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OUR SEXUAL NORMS TRHROUGHOUT HISTORY: REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS MOVEMENT. AMERICA’S FIRST BIRTH CONTROL CLINIC

The Reproductive Rights Movement

In 1915, Mary Ware Dennett founded the National Birth Control League. It was the first birth control organization in the country. The league worked to repeal the Comstock laws. Dennett believed that information about sexuality and contraception was crucial to the health and happiness of the American family.

Dennett wrote The Sex Side of Life, a sexuality information guide for young people. She was charged with obscenity under the Comstock laws in 1929 and was found guilty and jailed. When the verdict was reversed in 1930, Dennett won one of the first victories against Anthony Comstock. Despite her efforts, however, the National Birth Control League was short-lived.

Margaret Sanger and America’s First Birth Control Clinic

The reproductive rights movement was firmly established on October 16, 1916, in the Brownsville community of Brooklyn, New York, when Margaret Sanger, her sister, Ethel Byrne, and an associate, Fania Mindell, opened the first birth control clinic in America. They provided contraceptive advice to desperately poor, immigrant women who lined up hours before the clinic doors opened.

Less than a month later, all three women were charged with violating New York’s antiobscenity statutes. They were arrested, indicted, and sent to prison for discussing and distributing contraceptives. The resulting publicity caused great widespread anger against the injustice of forcing women to bear children they could not afford and did not want.

In 1923, Sanger founded the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. The bureau treated patients and kept comprehensive records that would demonstrate the need to broaden the interpretation of federal and state Comstock laws and allow women to contracept for health reasons.

In 1936, the birth control movement achieved one of its greatest victories. Judge Augustus Hand, writing for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, ordered a sweeping liberalization of federal Comstock laws as applied to the importing of contraceptive devices.

Federal agents, acting under the Comstock laws, had seized a shipment of contraband diaphragms—Japanese pessaries—that was addressed to Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. Judge Hand decided that birth control could no longer be classified as obscene in his jurisdiction—New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. He cited contemporary data on the health consequences of unplanned pregnancy and the benefits of contraception.

In the years following One Package, the ideas that had made Sanger controversial ceased to be shocking and gradually became entrenched in American public life. In 1939, the two organizations Sanger had founded—the American Birth Control League and the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau—merged to become the Birth Control Federation of America, which was later renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Advances in Contraceptive Research

Sanger avidly supported the development of a “magic pellet”—an inexpensive, medically safe, completely reliable contraceptive that could be taken orally or by injection. Years of scientific and advocacy efforts were rewarded in the early 1950s, when Dr. Gregory Pincus demonstrated that injections of the steroid progesterone could stop ovulation in laboratory animals. In 1960, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of oral steroid pills—”the Pill”—for contraceptive use.

Shortly thereafter, the first IUDs (intrauterine devices) became available. While later findings revealed that neither the Pill nor the IUD was problem-free for all users, they heralded major advances both in science and in attitudes about sexual and reproductive freedom. The advent of safe, effective, and inexpensive contraception helped propel the contemporary women’s liberation movement.

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