Women's History Month: Digital Read In

The Comstock Act, passed in 1873, criminalized the distribution of "obscene" materials, including information about contraception and reproductive health. Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), a nurse, writer, and activist, was a key figure in challenging this restrictive law. She believed women had the right to access birth control and reproductive education, seeing it as a pathway to personal and societal liberation. Her work laid the foundation for modern reproductive rights movements. She began publishing “The Woman Rebel” in 1914, where she openly defied the Comstock laws by sharing birth control information. In 1916, Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne and fellow activist Fania Mindell opened the country’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. This clinic is considered to be the beginning of Planned Parenthood, a group that officially formed with the merger of Sanger’s second clinic (opened in 1923) and the American Birth Control League that Sanger also founded. Planned Parenthood, though, parted ways with Sanger over her belief in eugenics, a racist philosophy that, in part, believes that some people are not fit to have children, based on their physical characteristics. Instead, “Planned Parenthood believes that all people — of every race, religion, gender identity, ability, immigration status, and geography — are full human beings with the right to determine their own future and decide, without coercion or judgment, whether and when to have children.”