Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Movement

Margaret Sanger started one of the most radically and notoriously rebellious political movements of the twentieth century which has progressively continued to affect the world today. The birth control movement was a social reform campaign led by Margaret Sanger. The goal was to make contraceptives available and legal, based on the “hardships of childbirth” and the many self induced abortions that not only could lead to infection or disease for the mother or un-born baby but more often than not, death for both. Regardless of the original eugenics purpose of birth control, contraception and the pill account for twenty-eight percent of women who are using some form of contraceptive, and as birth control now is generally perceived as a positive
At an early age, she “associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, and jails with large families.” (pg. 15, Margaret Sanger; A Life of Passion). The image of large families and children born destined to a life of hardship and cruelty, fueled the very ideas of the beginnings for Sanger’s movement to end the existence of unnecessary children born into poverty, “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race (Eugenics Publ. Co., 1920,
After White Plains, Margaret apprenticed in the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, and it was here she met her first husband, William Sanger. Their marriage appeared to be impenetrable, at least in the beginning and by 1910, the Sanger family had moved to New York City to support William’s budding career of painting. It was in New York, when her two sons were no longer infants, where Margaret proposed the idea of an open marriage to William. William was aghast at the mere thought of an open marriage, for he was so in love with Margaret, the idea of her having intimate relations with someone else deeply troubled him. By 1914, William had moved to Paris to pursue his not-quite-yet-failed painting career and Margaret had stayed in Greenwich. Hence began Margarets own sexual liberalization. She began to have numerous affairs with numerous men and around the same time she published her first copy of the The Woman Rebel.

The Comstock Laws were passed in 1873 and “prohibited distribution of any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials through the mail”, meaning contraception could not be sent through the mail as it had been defined as obscene and lewd. The Comstock Laws were created by Anthony Comstock, a devout Christian, who viewed contraception as the sole reason behind “lewd and lustness” demonstrated by women prostitutes in New York City. These laws remained unchallenged until