Margaret Sanger gained worldwide renown, respect, and admiration for founding the American birth control movement and, later, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, as well as for developing and encouraging family planning efforts throughout the international community.
The sixth of 11 children in a poor Irish family, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) had seen her own mother die at the age of 49 as the result of tuberculosis contracted after too many pregnancies.
In the early 1910's, Sanger worked as a maternity nurse on the Lower East Side of New York, delivering babies in the homes of poor, mostly immigrant women. The women she nursed knew nothing of how to prevent pregnancy and, because of the "Comstock laws," could get no information from their doctors. Instead, they resorted to the illegal practitioners of five-dollar abortions, on whose tables many of them died.
"Tales," Sanger wrote, "were poured into my ears -- a baby born dead, great relief -- the death of an older child, sorrow but again relief of a sort -- the story told a thousand times of death from abortion and children going into institutions. I shuddered with horror as I listened to the details and studied the reasons back of them -- destitution linked with excessive childbearing. The waste of life seemed utterly senseless."
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