Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood

Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States on October 16, 1916. Her nonprofit organization is now known as Planned Parenthood. Sanger was not only an advocate for women’s reproductive rights, but also a serious eugenic enthusiast. Her motives behind starting the organization were to educate women about the reproductive process allowing them to choose when and whether to bear children. Although Sanger supported the eugenics movement and sterilization, we cannot forget about all of the men and women her organization helped and continues to help to this day.

Growing up Sanger's father was an unstable man who was incapable of providing adequately for his large family. Although a skilled craftsman, he was unable

She also worked in a predominantly poor immigrant neighborhood in the Lower East Side as a nurse treating a number of women who had undergone back-alley abortions or tried to self-terminate their pregnancies. Disturbed with the number of women suffering, Sanger went beyond the surface and researched ways to create a “magic pill” to control fertility. "No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother" Sanger said (qtd. in Ervin, Valerie). Her intentions were never to eliminate a certain group, rather limit the number of children and improve women’s quality of life. She believed that women were natural eugenicists and wanted their children to be free of disease and poverty. People fail to recognize that her work was incomparable to the works of

Planned Parenthood’s goal is to educate and empower women to make their own reproductive choices. Its efforts focused on minority communities, because that is where, due to poverty and limited access to health care, women are especially vulnerable to the effects of unplanned pregnancy. The nonprofit supplied women with pelvic exams, pap tests, cancer screenings, and testing and treatment for vaginal infections. Today, they not only provide women with their free services, but men as well. Offering them STI screenings and treatments, testing for HIV, condoms, and referrals for free or low-cost vasectomies. Planned Parenthood is the primary source of health care for many citizens in the United States. Without it many individuals would be left without the proper medical attention they need. Unlike the Eugenics movement, Sanger’s methods were never forced upon women. Women were not deceived into thinking anything other than what she was informing them on. “Margaret Sanger gave hope to multitudes. For many she redefined hope” (Black, 144). Although she may have encouraged different birth control methods, people were never subjected to any type of surgery or procedure under false pretences such as the victims of the eugenics movement. In fact, Sanger’s clinics