Margaret Sanger (referred to as Margaret) was born in New York, US, on September 14, 1879 to Michael Higgins (Higgins) and Anne Purcell (Purcell). Her parents were Irish-born Catholics whose parents had emigrated from Ireland during the Potato Famine of the mid-1800s—the Higgins family to Canada and the Purcell family to the US.
As a youth, Higgins crossed the border to the US. and served as a Union soldier in the Civil War. He never returned to Canada, which was disliked by the Irish because of its ties to Britain.
Higgins and Purcell married in 1869, and Margaret, born fourth, would have seven brothers and three sisters. The family lived in Corning, NY, about 250 miles from Manhattan.
Higgins was in business as a stonecutter maker of marble tombstones and the like. He was a virulently anti-Catholic Leftist despite being raised a Catholic, while Purcell was a devout Catholic. Margaret was her father’s favorite, and he instilled in her a spirit of rebellion, which included belief in women’s right to vote. The family was poor and had to struggle to survive. However, because of their Catholic upbringing, Higgins and Purcell believed that sexual intercourse was for procreation only. In addition to delivering 11 surviving children, Purcell had many miscarriages. She was almost continually pregnant, which inculcated in Margaret the need for birth control.
Margaret had some secondary schooling as a boarder at the grandiose Claverack College, Hudson, NY, financed by two of her older sisters. She wished to study medicine at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, about 45 miles north of Corning. However, that was not to be. In 1898 she was forced to leave Claverack College due to lack of funding, and after a brief spell teaching in New Jersey, she returned to Corning in 1899 to tend to her dying mother and help look after the four children still at home.
Purcell died from tuberculosis at the age of 49. Despite the Irish tradition that she should take her dead mother’s place, Margaret enrolled as a probationer nurse at the White Plains Hospital, about 25 miles north of Manhattan. The hospital was small and newly established and had no resident doctors. During the evenings, Margaret was involved heavily in obstetrics and other medical matters and procedures.
Like Abraham Lincoln, she was largely self-taught, although lectured by visiting physicians.
In 1902, Margaret married a student architect, William Sanger (Sanger), who fell in love with her and courted her with determination, including the bestowal of numerous bouquets and jewellery. William was an anti-religion Socialist like her father.
Following the marriage, Margaret ceased her nursing course. While plagued with bad health due to recurring tuberculosis, Margaret gave birth to three children, Stuart in 1903, Grant in 1908, and Peggy in 1910, who died aged five from pneumonia.
The family resided in Hastings-on-Hudson, a village about 20 miles north of Central Manhattan. In 1910, the family moved to a rented apartment in Greenwich Village, Lower Manhattan, because of a lack of finances. Margaret worked as a nurse with the disadvantaged while at the same time becoming involved with the Socialist and Bohemian culture of Greenwich Village, which was anti-marriage. She joined the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party. Sanger spent his time in an artist’s studio painting pictures.
Margaret became a committed feminist and social reformer and commenced writing articles on sex education. She had witnessed a death caused by septicemia following a self-attempted abortion in 1912, and while not supporting legalized abortion, it made her determined to publicize the use of contraceptives. She took a first lover, John Rompapas, and proposed an "open marriage" to Sanger, which he rejected. He demanded that Margaret spend more time with the children and finish her affair with Rompapas.
In an effort to save their marriage, the family sailed for Europe in 1913, but after three months there, Margaret took the children and returned to Greenwich Village and Rompapas, leaving Sanger in Paris. The marriage was effectively over, although the caring Sanger would continue to express his love for her while she participated in several sexual affairs.
At that time, because of the Comstock Act, the production, distribution, or provision of information relating to the prevention of conception or to the procurement of an abortion was illegal to various degrees across a number of American states.
Margaret commenced a publication titled The Woman Rebel, No Gods No Masters, which promoted contraception, and wrote a pamphlet titled Family Limitation, which described the various methods in detail. She was indicted for breaching the Comstock Acton seven counts, which carried a penalty of up to five years imprisonment in the penitentiary with hard labor on each count.
The Comstock Laws were the fruits of the labor of Anthony Comstock, a religious zealot who was able to persuade Congress to pass them. They included the parent Comstock Act (Act), which criminalized the dissemination of any immoral or obscene material, including writings related to contraception or abortion. Congress appointed Comstock a special agent of the United States Post Office, an appointment he fulfilled with much vigor.
At that time, Margaret also formed the National Birth Control League of America.
In late 1914, leaving her three childrenin the care of Sanger, who had returned from Paris, some friends, and some of her sisters, Margaret fled the US for England by ship from Montreal, using a false identity. In England,she became sexually involved with the Fabian sexologist and eugenicist Havelock Ellis, and with Marie Stopes, a campaigner for women’s rights, birth control, and eugenics, both as pictured below.
She also took other lovers, including H G Wells and a Spaniard, Lorenzo Portet, with whom she traveled to Spain.
Margaret became deeply involved with the British Fabians, the promoters of eugenics, including sterilization and even the gas chamber. With Ellis, she discussed the functions of male and female genitalia and broadened her knowledge of contraceptive devices.
Margaret returned to the US in 1915 to face trial, following which her 5-year-old daughter, Peggy, died in her arms from pneumonia. That was the direct result of her sleeping in severe wintry conditions, brought about by being abandoned for a year by Margaret. Sanger had been unable to look after Peggy, as he was sentenced to 30 days in prison for providing a copy of Family Limitation to a visitor sent by Anthony Comstock to entrap him, following the decampment of Margaret.
The charges against Margaret were dropped before the trial, and she embarked on a series of lectures across the US. By that time, Anthony Comstock had died, and public opinion was moving toward approval of contraception.
She also found time to write articles on birth control and took many lovers.
Other than in Connecticut, where the use of contraceptives was specifically illegal by statute, the broadness of the Act made their use arguably illegal elsewhere. Nevertheless, in October 1916, Margaret opened a birth control in Brooklyn, which would give verbal advice only, and according to Margaret, did not breach the Act.
On the first day, there was a line of about 150 women awaiting admission to the clinic for advice, such was its popularity. After ten days, in a sting reminiscent of Anthony Comstock’s, Margaret Whitehurst, a police officer disguised as a mother seeking advice, insisted on purchasing a birth control pamphlet. The next day, Margaret, her sister Ethel, and two nurses were arrested and charged with breaching the Act. In 1917, both Margaret and Ethel were found guilty, and both were sentenced to 30 days imprisonment. The clinic did not reopen.
With Comstock deceased, the desire to enforce his laws decreased, and Margaret began publication of The Birth Control Review magazine, of which she would retain control until 1928. The publication, which sought primarily to legalize birth control, contained general information, articles, and cartoons.
In July 1917, Margaret appealed her conviction to the New York Supreme Court, which upheld the judgment in January 1918. She then appealed to the New York State Court of Appeals, which also upheld the judgment against her. However, in writing the Court’s unanimous opinion, Justice Frederick Crane noted that under the existing law, physicians could prescribe contraceptives should a pregnancy endanger a woman’s health or well-being. Pharmacists were also able to stock and dispense contraceptives prescribed by physicians. That effectively cleared the way for Margaret.
In 1921, Margaret dissolved the National Birth Control League of America and formed the American Birth Control League. She finally obtained a divorce from the reluctant Sanger in 1921, and in 1922 married Noah Slee, a much older millionaire, and businessman.
In 1923, Margaret opened the first legal birth control clinic in the US. The clinic had to be staffed by physicians to comply with the Act. While promoting contraception through numerous lectures and published articles, Margaret became heavily involved in eugenics. In the mid-1920s, she joined the American Eugenics Society, which Harry Laughlin (Laughlin) and others had incorporated in January 1926, with the racist Charles Davenport as its first president. Tellingly, Margaret published an article by Laughlin in the January 1926 edition of the Birth Control Review, as depicted below. Margaret had nailed her colors to the mast.
Together with her contemporary Marie Stopes in England and many of the rich and powerful in the United States, Margaret became a firm advocate of population control through the use of eugenics. She wrote in 1920:
The most merciful thing that the family does to one of its infant members is to kill it; (Woman and the New Race 1920).
Amazingly, Margaret dedicated the book to “The Memory Of My Mother , A Mother Who Gave Birth To Eleven Loving Children.”
She wrote and spoke widely on such subjects as the control of the birth rate of African Americans; the evil of large families; the limiting of reproduction by the mentally and physically defective; the requirement of a permit for a family to produce children, following mental and physical examinations of both parents by the authorities—valid for one birth only at a time; the need to apply sterilization and segregation to those likely to have defective offspring; and so on.
In 1926, Margaret gave a speech to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey. The speech was so well accepted by the members of the anti-African American, anti-Jewish, and anti-Catholic hate group that she was invited to give a dozen similar addresses.
From at least 1921 until 1962, Margaret was the head of what became known as Planned Parenthood in 1942. Although she actively promoted eugenics in those days, she was opposed to abortion, and none were performed in the clinics. That was changed by her successor, Frank Guttmacher, a strongly pro-abortion physician.
In 1952, Margaret helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation and remained its first president until 1959. That would become the leading provider of abortions in the Western World with over 130 members, as would Planned Parenthood in the US, which would perform about 40 percent of abortions there, but neither during Margaret’s time in control.
Margaret’s admirer, Adolf Hitler, who was instrumental in wreaking havoc on the world during World War II, was influenced to a large degree by her writings, by her fellow proponents of eugenics, and by framers of the eugenics laws in the United States. Margaret and Hitler shared a common connection with Ernst Rudin, the director of the Nazis’Racial Hygiene Society. In the early 1930s, Margaret’s Birth Control Review even published an article by Rudin calling for eugenic sterilization as a matter of urgency.
Many of the Nazis’ laws on eugenics were based on the work of the American Eugenics Society, of which Margaret was an influential member. In fact, the Nazi’s compulsory sterilization laws were based on a work by Laughlin, a founder of the Society, known as the Model Eugenic Sterilization Law, which stated its purpose as being:
Purely eugenic, that is, to prevent certain degenerate human stock from reproducing its kind. Absolutely no punitive element.
That model law had been adopted by a number of American States prior to the Nazis, and used up until the 1960s. It had been found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court in a majority opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), in which the Court held that Laughlin’s Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, enacted in Virginia as the Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924 (Act), was valid.
The case concerned Emma Buck, a dissolute woman who had been committed to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded (Colony); her daughter Carrie Buck, also in the Colony; and Carrie’s baby daughter, Vivian, the result of rape. The Colony authorities, after much searching, chose Carrie as a test case to have Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924 declared constitutional.
At the trial at first instance, Laughlin gave biased evidence, and Carrie was poorly represented by Irving Whitehead, a pro-sterilization attorney appointed by the Colony, who called no evidence. The Court found that Emma, Carrie, and Vivian, were genetic imbeciles and approved Carrie’s sterilization.
On appeal to the US Supreme Court in 1927, the Court, in an eight to one majority, found that the Act was constitutional on the ridiculous basis that compulsory sterilization was no different from compulsory vaccination. The majority opinion was delivered by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in just five paragraphs, in which he included:
Instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…
And:
In later life, Carrie Buck was found to be a woman of normal intelligence, and her daughter Vivian was an honor student at school before her death at the age of eight.
That deeply flawed decision cleared the way for more than 70,000 compulsory sterilizations throughout the US, initiated by Margaret’s associate, Laughlin. Of those, the majority were African American women.
Following Margaret’s death in 1966, Planned Parent presented the Margaret Sanger Award in her honor annually until about 2015, when her racist views on African Americans became too hot to handle. Although Margaret had opposed abortion, other than in medical emergencies, Planned Parenthood became an abortion provider from 1970. The recipients of the Award included Frank Guttmacher in 1972; in 1996, Harry Blackmun, who had written the opinion of the US Supreme Court in Roe v Wade in 1973, which opened the floodgates to millions of abortions in the US, of which Planned Parenthood would perform more than 9,000,000 up until now; in 2009 Hillary Clinton; and in 2014 Nancy Pelosi.
Similarly, the other worldwide abortion provider, Marie Stopes International, found Stopes’ connection to eugenics concerning African Americans too hot to handle, and recently changed its name to MSI Reproductive Choices. Apparently killing kids is fine, but upsetting their parents is not. The abortion provider has clinics throughout Australia, and the one in the Sydney CBD is but three minutes walk down Macquarie Street from the Supreme Court. In all the years that abortion was illegal in NSW until legalised by the Liberal Government, the police and the judiciary turned a blind eye.
In 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, holding in its majority opinion:
Roe was also egregiously wrong and deeply damaging. For reasonsalready explained, Roe’s constitutional analysis was far outside the bounds of any reasonable interpretation of the various constitutional provisions to which it vaguely pointed.
Roe was on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided …
When Margaret died in 1966, advanced in years, and entered the dimness awaiting judgment, she recognized her errors and screamed for mercy. On the right side of the ledger, she had condemned abortion. However, her life devoted to eugenics would have disastrous consequences. Her catchcry had been "No Gods, No Masters."
She was cast into the pit for all eternity in the company of Charles Davenport, Harry Laughlin, Havelock Ellis,Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,Adolf Hitler, Marie Stopes, Frank Guttmacher, and Harry Blackmun.
Thou shalt not kill. (Exodus 20:13)
