Louisa Higgins Research Paper

The city of Corning, New York gained one of the most influential advocates on September 14, 1879: the daughter of Bob Higgins and Anne Purcell Higgins. Little to Bob or Anne’s knowledge, Margaret Louisa Higgins, later known as Margaret Sanger, was destined to change the world of contraceptives for its present-day use: modern birth control. As the sixth child of eleven, Sanger grew up in poverty; with a socialist advocate for a father, and a recurrently pregnant mother constantly worn down from those pregnancies and later dying of tuberculosis. Although tuberculosis ultimately killed Sanger’s mother, Sanger believed that the frequent pregnancies of Anne burdened her mother and were the underlying cause of her relatively early death at the age

of fifty. Throughout Sanger’s childhood, she recognized the struggles of large families, typically ones of color and of poverty, observing that the wealthy white population tended to have smaller successful families.
After moving to Europe temporarily with her husband and 3 kids, Sanger brought back European knowledge of contraceptives to the United States, setting the stage for her future actions. Once back in the United States, Sanger began her sexual rights movement through her use of law-breaking tactics in order to advocate for birth control as we know it today. Although Sanger did a lot for women’s rights, and ultimately is responsible for the evolution of contraceptives - such as ‘the pill’ - many argue that her whole movement was done with ulterior motives. Sanger’s childhood motivated her to help prevent unwanted pregnancies and debilitated women such as her mother, but underneath her advocation was an underlying motive that many tend to forget and or ignore.