92 Years Ago Today Sanger Opened the First Birth Control Clinic
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If my embedding was done correctly, the above map will allow you to see the actual "Street View" of 46 Amboy Street, Brooklyn, today--the site of Margaret Sanger's first birth control clinic (click on the address and then choose "Street View" to visit the block). I've pasted above that an archival photo of the same site during Sanger's time when it was the first clinic in the United States to provide women with family planning services. As you'll see from both images, one of the original structures still stands, now abandoned, with no trace of it place in history or the massive social changes that the movement, which took its first tangible form at this location, set in motion. It's sadly poetic, it's current condition, certainly the anti-birth control groups would revel in its obscurity.
In honor of Sanger as well as this little plot of earth, take a moment to read a brief history of the site and the struggle Sanger began there and that we continue today. This link to The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University's archives offers a window into that time.
About this post: posted by Cristina Page at
10/16/2008 07:49:00 AM
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Cristina,
I am prolife and pro contraception and believe this forgotten spot deserves commemoration. Thank you for remembering it.
Margaret Higgins Sanger was a complex and sometimes disturbing figure, especially in her attitudes towards working class and "ethnic" families like that she came from, and her eugenic contempt for disabled persons (she sure didn't want *us* to reproduce, and didn't reagrd *us* as wholly human beings!)--to mention just a few things.
Yet somewhere in that mix was the bravery to advocate for and directly provide contraception, beginning at this Brownsville clinic, when contraception was still against the law. And that bravery was motivated both by recognizable concern for women in difficult pregnancies and for unborn babies also threatened by abortion.
When Sanger opened this first birth control clinic, she circulated leaflets in the neighborhood's three major languages imploring women to visit : "MOTHERS!...DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT." It is clear from other statements she made about abortion that the lifetaking she referred to here was, along with the deaths of women through botched abortions--she was talking about the taking of unborn lives that happens in every abortion. To her, contraception was a lifesaving and humane necessity for alleviating abortion.
Both "sides" of the abortion debate are often mistaken about Margaret Sanger. She can neither be claimed as an advocate for a general right to abortion, nor reviled as someone who singlehandedly caused millions of abortions (I for one have to wonder how many abortions her work prevented.)
But within the complex reality of Sanger, there are things that suggest possibilities for common ground in today's abortion debate.
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