Margaret Higgins Sanger was jailed for opening the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in Brooklyn, New York in 1916, dispensing information about contraception to poor women in the New York tenements; “secrets only wealthy women knew” at that time.  Her work was illegal due to the Comstock Law, which made dispensing, mailing, or openly discussing sexual information “obscene.”  Sanger was driven to change the law, through her relentless belief that only when women are able to control their bodies (and make all pregnancies voluntary), will war and poverty end.  We owe freedom of sexual information (in states where it now exists), Planned Parenthood clinics (and ultimately The Pill) to her lifelong efforts on behalf of the health of women.

“Sanger's commitment to birth control sprung from personal tragedy. One of eleven children born to a working class Irish Catholic family in Corning, New York, at age nineteen Margaret watched her mother die of tuberculosis. Just 50 years old, her mother had wasted away from the strain of eleven childbirths and seven miscarriages….” 

“Not only did Sanger live to see the realization of her ‘magic pill,’ but four years later, at the age of 81, Sanger witnessed the undoing of the Comstock law.  In the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, the court ruled that the private use of contraceptives was a constitutional right. When Sanger passed away a year later, after more than half a century of fighting for the right of women to control their own fertility, she died knowing she had won the battle.”   PBS American Experience: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pill/peopleevents/p_sanger.html