Sanger was born in 1879 as one of 11 children in an Irish Catholic family. Her father, an avowed atheist, drank heavily and discouraged his children from practicing their faith. Margaret moved away from her father as soon as she could. She soon married William Sanger and had three children in her twenties, but domestic life did not fulfill her and so she began her lifelong search for meaning to fill her emptiness.
After lavish entertaining and socializing also failed to satisfy her, Sanger became interested in causes of sexual liberation, feminism, and birth control. To the dismay of her husband, she became obsessed with fighting for sexual freedom, even to the neglect of her family. She eventually abandoned her husband and children so that she could devote herself fully to advocating these ideas.
Sanger became intrigued by the theories of political economist Thomas Malthus, who believed that world hunger and poverty were due to overpopulation. Although Malthus recommended allowing “plagues, pestilence, and putrification” to decrease the population of poor people, his followers recommended education, contraception, sterilization, and abortion. Fascinated by these ideas, Margaret saw them as a way to ground her ideas of sexual freedom: birth control could be used to diminish the threat of poverty and overpopulation. Sanger was also greatly influenced by eugenics, an offshoot of Malthus’s theory which called for an elitist white supremacy, to be created by, in Sanger’s words, “more children from the fit, and less from the unfit.”1 Sanger’s magazine, The Birth Control Review, published articles with unabashedly racist messages, including one by Ernst Rudin, who directed Hitler’s genetic sterilization program.2
Sanger eventually founded Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest provider of birth control and abortion around the world. The name “Planned Parenthood,” which sounds very family-oriented, was chosen to cover up the eugenic intentions of the organization and to give birth control a personal appeal.
Although Sanger’s dream of implementing unlimited access to abortion, birth control, and sterilization came true, she lived a very unfulfilled life. She was openly promiscuous, became addicted to drugs and alcohol, and even dabbled in the occult toward the end of her life. As George Grant writes in Killer Angel, his biography of Sanger, she became the “champion of birth control …. but lost everything else: love, happiness, satisfaction, fulfillment, family, and friends.”3
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