Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger
From Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality
Planned Parenthood of America is a voluntary reproductive health organization with nearly 900 clinics across the country organized under an umbrella of 170 nonprofit corporations. Its roots lie in a clinic formed by a nurse, Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), who in 1916 defied then-current laws by opening a clinic that offered information about contraception. This was illegal because in the 1870s anti-obscenity laws had been adopted in the United States which forbade the importing or mailing of contraceptives and contraceptive information. These laws were passed at the instigation of New York Congressman Anthony Comstock and were known as the Comstock Laws.
As a maternity nurse, Sanger knew that many of the women she helped did not want to have any more children but did not know what to do to prevent becoming pregnant. Even doctors were forbidden from disseminating such information. Sanger vowed to fight these laws after witnessing the death from an illegal abortion of a woman whom Sanger had treated once before because of the effects of another illegal abortion.
Sanger traveled to Europe to learn the methods of preventing pregnancy that existed there, and returned to the United States to publish a newspaper called The Woman Rebel, in which she coined the term “birth control.” Sanger was indicted by the federal government in 1914 and fled back to Europe to avoid trial. During her second stay in Europe she learned more about a method of birth control called the diaphragm. She returned to the United States in 1915 to face trial, but growing support in America for her cause forced the government to drop the indictment. She began to travel around the country starting advocacy organizations for birth control, several of which eventually became the predecessors of today’s Planned Parenthood affiliates.
On 16 October 1916 Sanger opened a storefront office in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where she began to provide contraceptive advice. The clinic attracted hundreds of people, but was closed after ten days by the police and Sanger was sentenced to a thirty-day jail term. It only spurred Sanger on.
The 1920s brought women the right to vote and the movement for birth control pushed forward. Though the Comstock Laws remained in effect, in 1921 Sanger launched the American Birth Control League (ABCL), which received more than a million letters from women asking for information during its first four years of existence. Sanger left the ABCL to open an actual birth control clinic under the supervision of a physician who was able to prescribe contraception under a loophole in the Comstock Laws which allowed the use of condoms to “prevent the spread of disease.” Although the law permitting condoms was officially intended to protect men from venereal disease, Sanger’s center was able to broaden the definition of disease to include the ill health and economic stress brought on by unwanted childbearing.
Bit by bit, under the prodding of Sanger and others in the birth control movement, larger holes were made in the Comstock Laws, and the movement spread to localities across the country. In 1937, the leaders of the ABCL and the nation’s hundreds of clinics decided to find a way of joining together, and in 1939 they announced the formation of the Birth Control Federation of America, with Margaret Sanger as honorary president. In 1942 the name was changed to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The 1940s were years of intense struggle for the organization, both on the national and local levels, with clinics opening and being shut down by the authorities all over the country. In 1952, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded at a conference in Bombay to deal with the concerns of worldwide population growth. But the biggest development to come out of the 1950s was the invention of oral contraceptives, know as “the pill.” Research money, funded by Katherine Dexter McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune, and funneled through Planned Parenthood, helped in the creation of this new method of birth control which would revolutionize family planning.
While family planning became more integrated into American life, there were still laws against it. Finally in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled the Constitution barred states from interfering with a married couple’s decisions about childbearing. (Unmarried people were not give the right to get contraceptive services until the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird.)
In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the first federal legislation specifically designed to expand access to family planning services: Title X of the Public Health Service Act. This fueled an impressive expansion of services offered by Planned Parenthood, especially for low-income women and teenagers.
1970 was also the year that Planned Parenthood began providing abortion in New York State following legislation which gave the state the most progressive abortion law in the nation. Those opposed to abortion fought back, but in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruled that states could no longer interfere with a woman’s decision, in consultation with her doctor, to have an abortion in the first three months of pregnancy.
Today Planned Parenthood offers both clinical services—including birth control and instruction and prescription, cancer screening, pregnancy testing, abortion, prenatal care, genetic counseling, infertility testing, HIV testing, adoption screening, and child care—and educational programs on such topics as family planning, sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy prevention, women’s health, and parenting skills.
