Too Many Pregnancies Can Jeopardize a Women's Health

Margaret Sanger's beliefs were formulated from her personal life and her professional life

Margaret's beliefs about women being able to control the amount of children they had, rather than breed like rabbits, was fueled by working with the poor, and witnessing her own mother struggling with all those childbirths. Margaret was convinced that women had to be on equal level with a man and not dictated to by their husbands when it came to producing offspring. Margaret also voiced that if women were to have any sexual pleasure from relations with their husband the fear of pregnancy had to be eliminated. This was a very critical psychological need for women for women of that time period.

The Sadie Sachs story

Sanger worked among the poor and she saw for herself in her duties as a nurse, how the women's health was jeopardized because of too many pregnancies. She saw the horrors of desperate women suffering from self-induced abortions and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that women needed to be educated about birth control, even though the laws said otherwise. The only advise Sanger was allowed to tell her critically ill patients who dared to self-abort was to abstain from having sexual relations. This advice did not work for Sadie Sachs who died after a second failed self-induced abortion attempt. The Sachs case was the turning point for Sanger; she realized that women were willing to die in order to prevent unwanted or needed pregnancies. She knew from that point on that she had to get birth control information out to these women before they became that desperate.

Though things were not much better in Canada at the time, with the strong arm of the Roman Catholic Church, it did get better after the influence of such people as Margaret Sanger.

Planned Parenthood Montreal
4515 Rue Sainte-Catherine O
Westmount, H3Z 1R9
tel.: 514-935-1004

Sources

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/sangermargaret/p/margaret_sanger.htm

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988152,00.html