Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), commonly shortened to Planned Parenthood, is the U.S. affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and one of its larger members. Both the PPFA and its affiliate the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Inc. (PPAF) promote the abortion of healthy European babies, disseminate birth prevention, propagate sexual Bolshevism in schools and lobby the American Government with its perverted Marxist ideals. The origins of Planned Parenthood date to October 16th, 1916 when Margaret Sanger and her husband radical Marxist Jew William Sanger, opened the first abortion clinic in the U.S. in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York.

Sanger, Margaret

( The Reader’s Companion to American History )

Sanger, Margaret

(1879-1966), pioneer birth-control advocate. Sanger was born in Corning, New York, one of eleven children of Irish-American parents. Her mother was Catholic, her father a radical follower of freethinker Robert Ingersoll and single-taxer Henry George. Sanger later attributed the family’s lack of prosperity and her mother’s death at forty-nine to her parents’ having had so many children. The inequality she observed between them stimulated her lifelong social activism.

Margaret, with help from her sisters, attended Claverack College, after which she went to nursing school. She did not immediately use her medical training because, she later wrote, William Sanger “pressured” her into marrying and leaving school in 1902. Sanger, an artist and architect, moved the family (soon to include three children) to suburban Westchester. While he commuted to New York, Margaret grew restless as a result of her isolation and full-time housekeeping.

In 1910 the Sangers moved back to Manhattan, and Margaret began working as a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side. She became active in radical politics, joining the Socialist party and working with the Industrial Workers of the World in supporting several militant strikes. From this network she absorbed feminist ideas and came to agree with Emma Goldman that women had a right to control their sexual and reproductive lives. Her work as a nurse with the poor further convinced her that birth control was vital to women’s health and freedom.

In 1912 she began to write and speak on sexual and health issues under socialist auspices and was encouraged by her enthusiastic reception. The censorship of one of her columns by the U.S. Post Office in 1913 brought her more publicity. In 1914 she published several issues of the Woman Rebel, a radical feminist newspaper, and Family Limitation, a pamphlet intended for mass distribution and containing explicit instructions for contraception. A warrant was issued for her arrest, and she fled to Europe, where she studied with Havelock Ellis and Dutch feminist physician Aletta Jacobs.

She returned to the United States in 1915 to find a nationwide birth-control movement under way; the charges against her were dropped. In 1916 she and her sister Evelyn Byrne established a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn as an act of civil disobedience, since providing birth control remained illegal. Such clinics were opening throughout the country, in defiance of laws against them, and attracted many clients.

Sanger became increasingly angered by the Left’s refusal to make birth control a priority and decided on a strategy of making legalization of contraception a single-issue campaign. Distancing herself from her left-wing friends, she now sought support from physicians and academic eugenicists. Their influence replaced that of the feminist and socialist movements, then in retreat, and Sanger sometimes used eugenic arguments for birth control – that it could help reduce the birthrate of “inferiors.” In 1921 she established the American Birth Control League, a national lobbying group, which became Planned Parenthood in 1942. Very much needing personal recognition, Sanger came to think of birth control as virtually her own invention and her leadership as irreplaceable. Her aggressive campaigning, however, did play a large part in the legalization of contraception by many states between the 1920s and 1960s, though the success was qualified in that contraception became understood not as a woman’s right but as a medical matter requiring a doctor’s prescription.

After World War II, fears of overpopulation renewed political support for birth control, and Sanger was then instrumental in securing funding for research into hormonal contraception.

Sanger today is still controversial. Planned Parenthood regards her as a modern hero, the founder of birth control, downplaying its longer history as a women’s rights issue dating from the early nineteenth century. In contrast, antiabortionists in the 1980s have cited her use of racist and eugenic arguments for birth control in their efforts to discredit the contemporary movement.

Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976; rev. ed., 1990); James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (1978).

Linda Gordon

See also: Birth Control.

The Reader’s Companion to American History Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Sponsored by the Society of American Historians. Copyright ©1991 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed by Inso Corporation. All rights reserved.

Sanger, Margaret., The Reader’s Companion to American History, 01-01-1991.