Margaret Sanger’s Tarnished Legacy
Exactly one week ago, the nation observed a holiday that used to be called Columbus Day. Many calendars now designate the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day. The name changed as part of a movement to stop honoring people who had mistreated others. Margaret Sanger is now considered one of those disgraced former good guys.
On this day, October 16, in 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. It was in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a poor immigrant neighborhood.
At the time, federal and state Comstock laws prohibited distribution of information and methods to prevent or end pregnancies. But that didn’t stop women, many with babies in tow, from flocking to the clinic during its brief life, just ten days. Then the clinic was shut down for its illegal activities, and Margaret Sanger was arrested.
Women waiting outside the first birth control clinic in America
Operating the illegal birth control clinic is not why Margaret Sanger’s name is now villified. It’s because of her involvement with the eugenics movement, which was popular at the time. Believers in eugenics maintain that society can be improved by selective reproduction: more babies born to people with desirable traits, such as intelligence, and fewer to those from “inferior” groups. Eugenicists often count racial and ethnic minorities among the inferior.
For many years, Planned Parenthood, which traces its roots to Sanger and her Brooklyn clinic, defended her position. The organization said that Sanger directed her birth control outreach toward poor, immigrant, and Black women not because she felt they were inferior but because they were in need of information and methods to limit their family size, if they so desired.
In the 2020s, Planned Parenthood’s support of Sanger has changed. An April 2021 blog titled “Planned Parenthood’s Reckoning with Margaret Sanger” stated, “Her alignment with the eugenics movement, rooted in white supremacy, is in direct opposition to our mission and belief that all people should have the right to determine their own future and decide, without coercion or judgement, whether and when to have children. We must acknowledge the harm done, examine how we have perpetuated this harm, and ensure that we do not repeat Sanger’s mistakes.”