Author's Note: In order to give readers a better sense of Margaret Sanger's personality and voice, part of the story is written from her point of view. These parts of the story are written in italics. Also, I recognize that some of the videos in this post are from biased sources, but the information given in the videos is completely relevant to the research done in order to write the piece.

My eyes jolted awake as soon as I heard the sound of the keys jingling. After spending long, grueling nights in a small, one person cell with two other women beside me, I longed for a breath of fresh air, one free of the scent of human feces in its midst.

“Margaret Sanger, you are free to go,” the officer said, reading my name off of a list. To him, I was just that. Just another name on the list, complete with a vagina, the corridor that paves the way to populating the Earth. Oh, I’ll show him. I’ll show all of the men what it really means to be a woman, I thought to myself, rolling my eyes as I slipped past him, making my way out of the jail.

Margaret Sanger

Five days locked up gives one a lot of time to think. Weird thoughts sneak their way into the brain. While staring at the numerous creatures who called the cell their home, including roaches and rats, I almost envied them. They were not fighting for their rights; there was no need to. They could come and go as they pleased, slipping their way through cracks in the walls and holes in the ground. The world was theirs; their only enemy was big, strong human beings like me. Their lives were simple. Mine was not.
Besides pondering the very complex matter on the lives of these tiny creatures, I found myself encaptured in my hunger. I was so hungry. One loaf of bread divided up among the prisoners in each cell at precisely 11 o’clock each morning just wasn’t enough. We were starving. And it wasn’t just for food, either.

***

Death is a controversial topic, to put it in the simplest of terms. Since we have been brought into this world, we have been faced with a variety of forms of death. Don’t believe me? Well, hear me out. When you were just a young child, rolling around in the grass or walking along the sidewalk, you encountered dead plants or you saw a bug and thought it would be a great idea to smoosh it. When you were in elementary school, you began to hear about killings, some of which were afflicted on young children just like you trying to learn how to add, subtract, and multiply. In middle school, you heard about the person at another school who took their own life. In high school, more and more people kept taking their lives; maybe sometimes, you wondered whether you should take your own. You continued to learn about the massive deaths that have swept nations through war and famine, and even though it was just another history lesson, you couldn’t help but feel pain for those whose lives were lost.

Following high school, death’s face never left your door. It is the overarching enemy of life, creeping around and taunting you at every corner. Although it should not necessarily be controversial, it is. It perhaps may be one of the most controversial topics of today. We can ask ourselves, despite how common death really is in our lives, what forms of death are “appropriate”? Who deserves to die? Who doesn’t? It’s a tricky subject, but it has been answered in many contexts, even if we haven’t quite noticed it.

***

No matter how many times I tried to explain it, they didn’t seem to get it. There was no denying the issues at hand. Sex leads to pregnancy. Pregnancy leads to babies, some dead, some alive. Babies lead to children. Children lead to mouths to feed, bills to pay, and families broken. So why not prevent it?
This is what I tell anyone who comes my way with concern for my beliefs. I witnessed this pain firsthand. My own mother went through 18 pregnancies, only 11 of which made it into this world alive. As she died of tuberculosis at the young age of 50, there seems to be nothing more to life that she experienced other than the pain and agony of childbirth.

On one occasion, I was there to help her give birth. I will never forget her yelling and screaming, almost as if she was being murdered.

“Margaret!!!” she yelled over and over. I could hear my heart pounding in my chest. At this point in my life, I was just a young girl, and had none of the nursing training I have now under my belt. I could feel sweat dripping from my body as the entire length of my arms and the front of my shirt became splattered with blood.

“Push, momma,” I said to her anytime she yelled; I was desperate to get the baby out of her body, not only to end her pain and agony, but to end mine as well. It was a crime scene. My mother was the perpetrator, the baby was the victim. She was bringing yet another innocent child into this world that would have to face the agony I was witnessing before me. Today, looking back on this traumatic event, I know it is my duty to prevent other women from digging themselves into the same ditch.

There was one woman in particular who I came across years ago, when I was working as a nurse. She came to me with endless tears streaming down her face; she looked like she hadn’t stopped crying for weeks on end. She begged for my help, describing the morbid details of how she used a metal hanger to take the life of the unborn baby in her womb. It was the first time she inflicted this pain on herself to avoid having a fourth child, as she and her husband barely had enough to support themselves and the three children they already had.

“What should I do?” she asked me, unable to contain the waterfall of tears flowing from her eyes. “I can’t live like this anymore. I can’t see my children suffer. I can’t bring another child into this world.”

I gave her the best advice I could, which wasn’t much at the time, and sent her on her way. The next time I saw her, she was bleeding out onto raggedy old sheets that looked like they were 100 years old. She had gotten pregnant a fifth time, and had again ended the baby’s life; however, this time, she wouldn’t be so lucky as to survive herself. I attempted to alleviate her pain as much as I could, knowing this was the end of her life. Holding her hands across her chest, I held back my own tears.

“I am so sorry, sweetie, that you are leaving this world in such an unfortunate, disgusting way,” I whispered to her, as she took her last breath. In that moment, I knew I couldn’t let another woman die in such an evil, miserable way ever again.

***

On the boat heading to England from the United States, the fire burning inside of me was stronger than ever. Law enforcement was out to get me, and the men of the church and the disappointing politicians would do anything to see me locked behind bars. While most would perceive my trek across the ocean as the beginning of my defeat, it was far from that.

My publication, “The Woman Rebel”, is far from harmful to the public. I know I am not the only one who wishes to spark the change that is long overdue for the women of America. That fire inside of me, that is the activation of the once slumbering spirit to revolt that is inside every single woman. I wrote in my publication nothing but the truth.

***

The “change” Sanger was aiming to spark was far from the innocent change one would expect; and she wasn’t alone. Eugenics, according to “Introduction: Eugenics and the Modern World” of the Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics was not simply limited to one area of the world. Today, we think of eugenics as being associated with one thing: racism. In addition, we think of Auschwitz as a prime example of eugenics taking place firsthand. However, this definition is far too limited.

In America, it all started with Darwin’s idea of natural selection that catapulted into other ideas of what would then be titled “Eugenics”. Galton, one of the original supporters for eugenics and a cousin of Darwin himself, took the idea of natural selection and transformed it into an entirely new and utterly shocking idea, that eugenics was the “preferable alternative to natural selection among humans.”

The foundation of eugenics in the eyes of Galton was this: that while “Natural Selection rests upon excessive production and wholesale destruction, Eugenics [rests upon] bringing no more individuals into the world than can be properly cared for, and those of only the best stock” (Bashford and Philippa).

So, how exactly did this idea develop into an entire movement that people like Margaret Sanger advocated for? What did eugenics look like, in action, in America? First, it was all about promoting marriage among individuals where reproduction was seen as desirable. Galton himself “envisioned a society in which the state aided the well-born in expanding their families and… such state aid materialized rapidly.” This idea may sound familiar to you; this is because this was the idea that groups of people like the Nazis looked to when aiming for a “better race”.

Putting eugenics into action started with things like arranged marriages; in extreme cases, certain Americans went so far as to prohibit marriages among certain individuals - not just due to race, but also due to things like “syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis, epilepsy, [and] alcoholism”. These don’t seem so far off; all of us want the greatest, healthiest society possible for our children to grow up in. However, the list goes even further to prohibit marriage among “mentally ill parties… and less specific conditions such as ‘criminality’ or sexual ‘tendencies’” (Bashford and Philippa). Choose to not follow these rules? You’re the enemy in the eyes of the state.

In the case of Sanger, and many other modern eugenicists today, race did, in fact, play a key role in modifying the human race. According to “Eugenics and the Science of Genetics” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, the idea that there was an inferior race was highly unpopular, but that didn’t mean that people completely rejected the idea of a superior race. There was a widespread belief among American and non-American scientists alike that “race crossings could produce genetically unbalanced and thus inferior hybrids.” Jon Alfred Mjøen, a scientist and eugenicist, often spoke to the public about his idea that “race interbreeding might lead to offspring with physical and mental qualities that were not well balanced.” His argument was on the basis of an experiment he did mixing different species of rabbits, resulting in a mixture of upright and hanging ears (Roll‐Hansen).

After Nazism and World War II, the word “eugenics” was deeply avoided, but the idea itself would prevail, and still exists in our country today. From Sanger to Trump, the idea of promoting the superior race has yet to fade.

It’s no surprise that the idea hasn’t faded given that it has been an indelible feature of our culture since its beginnings. Take an older text that many of us are familiar with: Plato’s Republic. Socrates imagines an ideal society, one where death is still inevitable, but looks very different from common beliefs today. But there is so much about our society today that we can learn from his work.

In Plato’s ideal society, Kallipolis, death is made out to be a good thing; one that should not be feared in any sense. Any negative sort of afterlife is eliminated completely; the gods are considered to be perfect in every way in this ideal society, despite the negative depictions of the gods in other works of the time. In the ideal society, “God is the cause only of good… the gods shall not be misrepresented” (Republic 52). This perfect depiction of the gods resulting in a perfect depiction of the afterlife is put in place, in part, to eliminate any fear of death. His principle was that “the good man will not consider death terrible to any other good man who is his comrade… therefore he will not sorrow for his departed friend as though he had suffered anything terrible (Republic 241).

This has a direct connection to Margaret Sanger’s beliefs in support of abortion. Sanger had a distinct vision for who should and who shouldn’t be alive in her ideal society. In a way, through opening a variety of clinics in very well thought out areas that were predominantly poor, Sanger was trying to convince those living in the neighborhoods to either get on birth control or go through with an abortion. In Woman and the New Race, she said herself that “[we should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring” (ch. 6). These beliefs, however, were not widely advertised to her target populations. She used “colored ministers” with “engaging personalities” in order to deliver “the most successful educational approach to the Negro population” (Woman, Morality, and Birth Control 12). This was her sneaky way of cutting down on the number of births to these poor families, who tended to be people of color. Just like Plato altered his people’s idea of the afterlife in order to advertise death as being a “good” thing, Sanger deliberately placed clinics and distributed pamphlets about birth control and abortion to target groups of people to attempt to control the influx of certain groups of people into the United States. While Sanger was more so advertising that it is ethical to refrain from bringing certain people into this world, both Plato and Sanger are attempting to affect a mass society’s mindset on when death, or lack of life thereof, is considered to be “okay”.

***

I feel the waves moving the boat to and fro, listening to their ferocious power thumping against each other as they rise and fall. I look down at a copy of my publication, The Woman Rebel, the one I wrote knowing the possible consequences of the words in my mind being permanently copied on a piece of paper and distributed to the women in need. I flip to a random page, and smile as I whisper the powerful words to myself.

“Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously,” I whisper, remembering the exhilaration I had felt while writing these words. “Because I believe she must consciously disturb and destroy and be fearless in its accomplishment. Because I believe in freedom, created through individual action.”

I let my voice drift off, my mind drifting away into the abyss of endless hope and possibility. I see the docks in the distance, bright lights leading the captain to our final destination. But I knew, deep down, this was only a pit stop for me. I would return to America and finish what was started. The fire was still burning.

***

The law that prohibited the distribution of texts that included the majority of Sanger’s pamphlets, including The Woman Rebel, was known as Comstock Law or the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act. This law, however, held a very broad definition of what exactly “obscene” meant.

Originally, according to The Social History of Crime and Punishment, Anthony Comstock, upon moving to New York City, was disheartened by what he believed to be “obscene,” which included novels and pamphlets like pornography. Being a Christian member of the Young Men’s Christian Association, he took a huge stand against abortion and birth control. His goal was to control what was able to be sent to and from the post office, because he believed “the privacy entailed there allowed people to transmit morally offensive materials” (Caron 313).

The Comstock Law passed without argument, mainly due to the fact that Comstock promoted the law as gearing more toward “offensive” and “dangerous” material to young people, like pornography. However, underneath it all, it was essentially anything related to birth control or abortion of any kind that he was aimed to stop.

Arguably, however, Comstock could be considered a eugenist himself in some sense. Underlying the passing of the law was the idea that whites were being “inundat[ed] by increased fertility among the lower classes, especially among immigrants considered racially and morally inferior” (Caron 313). By passing this law, it could discourage these immigrants from wanting to have children in his country. While his way of eugenics was different from the baby avoiding and baby killing approach Sanger and many others held, it was eugenics nonetheless.

Map of the legislation status of eugenical sterilization during Sanger's time

Additionally, there are numerous stories that feature eugenics available on bookshelves today. One of these is The Giver by Lois Lowry, a typical assigned text to middle schoolers everywhere. Looking back upon this text now, I shiver at the ideas presented in the book, and cannot believe middle schoolers are encouraged to read them!

However, similar to both Plato and Sanger, it is in this ideal society where death, specifically by euthanasia in this case, is displayed to people in a very positive, uplifting light. First off, the name given to euthanasia is far less scary and intimidating in The Giver than the word we use in our society: Release. For the elderly, Release is seen as a great cause for celebration. Once one is too old to contribute to society in the way they were expected to contribute, they are Released to Elsewhere. There is no knowledge of the people as to where “Elsewhere” is or what it necessarily looks like, but just the name sounds much more ambiguous with far less baggage than if we were to call it Heaven or Hell.

This Release, however, is not always a cause for celebration; for example, if twins are born, the smaller one is Released while the bigger one is allowed to live long enough to be assigned to a family. Criminals are also Released as punishment. It is interesting how death, in the society portrayed by Lowry, although given one overarching title (Release), is used both as a cause for celebration and a cause for sadness. It is fairly obvious that the death of an elderly is far less sad (yet still very sad) than the death of a newborn baby. However, the people do not necessarily see it in this way, because it is covered up under one term that sounds way less scary than “Death”.

Sanger and eugenicists holding similar values have a way of covering the scariness of it all up from the people as well. There are many ways that this is done. For example, it can be done through birth control, which prevents unnecessary babies from ever being conceived (think about it, these magic methods are literally controlling birth itself). But people like Sanger stray from using the term “birth control” too often. Instead, they use terms like “the pill” or “plan B” to describe acts of deliberately preventing sperm and egg, and therefore life, from being conceived. What could possibly go wrong with a simple, tiny pill? If women are taking it everyday, just like their vitamins, there seems to be no harm involved.

***

Oh, how exhilarating England was. A free woman, no longer bound by the ties of an awful marriage, with the freedom to have sex with whomever she pleases. England was a place full of opportunity, and sex, might I add. Throughout my time here, I have found myself in the beds of some wonderful men and sucked up in books and research unlike no other.

Of the people I have built friendships and shared my knowledge with, Havelock Ellis is among the most wonderful. This is a man who understands women more than any man I have ever met before. He is a proud soldier of the fight for Birth Control,  a term that I coined shortly before my trip to England, which includes any form of contraception to prevent women from getting pregnant. In fact, I have learned a lot from his work, and believe that others would benefit greatly from reading it as well.

Among my list of close friends from England includes not only him, but the wonderful Marie Stopes. I have shared with them all that I know about contraceptives and the future of Birth Control, and they have shared their knowledge with me as well. The two of them are both actively eugenists, and some of their arguments are very convincing. When I am with them, I question whether or not I fully identify with their beliefs, but this is an issue I will deal with later. As far as they know, I am wholeheartedly alongside them in the fight toward purifying the human race.

***

Sanger’s friendship with Marie Stopes was extremely important to her cause; specifically because Marie Stopes was a leader in the development in birth control and clinics in Europe. In her pamphlet, “Equipping a Birth Control Clinic,” she outlines the procedures and necessities for a birth control clinic in Europe.
Despite this amazing feat of making sure women are comfortable and given the proper treatment and care, there are pieces of her pamphlet that outline her eugenist tendencies, including comments such as: “The poor women coming for birth control advice are likely to be accompanied by babies in perambulators or young children” (4). Her main goal for creating a pamphlet outlining clinic requirements is to ensure that poor women, women that are having too many babies that threaten white culture in the eugenists’ eyes, are flocking to the clinics in large numbers.

Even with eugenist comments like these, that Sanger most likely ate up, a pamphlet like this was exactly what was needed from Sanger in America to better future clinics in America, especially the Planned Parenthood clinics she would found later on. Everything put in this pamphlet was aimed at “relax[ing] the patient’s tension and make her at peace and in a normal state of mind and body” (11). In reality, it was all a show in order to ease the fact that life versus death was being deliberately controlled.

So far, we have explored the idea of death itself, in the sense that there are many ways in which society greatly shapes our views on death in a very sneaky way. However, there is also a much more obvious idea to explore that affects who we are on an everyday basis. In our society, what forms of death are considered “appropriate”? I am sure, after reading that question, there are already thoughts that came to mind.

The two texts previously mentioned certainly give an idea for their ideal societies that euthanasia, if necessary, is considered okay in terms of the way to kill someone. In fact, in The Giver almost every single human being ends their life through a lethal injection, unless by the slight chance that an accident occurs and the person dies before they can become Released. Sanger’s own view is that it is okay to prevent babies from being conceived and even to kill babies who have already been conceived. In all of these scenarios, however, there are limitations on who is to be killed and who is not.

In Plato’s Republic, doctors are trained to only treat people who are healthy enough to be cured; that is, they have a single, curable ailment. In addition, anyone who has a mental illness of any sort that cannot be cured are immediately put to death. In The Giver, if a baby is born too small and not healthy enough to one day benefit society, they are Released. Once an elderly becomes unable to contribute readily to society, they are also Released. In Sanger’s point of view, if a family is unfit to raise their children in the “right” way, so that one day their children will benefit society in the best ways possible, they are encouraged either to not have children to begin with or to kill their child once conceived. What do all of these scenarios have in common? Killing the unfit.

Sadly, but truly, if there is an individual who cannot “contribute” to the society in the way that those in power see fit, they are simply not worthy of being alive.

***

After learning more than I ever imagined throughout my time in Europe, I longed to bring my knowledge back to America to continue my fight for the future of women. The right time would never come, but I decided to press my luck and took the next step at returning to America after the death of Anthony Comstock, one of my biggest enemies throughout this fight.

My return, though welcomed by many of my supporters, was unexpected (to say the  least). The ones whom I thought were on my side from before had left, forming their own birth control association that they did not want to be affiliated with a history of crime. I was left on my own to sift through the struggle of finding a new group of friends whom I could trust would agree with my cause.

On top of this, I found myself grieving over the death of my beloved Peggy, my sweet four-year-old girl. But the horrible pain inside me only pushed me even further in my fight to spread my beliefs across the country. I spoke to a variety of groups, including Urban League, Junior League, and women of the Ku Klux Klan. As long as they had ears and wanted to use them to hear me, I spoke.

I aimed to make my wonderful friends back in Europe proud, for I greatly admired their hard work, dedication, and intelligence. I strongly believe that, until each individual has the ability to make their own decisions regarding their reproductive activity, our race cannot continue to get better.

Speaking to the women of the Ku Klux Klan was one of the highlights of my career. They were among the most eager to hear me speak, and I felt extremely knowledgeable and readily able to display knowledge that they would approve of after learning from my eugenist friends back in Europe.

I agree wholeheartedly with women like these about purifying the wonderful white race we have now. This race is at risk of being harmed by the multitudes of babies being born to people of poverty. Now, I have nothing against my friends of other races, but it is a known fact that it is people of these races that are continually giving birth to babies when they have no resources, or rights, for that matter, in bringing these babies into this world.

In addition, in order to ensure that the future of our race is as bright as it could possibly be, we must encourage the use of Birth Control specifically in the ill and feeble-minded and the mentally and physically defective. Some of the greatest people I have met are taking steps toward a race cleansed of all impurities, and I believe America has every obligation to do the same. As our very own Theodore Roosevelt said himself, if we choose not to do this, we are committing our very own “race suicide.”

As I wrote in a letter directly to Theodore Roosevelt, who greatly believes that the multiplying of impoverished races could be greatly harming our white culture, “there is no greater national waste than the spawning of the slums, with its resultant high maternal and infant mortality rates, child labor and prostitution.”

There is a statistic I like to share with those that disagree with the eugenist point of view of using birth control to control the amount of births of the racially inferior. And that is, that for the entirety of France, 86.6% of the children of rich parents reach twenty, which is much greater than the 48.6% of children of poor parents. France is easily comparable to our own country, because the poor woman is equally as handicapped in rearing her offspring as the poor women here. Nobody can argue with statistics.

***

Actual letter written by Margaret Sanger referencing "The Negro Project"

 As I stepped foot into one of the newly remodeled Planned Parenthood clinics, nostalgia washed over me. Although that fire inside me was still burning, it had dimmed a little since before. While I had gained so much, I had been knocked down many more times.

With the hustle and bustle of doctors, nurses, and patients around me, I am reminded of the little clinic I opened on 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn. This was a strategic location, similar to the later location that would be opened in Harlem, that allowed as many immigrants in poverty to benefit from the services we offered.

Knowing just how dangerous and perfectly illegal our endeavor was, my sister and another friend of mine went into this project with strong minds, ready for anything.

What I truly believe drew hundreds of women through our doors the very first day was our pamphlet, which read, “Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them? DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT.” For just 10 cents, women could come and speak with our nurses about pregnancy prevention. The word spread like wildfire, and we were amazed at our success. Until it was over.

We were helping a woman who seemed desperate for answers. She was one of the more curious patients, seemingly knowledgeable already, but wanting the reassurance from my women and I that she was on the right track. Turns out, her curiosity really did kill the cat; she was an undercover police-woman, posing as a patient. We had been caught.

Me, being awfully stubborn, opened the clinic up exactly two more times before I was evicted from the premises.

That was when I found myself locked tightly in my jail cell, unable to breathe a breath of fresh air, so close to my cellmate I could tell you where all the freckles and scars on her skin lay from memory. That was when the fire was the strongest, when all of the sensations in my body, from starvation to hunger to filth multiplied together to make the beast of the woman I would become.

“Margaret Sanger, you are free to go,” the officer said, reading my name off of a list, clearly uninterested in his boring task at hand. Little did he know, in that moment, he was responsible for letting the beast free to continue her work at taking over the world.