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Margaret Sanger

Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966) was an American nurse known for informing American women about birth control methods. She defied the Congressional ruling that birth control information was obscene, and distributed the pamphlet "Family Limitation" to poor women. She was forced to flee America in 1914 due to public outrage.

In 1920 she published What Every Girl Should Know, which was later widely distributed as one of the Haldeman-Julius "Little Blue Books". It not only provided basic information about such topics as menstruation, but also acknowledged the reality of sexual feelings in adolescents.

She criticized the censorship of her reproductive literacy message by the civil and religious authorities, presumably done on moral grounds, as an effort by men to keep women in submission. She was particularly critical of the lack of awareness of the dangers of, and the scarcity of treatment opportunities for, venereal disease among women. She claimed that these social ills were the result of the male establishment's intentionally keeping women in ignorance.

Having returned to the country she founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and Planned Parenthood of America in 1942.

Sanger was an atheist and singled out the Christian church for its opposition to her message, blaming them for obscurantism and insensitivity to women's concerns. It is alleged that she believed in "free love", an idea which is compatible with some of the contemporary theories of eugenics. Although abortion was illegal during Sanger's lifetime, her association with Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider, has led some (particularly Roman Catholics and American conservatives), to condemn her as an abortion advocate. This probably accounts for a large part of the enmity that she encountered, though in her writings she emphasized that birth control was the only viable solution to the problem of illegal abortion.

Sanger was an avowed socialist, blaming the evils of contemporary capitalism for the unsatisfactory conditions of the young working-class women. Her views on this issue are evident in the last pages of What Every Girl Should Know. She strongly believed in more assertive public health and eugenics measures. She deplored the contemporary absence of regulations requiring registration of people diagnosed with venereal diseases (which she contrasted with mandatory registration of those with some infectious diseases like measles). In a mix of socialist and eugenic thought, she blamed the influence of economic considerations on choice of spouses for causing suboptimal human breeding.

Her views in these areas were by no means unique. Socialism was in her lifetime one of the most influential political ideologies. It formed an ideological basis for the establishment of welfare states in Britain and in Scandinavian countries, particularly in Sweden, with many positive effects on public health. However, the policies that socialism inspired in Sweden also included forcible sterilization of individuals deemed unworthy of reproduction due to mental illness or an expected inability to raise children properly. Considered enlightened then, today such measures would be deemed egregious violations of human rights. Similarly, Germany's Nazis carried eugenics to an extreme in widespread forcible sterilization and murder of those considered inferior. Sanger clearly cannot be blamed directly for these deplorable occurrences.

Ethical debates over reproduction and public policy continue today: some disagree over the merits of particular ethical or political theories, others over divergent measurements of the impact of health policy. The American "culture war" over sex education versus abstinence is an example.

Although her social views are no longer of popular interest, she is remembered by many as the founder of the birth control and abortion movement in the USA. She remains an iconic figure to the pro-choice movement, feminists and, more generally, liberals, and a profoundly distasteful one to those who espouse pro-life or generally conservative views. In recent years, Sanger has been criticized for advocating eugenics and for appearing at a Ku Klux Klan rally, both of which her critics associate with racism.

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Last updated: 10-24-2004 05:10:45