One hundred years ago it was illegal – and OBSCENE — to teach women about contraception. Today as the debate about women’s healthcare coverage rages, it’s good to look back at how things once were, and to contemplate the possibility of a return to those bad old days.
A woman named Margaret Sanger fought for your right to control your body. She grew up in a house with 10 brothers and sisters, which was not all that unusual in those days. In fact, she helped deliver one of those siblings in a home birth when she was eight years old.
Margaret and her sister Ethel Byrne opened the country’s first birth control clinic in two rooms in Brooklyn in 1917. Nine days later she was arrested and the clinic was shut down. She appealed and the resultant judgment allowed doctors (although not nurses) to prescribe contraception for medical purposes. This became the foundation on which she and others built the modern birth control movement.
Nation’s First Birth Control Clinic
The New York clinic provided contraception and preventive gynecology, as well as groundbreaking services in sex education, marriage counseling, and infertility counseling. The clinic even quietly made referrals for safe, illegal abortions.
When women gained the right to vote in 1920, Sanger found her base of support growing. Nonetheless the atmosphere in the United States continued to be fraught, which led Sanger to move her efforts overseas.
Margaret Sanger’s Clinic — and the movement she inspired to give women control over their own healthcare — inspired the organization known as Planned Parenthood.
Thank you Margaret Sanger for your courage, determination and commitment.