Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Movement Essay Example

📌Category: Historical Figures, History, Social Issues, Social Movements
📌Words: 1105
📌Pages: 5
📌Published: 17 March 2022

“If we cannot trust woman with the knowledge of her own body, then I claim that two thousand years of Christian teaching has proved to be a failure,” said Margaret Sanger, who sounded like an absolute girl boss.  But is she really? From the 1910s to 1930s, several breakthroughs took place in the American society. One of those important changes was the birth control movement led by Margaret Sanger. Her advocacy for birth control fostered a new era that encouraged discussions around topics such as sex education and women’s rights. Yet this far-reaching political influence sparked highly divided opinions on her. Some believed that she was as if a savior, others contended her to be a racist eugenicist. This paper argues that while Margaret Sanger’s advocacy for birth control is laudable considering the revival of Christian traditions and the Great Depression, her proposal of “the N*gro plan” solidified stereotypes on African Americans and harmed the Black society.

Margaret Sanger’s support for birth control despite the objection of Christian communities made her a virtuous activist. In the 1920s, American public schools started teaching students Darwin’s theory of evolution—a theory that states the exact opposite of Christian beliefs on human origin.  Ever since the start of human history, religious societies have deeply valued and guarded deference. Christians forcefully advocated for a restoration on Christian traditions, insisting upon “the accuracy of the Bible in matters of science and history as well as theology.”  A society that violently pushed against scientific developments could largely interpret what Margaret Sanger promoted—a scientific way of “killing” babies and controlling childbirth—as blasphemous. Sanger’s choice to stand up against the norms under tremendous social pressure was quite courageous. Some might argue that, however, simply having courage was not enough make an activist honorable, since the society has always evaluated one’s nature based on their contributions. Yet Sanger further aroused extensive awareness of women’s empowerment through redefining birth control as a moral choice that could prevent “[t]he reckless abandonment of the impulse of the moment and the careless regard for the consequences” and accusing the church for “keep[ing] women moral by keeping them in fear and in ignorance.”  That Sanger, in addition to “transgressing” social conventions, voiced out Christian’s hindrance on women’s liberation is undeniably influential and commendable.

Margaret Sanger’s promotion for contraceptives met the economic demand of the society after the Great Depression. Many people lost their basic rights of autonomy over their property, having no choice to decide for their future. It became financially more difficult for families to raise children.  Society urgently needed “access to easily acquired, affordable, and effective birth control,” as birth control clinics were still largely unavailable.  During that time, Margaret Sanger became the chairman of a committee that fought to “legalize the distribution of contraceptives and contraceptive information through the mails.”  Indeed, commercializing contraceptives was a great economic opportunity during the Great Depression, and it was possible that Sanger was simply taking advantage of the market demand. However, profitability in her campaign did not diminish her sense of duty or cancel out her contribution to the society. Highly engaged in the legalization process of contraceptives, she ensured the safety of contraceptive products, on which “multiple tests. . . [were] conducted at her request by doctors at the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.”  Further, Sanger’s contraceptive policies proved to be influential in reducing the average family size in America, from 4.11 children in 1930 to 2.5 children in 1933.  Margaret Sanger’s campaign thus solved an urgent problem appeared in America due to the Great Depression. Now she seems like an angle, doesn’t she?

Yet as a eugenicist, Sanger’s launch of “the N*gro project” contributed to the entrenched racism in the American society. What Sanger championed was “the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic”—in other words, to cut down the “unfit.”  Eugenics, in its own way, was already problematic. Though similar to natural selection that breeds out genes that are biologically disadvantageous, eugenics is different in that it embodies a man-made definition of “inferiority.” In other words, it is people themselves, usually those with immense wealth or social influence, who divide human beings into different hierarchies and decide who is worthy of being born. Anyone living in such system, including us ourselves, could be victimized just because one was born with less power and resources. In spite of this, with such standing point, Sanger could have promoted birth control plans regarding specific socio-economic classes in order to help populations that had less access to education and medical resources due to poverty. Yet, Sanger in 1939 initiated “the N*gro project,” targeting the entire race of African Americans, to assist them “gain better access to safe contraception and maintain birth control services in their community.”  Her choice revealed an embedded assumption that Black communities were generally in inferior living conditions and possibly her discrimination against the African American society. In concession, it is true that Sanger’s intention might not be as bad as it sounded. Further, several famous Black leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois supported her project, meaning that the contemporary Black society might have viewed her plan in a less negative light.  Even if the project might have been well-intended and supported by the community, however, it still negatively influenced the Black community through forming a system that had “control over the movements of the oppressed and [posed] restriction [on] their full participation in society.”  It easily infused the society with the false assumption of African American’s inferior status, which further created a vicious cycle where “Whites believed Blacks to be inferior, therefore [causing] white scientists [to] [believe] them inferior and their experiments [to] ‘[prove]’ them inferior.”  No matter what the starting point of the “the N*gro project” was, it ended up reinforcing racism in America, marking a “B” grade in Margaret Sanger’s transcript.

Therefore, Margaret Sanger was neither a saint nor an absolute villain. Rather, she was someone in between those two descriptions. She positively contributed to the society through encouraging women’s empowerment and meeting social needs during the Great Depression. Yet she harmed African Americans through launching a project that strengthened racist structures in the society.

Bibliography

"Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Family Planning." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed February 20, 2022. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4847a1.htm.

"Birth Control Organizations - National Committee on Federal Legislation on Birth Control." The Margaret Sanger Papers Project. Accessed February 20, 2022. https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/aboutms/organization_ncflbc/.

"Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project." The Newsletter. Accessed February 20, 2022. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/URLs_Cited/OT2018/18-483/18-483-1.pdf.

Fong, Melanie. "The Eugenics Movement: Some Insight into the Institutionalization of Racism." Issues in Criminology 9, no. 2: 89-115. Accessed February 20, 2022. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909709.

Pear, Robert. "Average Size of Household in U.S. Declines to Lowest Ever Recorded." The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/15/us/average-size-of-household-in-us-declines-to-lowest-ever-recorded.html.

 

Sandeen, Ernest R. "Christian Fundamentalism." Britannica. Accessed February 19, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/fundamentalism.

Sanger, Margaret. "Birth Control and Racial Betterment." Speech. Hazlet. Accessed February 20, 2022. http://www.hazlet.org/userfiles/31/Classes/1171/2%20-%20birth%20control%20and%20racial%20betterment%20-%20sanger%20excerpt.pdf?id=3242.

"The Morality of Birth Control." Speech presented in New York, November 18, 1921. American Rhetoric. Accessed February 20, 2022. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/Margaret%20Sanger%20-%20The%20Morality%20of%20Birth%20Control.pdf.

Tone, Andrea. "Contraceptive Consumers: Gender and the Political Economy of Birth Control in the 1930s." Journal of Social History 29, no. 3: 485-506. Accessed February 20, 2022. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3788942.

Wacker, Grant. "The Rise of Fundamentalism." Teacher Serve. Accessed February 20, 2022. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/fundam.htm.

+
x
Remember! This is just a sample.

You can order a custom paper by our expert writers

Order now
By clicking “Receive Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails.