From Wikipedia:

Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966) was an American birth control activist, an advocate of negative eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood).

Initially met with fierce opposition to her ideas, Sanger gradually won some support, both in the public as well as in the courts, for a woman's choice to decide how and when, if ever, she will bear children. However, her advocacy for eugenics has tarnished her reputation.

Here is a link to Sanger's Register of Papers in the Library of Congress.

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The following is from a 1939 Look Magazine article. The article consists of photos with captions, the captions were written by Margaret Sanger.

The photographs were from a film titled, "Why Let Them Die?", a documentry treating the moral, social and economic aspects of birth control. It was released for private showings by Sanger and her colleagues of the Birth Control Federation.

I'll provide a link to each photo that coincides with the caption. The photos lend some perspective so please take the time to check them out. Lets begin...

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1) Martha Hayes was 18 when she and Tom were married. For Martha, marriage was a blessed means of escape, escape from a home so crowded with children that there was scarcely room to lie down at night, escape from and embittered father and from the everlasting drudgery that has made her mother's life a curse.

2) But here is the record of Martha's married life. Eleven children in 14 years. One of them a still birth, one of them a miscarriage. Finally, pregnant and deserted, she took the desparate step which cost her life. The story of suffering and privation which lies behind Martha's case history card is not an unusual one. Her tragedy is all the worse because birth control could have prevented it.

3) At first life went smoothly. But when babies started coming with scarcely seven months between births and pregnancy, Martha and Tom found themsleves hating the home and familiy they had created. Tom became a hard driven hopeless father.

4) And when Martha was a housebound, work-worn mother, entangeled in the web she had married to escape. Four of her babies died in infancy. There was never enough food for those that lived. Tom's earnings year and after year averaged about $400.00.

5) Tom grew to dread coming home to his squalid two-room shack to the wistful hungry faces of his children. One day syphilis appeared on Martha's case history card, and finally, in drunken hopelessness, Tom Hayes abandoned his family.

6) Tom and Martha had not wanted so many children. They had known that they could not feed or clothe them, that their babies would grow up, if they grew up at all, weak in mind and body.

But Martha and Tom were ignorant of birth control methods, as Martha's mother had been. Not long after Tom deserted her, martha discovered that another baby was on the way.

7) Martha Hayes' last desperate step was one taken by millions of American women every year. From a neighbor trying to be helpful, she learned the name of a so-called "doctor" who could "help her".

She took what money she had, the fee usually whatever the the patient can scrape together, and paid it in advance. She didn't even know the doctor's name. They took her behind a hanging sheet..

8) Martha hayes never recovered from the illegal operation. She died at the hands of the abortionist, as some 8,000 American woman die each year, simply because she was ignorant of how to plan her family.

I have known thousands of women like Martha, known their needless suffering and the heartaches of their husbands. That is why I fight for birth control.

I Fight for Birth Control not only for the sake of Tom and Martha, but for the sake of the community. I would prevent subnormal parents from having children like these, and other parents from having children that may cost a mother's life. Proportionately, more mothers die in America in childbirth than 15 other countries.

Birth Control Makes for Happy Children and happy families by preventing the conception of unwanted babies. It also saves infant lives. When babies are born one year apart, 147 out of every 1000 infants die. When births are two years apart, 100 out of every 1000 die. When there is three years between births, only 87 die.

Since the Beginning of civilization, man has tried ways to keep teeming population within bounds. Where man has failed, nature has stepped in with controls as pitiless and they are inflexible. War, pestilence, famine, .. these are nature's way. Even today in the Far East, these forces are inexorably at work.

These Two Pictures Illustrates the Difference between planned and unplanned parenthood. Below is a well planned family, with the children properly spaced. Above is a family which knows nothing about birth control and will continue to know nothing about it until it is incorporated in out public health services and made available to the lowest income groups.

How urgently this is needed today is shown that by the fact that families on relief (welfare) are now producing 60 percent of out next generation. For every two babies born to parents not on relief, relief families are having three.

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That's it. I found it quite interesting considering the time period, subject matter and the fact that Look was a very mainstream magazine. There are also some not so hidden meanings in parts of the commentary which could have been deemed very controversial.

Comments?