Poor Women, Big Families

Tags

activism reproductive rights, Children, family limitations, Poverty

The International Aspects of Birth Control – Volume 1 – edited by Margaret Sanger, contains multiple articles from activists around the world about the struggle in their country for Birth Control rights.

While transcribing the 1925 book edited by Margaret Sanger titled The Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conferences: International Aspects of Birth Control I couldn’t help but be surprised by the amount of opposition faced by the original pioneers for Birth Control. Mrs. H. G. Hill, the president of the Alameda County Birth Control League in 1924, sums up the resistance when she wrote that, “There still exists in the minds of the masses a great deal of prejudice,  misunderstanding and indifference in regard to our work.” As all civil rights movements have shown us, sometimes the ignorance of the public proves to be the hardest obstacle to overcome. In response, Margaret Sanger was avid about publishing articles, pamphlets, and giving lectures.

For example, not everyone understood the need to limit big families. It was preached in Christian churches, which dominated the culture’s popular view, that “children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” Similar verses were used against the fight for Birth Control to prove that the movement was anti-God and anti-morals.

Jean H. Baker’s Biography of Margaret Sanger

Sanger was under no illusion that poor women with big families were always blessed. In Jean H. Baker’s autobiography of Sanger, she talks about how Sanger’s mother “had given birth to eleven children in twenty-two years and suffered seven miscarriages. She had been pregnant eighteen times in thirty years of marriage.” A few years after her last child was born, Sanger’s mother died of tuberculosis.

My mother died at 48,” wrote Sanger in sentences that needed no further explanation to make her point. “My father lived to be 80.’

Despite the toll pregnancy and miscarriages took on women, popular view still held that children were blessings and to prevent one would be to prevent the other. One of the best responses to such a claim comes from Maria Kirstine Dorothea Jensen, known better as Thit Jensen. Jensen was a Danish writer in the early twentieth century who fought for women’s rights and founded an Organization for Sexual Awareness in Denmark. In one of her articles she wrote about a physician who openly bashed the idea of women with the freedom to chose when to have children:

When I first lectured about Birth Control, it happened that a physician for women interfered – I think he was afraid it might spoil his practice, if there were not to be so many sick and half-killed women, when they finished child-bearing in a reasonable time. He had the nerve to go on to my platform and try to take over my audience – of course, he didn’t know me, he talked the most perfect hymn of cheap sentimentality about the poor good mother – the darling mother who gave birth to her sixteenth child and happily took it to her heart and it was wonderful.

And of course, you know an audience; he appealed to their childishness and they applauded him. I could not stand that, exactly at my start, so I got onto the platform and told him just what I happened to know:

‘In your clinic, this very noon, a poor woman died after having borne her ninth child. She had been your patient through several years; you had told her that if she were to bear another child, she would die. You didn’t tell her how to avoid it, you only sent her home to her husband, knowing that the law forbade her not to live with him. She became pregnant, and she died, promptly, as you told her. But…who killed her? You, who had the knowledge, or she who knew nothing. And, tell me please, if she had been a rich woman, belonging to society, and your patient, would she ever have had to die from nine small children? Certainly not, because then she would never have had so many.’

The audience exploded, being poor people most of them.

He never answered a word.

The audience’s opinion changed rather quickly when they heard the truth; women were dying unnecessarily from their excessive pregnancies, particularly women who were poor and didn’t understand their options. Ignorant claims about traditional families and the public’s lack of knowledge kept women like Margaret Sanger and Thit Jensen fighting, lecturing and publishing for as long as they did.

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For full article written by Jensen see:

http://beta.birthcontrol-international.org/items/show/14

For full Alameda County Birth Control League article see:

http://beta.birthcontrol-international.org/items/show/196

January 2, 1923 First Legal Birth Control Clinic Opens in the U.S.

17 West 16th Street

On January 2, 1923, Margaret Sanger opened the first legal birth control clinic in America, The Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB). In 1916, Sanger opened a trial clinic in Brooklyn to challenge New York State law. She was arrested and served a term of 30 days. The case was appealed and in 1918, the Court of Appeals ruled that a licensed physician could provide “information for the cure or prevention of disease.” This decision provided a precedent for physicians in New York State. In accordance with this decision, in 1923, Margaret Sanger financed and organized the BCCRB under the medical direction of a female physician to advise and instruct patients. By the 1930s, the BCCRB served well over 10,000 patients each year and trained thousands of doctors and nurses. In “The Practice of Contraception”(Sanger, M. and Hannah Stone, 1931), Dr. Hannah Stone defined the functions of the BCCRB as,

(1)To advise and instruct women and properly equip them in contraceptive knowledge; (2) To evaluate the worth of various contraceptive methods; (3) To carry on clinical research in contraceptive methods and technique; (4) To instruct physicians who may desire to observe and learn the methods and technique of contraception; (5) To collect and correlate the many data concerning the social, economic, medical and sexual lives of our patients.” (200)

In the 1930s the BCCRB was the most important birth control organization for clinic activists. The first priority of the BCCRB was to treat patients but it also tested and reported effectiveness of contraceptives, analyzed and reported on patients’ experiences, created instructional literature, and provided training for doctors and nurses. The BCCRB also established a nationwide network of affiliated clinics and supervised numerous field projects in the rural south. Clinic staff worked in close association with Sanger’s National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control (NCFLBC), and promoted the inclusion of contraceptive instruction in public health programs throughout the country. The clinic’s detailed follow-up work with patients and careful record-keeping enabled medical researchers, contraceptive manufacturers, and associated clinics to study the effectiveness and safety of particular forms of birth control, including the diaphragm and jelly, condom, and the rhythm method.

Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York

The BCCRB sought to operate within the constraints of New York State law, which stated that doctors could prescribe contraceptives only for the prevention or cure of a disease, including tuberculosis, syphilis, and various types of psychoses. The BCCRB broadly interpreted the law to allow parents interested in spacing their children to be eligible for contraceptive information, while treating countless other patients under a catchall of medical indications, such as general debility. The Bureau was challenged on several occasions for illegally dispensing birth control devices and information, most notably in April of 1929 when police raided the clinic, seized records and equipment, and arrested Medical Director Dr. Hannah Stone, along with four other staff members. A judge later dismissed the charges citing insufficient evidence. The raid generated significant publicity for the clinic and helped secure long-sought support from New York’s medical establishment, which emphatically condemned the police action, called for a return of all patient records, and lent credibility to the work of the clinic.

In 1933 the BCCRB participated in a test case to challenge federal obscenity laws. Sanger arranged for a package of pessaries to be sent from Japan to the Bureau’s medical director, Dr. Hannah Stone. The package was seized by customs officials. After an extended trial (U.S. v. One Package) and appeal process, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 2nd District ruled in favor of releasing the package in 1936, stating that physicians could circulate and prescribe contraceptives and contraceptive information in the interests of the health and general well-being of their patients. As founder and director, Sanger managed the internal operations of the BCCRB as well as fund-raising, public relations and the pursuit of new research and testing. She was more intimately involved with the administration of the BCCRB than with any of the other organizations she established or directed during her long career. By the early 1930s, however, she left the daily management of the Bureau largely in the hands of its medical director, Dr. Hannah Stone, while concentrating her efforts on fund-raising activities and her campaign for federal birth control legislation.

The BCCRB was first located at 104 Fifth Avenue (across the hall from the American Birth Control League). In 1926 the clinic moved to 46 West 15th Street. In 1930, the clinic moved to 17 W 16th Street, which is now a  National Historic Landmark. In 1940 the BCCRB became the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, and in 1973 took the name Planned Parenthood of New York City.  In 1991, PPNYC moved to 26 Bleecker Street and in 1997 PPNYC’s Margaret Sanger Center was relocated clinical facilities to 26 Bleecker Street.

For more information see:

The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger Volume 2.

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/aboutms/organization_bccrb.html

Birth Control on Main Street, Cathy Moran Hajo

Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira: a Prodigy, a Champion & the Tragedy

One of the more interesting individuals I have been able to research during my time at MSPP has been Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira.

I came across her name as I was editing a chapter in the upcoming volumes. As I searched for her online to confirm the spelling of her name, of course, her Wikipedia page came up.

And of course, I clicked on it.

Within the first few lines of her article it states, “By the time she was 17 years old and had became internationally known, her mother shot her to death.”[1]

Wait, what???

Talk about cliff hanger. Obviously, I had to pursue further.

Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira, age & date taken unknown (Carmona, Ángela, Rosas y espinas. Álbum de las españolas del siglo XX, Planeta, 2004).

Hildegart was born on December 9, 1914 to Dona Aurora Rodriguez. Dona Aurora is reported to have told friends that she wanted a child to reflect beauty and intelligence. She therefore chose a man that she believed was ideal to reproduce these characteristics. She also noted that she only saw him once.[2]

Hildegart would become a prodigy guided by her mother’s close supervision. At age 13, Hildegart would enroll at the law school at Complutense University of Madrid, becoming a lawyer at 17.

Before 16, she had published various books and pamphlets, all focused on sexual reform. These works, including Sexo y Amor, La Revolucion Sexual and Educación Sexual, were successfully circulating in Madrid. [3]

Hildegart’s publication, Educación Sexual (Sexual Education), 1931 (Cultura Galega).

For Hildegart, the problem that was plaguing society was the sexual problem. It was the “terrible epidemic” of large families creating unhappy homes from which “all sorts of evils radiate.”[4]

This sexual problem would be solved by a sexual revolution. Who is it that we know was heading their own sexual revolution in the United States?

It was in October of 1931, at age 16, when Hildegart wrote to Margaret Sanger. Hildegart explained her accomplishments to Sanger, as well as her admiration for the work that Sanger has done in the United States, even mentioning that she has a photo of Sanger in her sitting room. [5] Hildegart was turning to Sanger to learn the American customs and laws regarding sex reform:

But the special motive of my writing to you is to beg your help for me in the work which I have enterprised, I would desire to know the laws, the propositions, the ideas and the books which are given to publicity in all countries but specially in United States of America where you can so well know the development of people in this interesting object.[6]

The correspondence between the two women would continue, however, there was another key character in these conversations; Havelock Ellis.

In a letter to Ellis, Sanger seems somewhat stunned and in disbelief about the prodigy from Spain, explaining:

I loved the jumps she made! Like a race horse run wild.[7]

At the beginning of December that year, Sanger would respond to Hildegart’s eager request by sending her literature on the sex and contraceptive movements in the United States. However, it was Ellis who would become enthralled with his “Spanish lawyer girl” calling her one of the “wonders of the world.”[8]

Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira, age & date unknown (Cultura Galega).

It would be Ellis who would piece together the wondrous story of Hildegart’s childhood. In 1933, Ellis published a profile, “The Red Virgin,” on the young woman.[9] She was able to read by the age of 22 months and by 2, she had good handwriting. Ellis described Hildegart’s careful instruction by her mother, which included sexual education.

Hildegart would write to Ellis that she was a eugenic child and that her mother had a master plan designed for Hildegart.[10] This master plan was carefully regulated as Hildegart’s mother was always with her.

Her mother is reported to have constantly reminded Hildegart to “remember [her] mission, love is only passing.”[11]

Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira (La madre ejemplar).

Ellis, seemingly taken with Hildegart, was also intrigued by Hildegart’s mother and her methods of childrearing and instruction. To him, Aurora was a “new mother of today,” being thirty-one at her child’s birth and remaining “strong and youthful in spirit” to undertake the careful education of her daughter.[12]

Hildegart’s education didn’t stop after her law degree. In a letter to Sanger, Hildegart explains how she is studying medicine to gain knowledge of the how contraceptives work. She also expresses how she wants to begin a birth control clinic movement in Spain and therefore requests information from Sanger.[13]

Sanger, flattered that Hildegart continuously sought her input and resources, responds:

Your marvelous accomplishment is splendid; now that you have a new Government, you should have Birth Control Clinics all over Spain. They should be established and all instruction to working women and mothers given my women doctors(if possible)…I wish you would become a part of our international work and form a center of information in Spain.[14]

Well, Hildegart, accomplished and ambitious, takes this to heart.

In March, Hildegart invited Sanger to Spain to visit the World League conference. Hildegart had formed the Spanish chapter of the World League for Sexual Reform; Liga Mundial Para la Reforma Sexual.[15]

Ellis, however, was concerned about Hildegart’s ambition of organizing an international conference in Madrid.

In a letter to Sanger, Ellis writes that though Hildegart is “wonderfully accomplished and energetic, she is still so young and inexperienced in conference organization.” He also mentions that her youth could cause jealousy amongst other attendees, in particular the men.[16]

However, Sanger encouraged Hildegart to proceed with hosting a conference.

Hildegart, while pursuing so many projects, told Sanger she would do her best to arrange for the conference.

This was the last correspondence between the two women.

On June 9^th, while Hildegart was asleep, her mother shot her four times.

Eleven months later, in June 1934, Aurora was found guilty of murder. She is described as having been “calm and collected” in the courtroom.

I knew she was going to run away with him, so I killed her. She was too good, too beautiful. She had a mission on this earth but it was not matrimony.

She would die in an asylum in 1955.

There are various ideas behind her mother’s motivation. One recurring idea is that Hildegart was intending to leave her mother. Her mother, unable to cope with her daughter leaving her, killed her.

Some claim that Hildegart had met a Catalan politician and deputy to the mayor in Barcelona. He had encouraged Hildegart to separate from her dominating mother. Aurora, having found Hildegart’s letters to the politician, killed her daughter to avoid their separation.

Others claim that she was planning to travel to England in order to visit Ellis or H.G. Wells.

The story of the young prodigy Hildegart remains, however, so do the questions surrounding her untimely passing.

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[1] “Hildegart Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira,” Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia, accessed: July 18, 2013.

[2] Allen, Jay, “Mother Slays Daughter Who Leads Women,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 10, 1933.

[3] Sinclair, Alison, “The World League for Sexual Reform in Spain: Founding, Infighting, and the Rold of Hildegart Rodriguez.” Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol. 12, No. 1 Jan. 2003: 98-109.

[4] Havelock Ellis, “The Red Virgin,” The Adelphi Vol. 6, No. 3 June 1933: 175-179.

[5] The Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 19:1251.

[6] The Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 19:1233.

[7] The Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 06:0517.

[8]  The Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 05:0312.

[9] The nickname, the Red Virgin, was a name given to Hildegart by comrades (Havelock Ellis, “The Red Virgin,” The Adelphi Vol. 6, No. 3 June 1933: 175-179.)

[10] Ibid.

[11] Allen, Jay, “Mother Slays Daughter Who Leads Women,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 10, 1933.

[12] Havelock Ellis, “The Red Virgin,” The Adelphi Vol. 6, No. 3 June 1933: 175-179.

[13] The Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 19:1265.

[14] The Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 19:1242.

[15] The Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 19:1222.

[16] The Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, LCM 05:0366.

Sanger & Wright: Drama in the Birth Control World?

Tags

birth control, Helena Rosa Wright, IPPF, margaret sanger

My interest in the Margaret Sanger project began after writing a paper for my History of Biotechnology class. I decided to write my unit paper on how the advent of the birth control pill led to the challenge of who was in control of reproduction.

Where would I look?

This is where that Google search box in the upper right-hand corner of my computer came in handy. I searched ‘Margaret Sanger’ and the first site to come up was the Margaret Sanger Papers Project.

This initial inspiration led me to conduct research on the birth control movement in England. While doing research at the British Library and the Wellcome Library, I came across several pamphlets and books written by a Helena Rosa Wright. As my previous exposure to the history of birth control had mainly focused on the movement in the US, I didn’t recognize the importance of this name. Eventually, my research would revolve around the ideals of Wright.

Now as I sit here working at the Margaret Sanger Papers project I wonder, did these two women ever meet?

Fortunately, the collections at the Project responded to my question: yes, they did meet and on several occasions.

I wanted to know more, so I asked a more difficult question: How did these two birth control advocates interact?

This question would be much more difficult to answer. I’ve spent the majority of my day looking over reports from IPPF conferences that they both attended, research reports done by colleagues and the correspondence between the two women in order to lace together their relationship.

Firstly though, I believe some background information on Wright is necessary.

Photo of Helena Wright, date taken unknown (Patricia St. Ledger).

In 1915, Helena Rosa Wright (née Lowenfeld) graduated as a doctor from the London Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women. Not long afterwards, she began her training in gynecology. During the 1920’s Wright spent time as a missionary associate professor of gynecology in China with her husband, Peter Wright. After returning to London, she worked at the Women’s Welfare Center in Telford Road where she encouraged the center to focus on contraceptive services and education. She began to speak at conferences concerning the effects of sex and contraceptive education. Eventually, those who were voluntarily partaking in promoting sex and contraceptive education, along with Wright, formed the National Birth Control Association. Wright was one of the individuals responsible for the formation of the International Committee on Planned Parenthood (would become the International Planned Parenthood Federation). In 1951, Wright would be elected as treasurer of the IPPF.

Alright, there are some basic details. Now to get into what might be some drama.

Wright first met Sanger at a conference on International Birth Control in Zurich. From the research that I have examined, Wright admired Sanger and her work.[1] Sanger, in a letter to Clinton Chance, praises Wright’s work on sex and contraceptive education.[2]

Okay, that seems like a good start. This also seems like a good place to discuss what the two activists had in common.

The simplest way to look at it is that both women wanted access for women to contraceptives. Both women understood that the access to contraceptives would improve women’s health.

Helena Wright lecturing to midwives in Warsaw & using her model of the female sex organs, 1957 (photographer unknown).

Furthermore, both Wright and Sanger advocated for greater understanding of sexual expression. Sanger would publish Woman and the New Race and Wright would publish Sex and Society. In both publications, the women discussed the necessity of individuals to understand and develop their sexual expression separate of its role in parenthood. Wright and Sanger also discuss how the conception of sex must be recreated. In both works, the dissociation of sex from pregnancy will lead to a new “social code” according to Wright or a new “sex morality” as stated by Sanger. [3][4]

Both advocates used similar terminology to describe the present conception of sex. Sanger described that society associated sex with being unclean and Wright explained that sexual pleasure had, for too long, been connected with guilt and was a dirty act to be practiced.[5][6]

So what would fundamentally change about the current conception of with the development of the new “social code/sex morality”?

Basically, sex would be separated from reproduction. Sanger described this as giving women the opportunity to “know themselves” and to “develop her love nature separate from and independent of her maternal nature.”[7]

For Wright and Sanger, the access to and knowledge of birth control were necessary to make these social changes. In Woman and the New Race (1920), Sanger acknowledged this access to knowledge:

To achieve this [new sex morality] she must have a knowledge of birth control.

One would think that Sanger and Wright would get on well. But they didn’t.  They ended up on different sides of some of the early ideological battles within the IPPF over its mission and makeup.

According to the biography, Freedom to Choose: The Life and Work of Dr. Helena Wright, Pioneer of Contraception, Evan’s describes Wright as an advocate of sex education. who was “less interested in controlling populations than in liberating women.”[8]

Using this statement, we can more clearly juxtapose Wright and Sanger.

Wright with Professor Karl-Heinz Mehlan (Right) and Professor Hans Harmsen (behind), at the twenty-first anniversary Conference of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Brighton 1973 (Pic Photos).

The IPPF was a collaboration between birth control groups that had very different ideas about what needed doing.  Most of the British contingent focused on opening birth control clinics, while many Americans were driven more towards arguments about overpopulation and were interested in contraceptive research.  The Dutch and the Scandinavians saw birth control as one part of a larger sex education movement. With limited resources, the IPPF had to decide what to do first. Intent on getting a functioning IPPF started, Sanger had little patience for the broader sex education and sex reform ideas of members like Wright and the Scandinavians.

The IPPF Medical Handbook had earlier described the uncontrolled population growth as the problem confronting the world “by the teeming millions of uneducated people to whom the conventional methods of contraception are beyond contraception.”

Here we can see that others like Margaret Sanger who held Neo-Malthusian views, believed contraceptive education and access to birth control were necessary to control population growth.

On the other hand, there were those, like Wright, who felt that population control was “one of the most dangerous and self-defeating ways of expressing our aims and intentions. Diminution of population numbers might be a result, not an aim.”

During the 1950s, the IPPF was struggling to gain government support. The IPPF had applied for membership as a consultative organization in the United Nations Economic and Social Council for work on population control and family planning. The opportunity, which did not succeed, pushed the IPPF’s sex reform goals to the side.

Sanger’s emphasis on population control versus Wright’s emphasis on sex education reform may have been to gain greater financial support from governments and foundations like the Rockefellers since their interest in birth control was mainly for goals of population control.

There also seemed to be personal issues between Sanger and Wright. In the same letter addressed to Clinton Chance, Sanger writes: “her [Wright] judgment is a little dipsy and not at all to be relied upon, as far as personalities are concerned.”[9]

Sanger goes on to criticize Wright’s position as treasurer of the IPPF, stating that her election was not based on her ability with finances but because there had previously been a dishonest person employed in the position. Sanger continued to explain that “we must have a person of more experience.”[10]

Clarence Gamble, date unknown (photographer unknown).

To further stress their relationship, Wright took issue with the Clarence Gamble. In the 1950’s, Gamble attempted to persuade western birth control workers to use cheaper contraceptives. At the 1952 3ICPP conference in Bombay, Wright challenged Gamble, explaining that this method was unacceptable as it injured the user. This, however, did not stop Gamble from continuing his work. [11]

In terms of the Wright-Sanger relationship, Sanger, who had for years received financial support from Gamble, defended his distribution of cheap methods of birth control.

Through all this, it seems that Wright and Sanger maintained a professional relationship. The correspondence between the two advocates remains cordial as it mostly pertains to business regarding the IPPF.

Hmmm…I may just be meddling.

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[1] Evans, B. Freedom to Choose: The Life and Work of Dr. Helena Wright, Pioneer of Contraception, London: Bodley Head, 1984, 208.

[2]  MS to Clinton Chance, Jan, 9, 1953 [MSM S40:650].

[3] Sanger, Margaret. Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentano’s, 1920.

[4] Wright, Helena. Sex and Society. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968, 72.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 90.

[7] Sanger, Margaret. Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentano’s, 1920.

[8] Evans, B. Freedom to Choose: The Life and Work of Dr. Helena Wright, Pioneer of Contraception, London: Bodley Head, 1984, 242.

[9] MS to Clinton Chance, Jan, 9, 1953 [MSM S40:650].

[10] Ibid.

[11] Linder, Doris H. Crusader for Sex Education: Elise Ottesen-Jensen (1886-1973) in Scandinavia and on the International Scene. London: University Press of America, 1996, 186.

Birth Control’s Past and Future

Tags

birth control pill, men, responsibility, women

In 2013, we live in a society where contraceptive use is common by both men and women. Margaret Sanger’s efforts had a lot to do with that, as she worked to make available and accessible a wide range of contraceptive methods.  But Sanger focused on woman-controlled contraceptives and was reluctant to trust men to take precautions.  What would Sanger say to the news that a birth control pill for men that has no major side effects could soon be available?

In an ideal society, no doubt, birth control would become the concern of the man as well as the woman. The hard, inescapable fact which we encounter to-day is that man has not only refused any such responsibility, but has individually and collectively sought to prevent woman from obtaining knowledge by which she could assume this responsibility for herself. She is still in the position of a dependent to-day because her mate has refused to consider her as an individual apart from his needs. She is still bound because she has in the past left the solution of the problem to him. Having left it to him, she finds that instead of rights, she has only such privileges as she has gained by petitioning, coaxing and cozening. Having left it to him, she is exploited, driven and enslaved to his desires. (“A Parents’ Problem or Woman’s?,” March 1919)

Sanger would no doubt be pleased with recent advances in the availability of birth control in this country.  Sex education for both boys and girls is offered at public schools and birth control devices are explained and encouraged. And while there have been many improvements in woman-controlled contraceptives, until now, men still primarily rely on the condom, the most popular method in Sanger’s day. Sanger didn’t trust condoms, not so much because she thought they were ineffective, but because they relied on men.

She has learned that whatever the moral responsibility of the man in this direction may be, he does not discharge it. She has learned that, lovable and considerate as the individual husband may be, she has nothing to expect from men in the mass, when they make laws and decree customs. She knows that regardless of what ought to be, the brutal, unavoidable fact is that she will never receive her freedom until she takes it for herself. (“A Parent’s Problem or a Woman’s?,” 1919.

The idea that women needed to take charge of family planning was a new one.  Sanger’s experiences working with married women with six, seven or eight children was that their husbands did not want to limit the family or did not want any interference in their pleasure.  Most of her campaign centered on the idea that women needed to be the primary decision makers because she wanted women to assert control as they were the one primarily affected.

While it is true that he suffers many evils as the consequence of this situation, she suffers vastly more. While it is true that he should be awakened to the cause of these evils, we know that they come home to her with crushing force every day. It is she who has the long burden of carrying, bearing and rearing the unwanted children. It is she who must watch beside the beds of pain where lie the babies who suffer because they have come into overcrowded homes. It is her heart that the sight of the deformed, the subnormal, the undernourished, the overworked child smites first and oftenest and hardest. It is her love life that dies first in the fear of undesired pregnancy. It is her opportunity for self expression that perishes first and most hopelessly because of it. (“Parent’s Problem or a Woman’s?, 1919)

The possibility of a male birth control pill will force women to ask themselves, despite still having to carry and care for the child, is it time for women to begin to trust men in regards to birth control?

A team led by Martin Matzuk of Baylor College of Medicine and James Bradner of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute believe they have stumbled on a potential birth control pill. While testing a drug that would be used in anti-cancer treatments, they have created a drug that controls fertility in men.  Tests have only been done on mice at this point, but results show a rapid decrease in sperm production and mobility, and virtually zero side effects. And most importantly, the mice immediately begin producing sperm again once off the drug.

If a birth control pill for men does become available in the upcoming years, it may change the way both genders view contraceptives. Questions will arise for both genders. The pill would be a less permanent alternative to a vasectomy, so married men not interested in having any more children would accept it with arms wide open. But will younger, single men want to take this pill or will a feminine stigma be attached to the pill? We know that Margaret Sanger would not approve of women relying on men, but will women today trust their significant other to take his pill daily when he may not even remember to take out the trash?

In 1919, Sanger asserted that “Conditions, rather than theories, facts, rather than dreams, govern the problem. They place it squarely upon the shoulders of woman.” (“A Parent’s Problem or a Woman’s?”) The development of a male birth control pill will change the conditions under which men and women make family planning decisions. Will women begin trusting their husbands and partners, and give up using the existing woman-controlled methods, many of which have serious side effects?  Will men accept the responsibility for family planning in the 21st century and prove Sanger wrong? Only time will tell.

Feel free to comment or answer the questions!

For more information on the male contraceptive, see “Guys, Take Note: Male Birth Control Pill May Be Ready Soon,” Science Daily, Sep. 5, 2012.  For the entire article quoted here,  “A Parents’ Problem or Woman’s?,” Birth Control Review, March 1919.