13th Day of Women's History Month: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger was born in 1883; her mother was pregnant 18 times (11 live births) in 22 years and died at the age of 49.  Margaret was able to train as a nurse practitioner with the support of her sisters, but married at age 19.  She gave birth to 3 children and began a "quiet life in the suburbs" until a fire destroyed their home, and they moved to New York City.  Margaret began working as a traveling nurse in the slums of the Lower East Side--it was here she witnessed the child abuse, neglect, and premature deaths of women from self-induced abortions.
In 1914, Margaret began to educate women about "Birth Control" (yes, she was the one who coined the phrase), even though the subject was forbidden--doctors would not talk about it, organized religion rejected it, and it was illegal to send information about birth control through the mail.  Sanger was charged with violating the postal code in 1914, and had to flee to England to avoid arrest (before leaving though, she published the first "how to" pamphlet with information on birth control).

Wikipedia describes the next few years the best:
Some countries in northwestern Europe had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States at the time, and when Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she learned about diaphragms and became convinced that they were a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had been distributing back in the United States. Diaphragms were generally unavailable in the United States, so Sanger and others began importing them from Europe, in defiance of United States law.^[8]
In 1917, she started publishing the monthly periodical Birth Control Review.^{[note 4]}
On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn,^.[21]  Nine days after the clinic opened (after seeing some 900 patients), Sanger was arrested for breaking a New York state law that prohibited distribution of contraceptives, and went to trial in January 1917.^[22] Sanger was convicted; the trial judge held that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception."^[23] Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised to not break the law again, but she replied: "I cannot respect the law as it exists today."^[24] For this, she was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.^[24] An initial appeal was rejected, but in a subsequent court proceeding in 1918, the birth control movement won a victory when Judge Frederick E. Crane of the New York Court of Appeals issued a ruling which allowed doctors to prescribe contraception.^[25] The publicity surrounding Sanger's arrest, trial, and appeal sparked birth control activism across the United States, and earned the support of numerous donors, who would provide her with funding and support for future endeavors.^[26]

 (John D. Rockefeller Jr. was a major contributor)
After WWI, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which had this as its' guiding principle: 
     We hold that children should be (1) Conceived in love; (2) Born of the mother's conscious desire; (3) And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health. Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to prevent conception except when these conditions can be satisfied.
 In 1942, the name of this organization was changed to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
 Mention the name Planned Parenthood today, and many people will cringe, mostly because the aims of Planned Parenthood have been highjacked by the right wing of our political system.  But the goals of Planned Parenthood have never changed--the goals of protecting the health of the mother and making sure every child is healthy and wanted.
It's so easy for us to forget the work of our foremothers in the area of women's health; women today get a shot, pop a pill, or some other convenient birth control method, and don't give it another thought.  Thankfully, none of us has had to hold the hand of a friend after she's inserted something inside her vagina in order to induce a miscarriage.  None of us has had to rush a friend to the hospital as she slowly bleeds to death from a back-street, botched abortion.  Hopefully none of us has cried with our friend as she finds out she's pregnant with her 12th child.  But some of us have had friends who have died in childbirth.  Some of us have had friends who have needed an abortion, and because of the work of our mothers and grandmothers, we can drive them to a clean, safe, legal clinic. 
But we soon could be experiencing all of those nightmare situations.  We have grown complacent.  We have forgotten.  But the right wing has not forgotten, and while we ignore the political system, they've been hard at work, spreading lies and getting legislation passed that will again put the decisions about women's health back into the hands of the government.
Don't believe me?  Just this week (yes, in the 21st century), there was a story out of Texas that got so very little attention, yet has a major impact on women in the Rio Grande Valley--and, really, women everywhere.  Due to laws passed in the Texas legislature, three more women's clinics were forced to close.  Women of the Rio Grande Valley now have nowhere to go for birth control or reproductive care.
Remember that thing I just said about women bleeding to death from botched abortions or dying from infections caused by inserting god knows what into their vagina to induce abortion.  Well, it's happening...TODAY....in Texas.  Closing clinics does not prevent abortions.  It just kills women.  Every day.
If you are "pro-life", I have one question for you:  Why aren't you sending weekly checks to Planned Parenthood, or your local women's health clinic?  Because THEY are the ones who are making abortions few, and safe, and doing all they can to support life--women's lives.