The story
On October 16, 1916, the nurse Margaret Sanger opened a birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in Brownsville, a poor immigrant neighborhood of Brooklyn, with her sister Ethel Byrne, also a nurse, and Fania Mindell, who translated. Women came in large numbers and were taught about contraception in English, Yiddish and Italian. Police raided the clinic about ten days later. Sanger was arrested, convicted in 1917 under a New York law against distributing contraceptive information, and served 30 days in a workhouse. Byrne went on a hunger strike in jail.
The federal Comstock Act of 1873 classed contraceptive information as obscene and barred it from the mails, and many states had similar laws. Cheap rubber contraceptives, made possible by vulcanization in 1839, existed but were hard to get. Sanger, who had nursed poor women in New York and seen many suffer from repeated pregnancies and unsafe abortions, coined the term birth control in 1914 and fought the laws in her newspaper The Woman Rebel. In 1918 a New York court ruled in her case that doctors could prescribe contraception to prevent disease. She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Her legacy also includes support for eugenics, which is a documented and criticized part of her record.
Why it mattered
- Clinics modeled on Brownsville spread, and Sanger's league became Planned Parenthood in 1942.
- Court rulings, including the 1936 United States v. One Package, gradually opened the way for doctors to provide contraception.
- Sanger helped raise money for the research that produced the contraceptive pill in 1960.
- The Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 recognized a right to use contraception in marriage.
Sources
- First American Birth Control Clinic (The Brownsville Clinic), 1916 Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University
- Margaret Sanger: Biographical Sketch Margaret Sanger Papers Project, NYU
Community notes
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