Margaret Sanger

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 6^th 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.