.)
Margaret
Sanger became controversial not only because she promotes the use of birth
control pills but also because of several things she wrote. Sanger espoused the
thinking of eugenicists -- similar to Darwin's "survival of the
fittest" -- but related the concept to human society, saying the genetic
makeup of the poor, and minorities, for example, was inferior. (Sanger 1922)
She also wrote that the purpose of birth control was "to
create a race of thoroughbreds," (Sanger 1921).
Although
she promotes the use of the pill, she
does not promote abortion. Margaret
Sanger actually stated that:
“Birth control does not mean abortion.” Here are her exact words:
“The real alternative to birth control is abortion,”
wrote Dean Inge, [Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London]. It is an alternative
that I cannot too strongly condemn. Although abortion may be resorted to in
order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation
of offspring isdangerous and vicious. [Emphasis added] I bring up the
subject here only because some ill-informed persons have the notion that when
we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not.
Abortion destroys the already fertilized ovum or the embryo; contraception, as
I have carefully explained, prevents the fertilizing of the ovum by keeping the
male cells away. Thus it prevents the beginning of life. [Source: Margaret
Sanger, "Birth Control Advances: A Reply to the Pope," 1931,
Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College MSM S71-243.]
(Marlin 2011)
Her opinion on promoting birth
controls also arose because of her own observation on working women. In 1913, she began publishing a magazine called the Woman Rebel which was
entirely dedicated to the interests of working women and boasted “No Gods, No
Masters.” She soon discovered that one of the greatest problems for working
women was their own unchecked fertility.
No matter what kind of monetary raises they might win from their bosses,
it was rarely enough to keep up with an ever-expanding brood of children. (Gross n.d.)
Regardless of the controversy,
Margaret Sanger is a true hero of the reproductive rights movement. She fought
against censorship her entire career and sacrificed her freedom and safety to
provide contraceptive information and services to all women. (Tiffany 2010)
In an interview with Mike Wallace in
1957, Margaret Sanger talked about why she became an advocate of or birth
control, over-population, the Catholic Church, and morality. According to her, she was “a born humanitarian”. She was not against the Church. (Sanger 1957)
Sanger has been criticized for her
association with eugenics, a branch of science that seeks to improve the human
species through selective mating. As grandson Alexander Sanger, chair of the
International Planned Parenthood Council, explained, "She believed that
women wanted their children to be free of poverty and disease, that women were
natural eugenicists, and that birth control, which could limit the number of
children and improve their quality of life, was the panacea to accomplish
this." Still Sanger held some views that were common at the time, but now
seem abhorrent, including support of sterilization for the mentally ill and
mentally impaired. Despite her controversial comments, Sanger focused her work
on one basic principle: "Every child should be a wanted child." (http://www.biography.com n.d.)
Margaret Sanger saw how her mother
and other women in the labor force suffered because of pregnancies which
affected not only health but also the economic situation of families. Although
women work and as much as there is increase in wages, it is still not
sufficient to support the growing family. Birth control is not to eliminate
“bad genes”. She was not an advocate of abortion. For her, abortion is
dangerous and should not be done.
The goal of taking the pill is to
have a control over the woman’s body and not just be a reproduction machine.
The world is dominated by men and is ruled by men. Up to this day, women are
still seen as sex objects. However, if the woman suddenly gets pregnant, many
men still run away from responsibility, thus leaving the woman and the unborn
child alone to survive.
I cannot refrain from saying that
women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than
being a child-bearing machine." What Every Girl Should Know, by
Margaret Sanger (Max Maisel, Publisher, 1915) [Jesus said: "Daughters of
Jerusalem, weep... for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in
which they shall say, Blessed (happy) are the barren, and the wombs that never
bare, and the breasts which never gave suck." (Luke 23:24)] (12Ap2)
Women should have a choice and just
like what the Bible implied, our bodies are merely borrowed and must be taken
cared of. There are a lot of women who still take “go and multiply” literally
yet in the end, it is not only mothers who suffer.
Women were not only made to conceive
a child. Their lives are not only meant to rear a child. In this day and age
where there are already equal rights among men and women and when there is
already a worldwide economic crisis, it is vitally important that women be able
to take charge of their own body and decide what to do with it.
In recent studies, children should
have at least a 3-year gap for the mother’s body to fully recover from giving
birth. Proper spacing should be observed when planning a family. There are
still misconceptions in developing countries that more children would mean a
better life because these children would help in farms and that someday one of
them might end up being the President of the country.
What these families fail to realize
is that more children without sufficient financial capacity would mean
malnutrition. Malnourished children would have a difficult time in school and
once the parents see that these children are not doing well in school, they
would pull them out and ask these kids to help out in farms instead.
If women were to be responsible and
use birth controls, then responsible parenthood will follow.
