Margaret Sanger Essay

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Margaret Sanger, a Model of Nurses as Advocates for Public Wellbeing or Reprehensible Racist Nazi Sympathizer? Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Reproductive Rights Movement is a very politically divisive figure, as much today as ever, more than 50 years after her death. She is demonized by some as a eugenicist and supposed supporter of racial extermination and also somehow well regarded by others as a humanitarian advocate for freedom, education, equality, and public health. So who was Margaret Sanger then? Some incite can be found in her personal history and the specifics of the claims made against and for personal character. Margaret was born in 1879 in Corning, New York to a family of Irish American immigrants. Her mother…show more content…
Originally passed in 1873 for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” the act criminalized use of the U.S. Postal Serve to send erotica, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, or any information regarding those items (Horowitz). Anthony Comstock, the man who had pushed for the act “got himself named Special Agent for the U.S. Post Office, with power to make arrests and confiscate material. In place of a salary, he arranged to keep a substantial portion of the fines he imposed.” (Wardell) His zealous persecution off all that he considered obscene led to even more stringent New York Penal Code law making it illegal to give speak aloud any information about any kind of birth control for any reason with the specific exception of doctors giving information verbally for the “prevention or cure of disease” (Ruppenthal 1919). “Lawyers and doctors advised Sanger that this exception referred only to advice for males on the use of the condom to prevent venereal disease” (Wardell). Because of these laws Doctors and Pharmacists both could face arrest just for talking about methods of birth control. This led to an overall environment of ignorance involving birth even among the educated in America at the
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