Essay On Margaret Sanger

1005 Words3 Pages

In our society today, both men and women have the ability to control their chances of reproduction by utilizing some type of birth control. However, this was not always true. From 1873 to 1972, the Comstock Act prohibited the usage or distribution of birth control. The American birth control movement, partly led by Margaret Sanger, fought against these laws, believing that women in particular should be able to decide the sizes of their families. Margaret Sanger changed the lives of women during her time period for the better by giving women access to birth control, becoming involved in politics, and aiding in the development of an oral contraceptive. In doing so, she had a lasting influence on reproductive rights that one can still see today …show more content…

Without birth control, many women who lived in small tenements died from improvised abortions. Margaret Sanger worked as a visiting nurse in New York, where she saw that many women, when faced with another unwanted pregnancy, resorted to hasty and cheap back-alley abortions. These efforts to be rid of unborn infants were extremely unsanitary and risky. After seeing such a vast amount of trauma and pain, Sanger shifted her attention from nursing to the need for better contraceptives. She started to write monthly articles in newspapers, such as Birth Control Review. In 1914, she coined the term "birth control" and soon began to provide women with information and contraceptives. This caused women to be more well-informed about possible ways to control pregnancies. Indicted in 1915 for distributing diaphragms and arrested in 1916 for opening the first birth control clinic in the US, Sanger would not be disheartened ("People & Events: Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)"). By accomplishing this, Sanger influenced much of the movement, and as a result, her beliefs gradually spread, reaching the minds of many women in America. Even …show more content…

She wanted a pill that could provide all women with cheap, safe, effective and female-controlled contraception. By 1942, Sanger had refocused her attention towards a medical approach to self-controlled pregnancy prevention. Years later, in 1951, she met Gregory Pincus, and they worked together to develop the “magic pill”. The result, Enovid, was approved for usage by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960 (Katz). It promptly improved the safety of the sexual revolution of the ‘60s for millions and established family planning as the cultural norm for the US and also in many other countries of the world. Today, over 100 million women use the pill as a form of birth control (Knowles). Sanger’s tenacious struggle to obtain a method of effortless birth control brought about the advent of safe and effective oral contraception and changed the future of human reproduction for the

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