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They tried to keep her silent, but her voice stayed firm.

Margaret Sanger fought against the system and prevailed.

What we take for granted today is her legacy...

Reproductive Rights in America           by Jeanie C.

“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.”   Margaret Sanger

    For over 83 years, the fight for reproductive rights in America has been an important part of women’s empowerment.  The access to contraceptives that we take for granted today, was once only available to wealthy women who had access to it through the black market.  Throughout human history, women have sought techniques for family planning.  Through informal networks, women shared information.  Finally, in 1916, Margaret Sanger and two other women opened the first birth control clinic in America, that “provided contraceptive advice to desperately poor, immigrant women who lined up hours before the clinic doors opened”  (PPFA booklet) . 

    However, within a month of the clinic’s opening, the three women were arrested for violating New York’s anti-obscenity laws.  According to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s booklet, 75 years of Family Planning in America, by Jon Knowles, “This event was a watershed in American social history.  It focused attention on federal and local Comstock statutes, passed in the 1870s, that defined contraceptives and abortifacients as “obscene.”  It galvanized public anger against the injustice of forcing women to bear children they could not afford and did not want.  And it added immeasurably to the fame and influence of Margaret Sanger, a 37-year-old public health nurse who devoted her life to fighting for women’s reproductive freedom.”   After being indicted for this crime,  Sanger chose to spend 30 days in jail, instead of paying the imposed fine.  She spent her month in jail teaching other inmates birth control methods.  

   Margaret Sanger lead the birth control movement, starting the American Birth Control League and the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.  “In 1936, after two decades of activism, proponents of the birth control movement achieved one of their greatest victories.  Judge Augustus Hand, writing for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, ordered a sweeping liberalization of federal Comstock laws as applied to the importing of contraceptive devices.  Judge Hand’s decision, while it stopped short of finding the Comstock laws unconstitutional, found that birth control could no longer be classified as obscene, given contemporary data on the damages of unplanned pregnancy and the benefits of contraception.  Sanger herself had put up the money for the costs of litigation.”

   “In 1939, the two organizations Sanger had founded merged to become the Birth Control Federation of America, which was later renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.  Around the same time, she left New York for Tucson, Arizona, retiring from the forefront of movement activism.  However, from the time of her retirement until her death in 1966, she continued to exert her influence on Planned Parenthood and other family planning organizations and clinics and to lend her personal support to the projects she considered most urgent.”  Some of these projects were making available to women the steroid progesterone pill  and the intrauterine device,  which were found to be reliable forms of birth control.

   “Today Planned Parenthood serves more than four million women and men in the U.S. and the developing world.  In addition to providing birth control services, Planned Parenthood affiliates in 49 states and the District of Columbia offer sexuality education and counseling, pregnancy testing and prenatal care, infertility services, screening and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and cancer screening.”

   To learn more about Margaret Sanger,  check out: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about/thisispp/sanger.html. For more information about the services that Planned Parenthood provides locally, call Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Eureka at 442-5709.   If you are interested in getting involved on campus, come to a Students for Choice meeting, every Monday at 3:00 p.m. in the Multicultural Center, call 826-4216 for more information.