Bio.com tells us that Margaret Sanger was an early feminist and women's rights activist who coined the term "birth control" and worked towards its legalization (pg. 1). Margaret was born in New York and raised in a Catholic family of 11 children. She witnessed the struggles her mother encountered raising a large family and felt that lack of birth control education contributed to her mother’s young death. Margaret sought higher education, studied nursing and relocated to the “progressive” area of Greenwich Village. Her passion to educate and provide birth control to women was born after working with and witnessing the hardships women encountered trying to raise children while pregnant and living in poverty. She opened the first birth control clinic in the US, was arrested and actually fled the country in pursuit of reproductive rights for women. She held controversial ideas for her times—specifically eugenics. I feel the statement below taken from bio.com illustrates the motives behind such contentious debate…
For all of her advocacy work, Sanger was not without controversy. She 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."
(bio.com, page 2)
Margaret passed away in 1966; however, she did witness her hard work justified in 1965 as an important reproductive rights goal was met with passed ground-breaking legislation--Griswold v. Connecticut which legalized birth control for legal married couples.
Reference:
Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/people/margaret-sanger-9471186, pgs. 1-3.
