Every Child a Wanted Child

No cause ever fought has been fought against more stupid, blind social prejudice, not even the cause of the people against the divine rights of kings, nor the cause of equal suffrage, nor any of the battles of freedom.

-- Pearl Buck, on the 21st anniversary of the birth control movement

Family planning by contraception was the cause. Margaret Sanger was its champion. Half a century ago, when she raised the banners of her lonely crusade, she was lacerated from the pulpits as a "lascivious monster" bent on "murdering" unborn children. Birth control, a phrase she herself invented, was unmentionable, immoral and illegal. It was a federal crime merely to send information about it through the mails. She was arrested eight times. Her zeal led to the breakup of her first marriage. Yet when she died last week of arteriosclerosis in Tucson at the age of 82, her vision had been realized beyond her dreams. Birth control, which to her meant the right of every woman to control the size of her own family, had become accepted in the U.S., and was spreading rapidly throughout the world.

What makes her success even more remarkable is that Margaret Sanger was no tough-talking, mannish feminist. Even when she wore severely tailored suits to appear more formidable, she could not conceal her obvious femininity. She was a radiant, vivacious redhead, scarcely 5 ft. tall, who left scores of suitors in her wake.

"Sleep on the Roof." Margaret Sanger grew up in Corning, N.Y., the sixth of eleven children. Her mother died of tuberculosis at 48. In New York at 17, Margaret married Architect William Sanger and soon joined the Socialist Party. She toiled as a nurse in the tenements of the Lower East Side.

On a sweltering day in July 1912, Nurse Sanger threaded her way through pushcarts to a cramped flat in a Grand Street tenement. Sadie Sachs, 28, wife of a truck driver and mother of three, was near death as the result of a self-induced abortion. She pleaded with Nurse Sanger and the doctor: "Another baby will finish me. What can I do to prevent it?" The doctor's gruff reply: "Tell Jake to sleep on the roof." Three months later, Sadie Sachs was dead--of another self-induced abortion. Margaret Sanger had a cause.

In 1913, in birth control clinics of France and Scotland, she listened, watched, learned, then returned to publish, write and edit a magazine called Woman Rebel. Its motto: "No Gods, No Masters." Her first editorial promised subsequent stories on birth control; postal inspectors grabbed up copies, and she was indicted on nine counts of sending birth control information through the mails. Deciding she needed time to prepare her defense, she left her three children with a nurse. Without court permission, without a passport, and under the alias "Bertha Watson," she left on a midnight train for Montreal and thence to Europe.

"You're No Woman!" By the time she returned to stand trial a year later, she had begun to attract public support. Besides, the first issue of Woman Rebel had only promised the illegal stories; it had not delivered them. The Govern ment withdrew its indictment.

In 1916 Margaret Sanger opened the nation's first birth control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. On the first day, 150 pram-pushing women from the neighborhood lined up to pay the 10-c- registration fee. Nine days later, the clinic was raided by policemen and--a particularly galling circumstance to her--policewomen.

"You're no woman!" she stormed at the lady cop who arrested her. "You're a traitress to your sex." Spurning the paddy wagon, Margaret Sanger marched the mile to Raymond Street jail, was later convicted of disseminating birth control information and imprisoned for 30 days.

"Nothing to Laugh At." To friends who urged her to ease up, she replied: "I am the protagonist of women who have nothing to laugh at." She met and fell in love with Sexologist Havelock Ellis, but Ellis was already married. In 1922, she married 3-In-One Oil Company Owner J. Noah H. Slee, after planking down a platform of specific demands to assure her independence: she would continue to call herself Margaret Sanger, she and Slee would occupy separate apartments in the same house, they would even telephone each other to arrange such trifles as having dinner together. Not much of a marriage by conventional standards, but it held firm.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the use of contraceptives spread, although their illegal status gave birth to such nervously silly euphemisms as "uppity-cuppity" (for diaphragm) and it was considered boldly wicked to admit using them. All the while, Margaret Sanger fought futilely for a federal "Doctors' Bill" that would open the mails to birth control information and devices. Victory came by a more roundabout route. She had ordered a new Japanese pessary sent to an associate, Dr. Hannah Stone, and it was seized by U.S. Customs. In U.S. v. One Package, U.S. District Court Judge Grover Moscowitz dismissed the Government's suit, ordered the package delivered. When, in 1937, Attorney General Homer Cummings announced that the Government would not carry the case to the Supreme Court, the mails were opened for good, although it was not until last year that Connecticut became the last state to lift its ban against birth control clinics.

Margaret Sanger started on a personal crusade to secure the freedom of the individual woman, whom she characterized as "a brood animal for the masculine civilizations of the world." But what she started on an individual level has since been heralded by demographers as one way of coping with the world's staggering population problem. She recognized this early. And, as a result of her efforts, the personal and planetary have been fused. Freely using contraceptive devices, women in India, Africa or the U.S. are staving off world-population pressures--while at the same time they enjoy the personal freedom of making every child a wanted child.

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