Biography
Margaret Sanger Opened the first U.S. birth-control clinic at 46 Amboy Street, Brownsville, Brooklyn on October 16, 1916, with her sister Ethel Byrne and interpreter Fania Mindell. The clinic served some 400 women in 10 days before an undercover policewoman shut it down on October 26, 1916, arresting all three. Charged under New York's Comstock obscenity statute, tried in early 1917 before a three-judge panel and sentenced to 30 days in Queens County Penitentiary. The 1918 New York Court of Appeals "Crane decision" upheld her conviction but for the first time permitted physicians to prescribe contraceptives. Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American nurse, sex educator, and birth control activist who founded the first birth control clinic in the United States. On October 16, 1916, she opened the clinic in a storefront at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Within ten days, undercover police arrested Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, and clinic worker Fania Mindell for distributing contraceptives and contraceptive information in violation of New Yorks Comstock-era anti-obscenity statutes. Sanger was tried in early 1917 and sentenced to 30 days in the Queens County Penitentiary, which she served. The arrests catalyzed national press coverage and a sustained legal campaign that gradually weakened state-level Comstock restrictions. Sanger went on to found what became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Her broader record included support for eugenics policies common in the Progressive Era — a serious and well-documented part of her history that the modern Planned Parenthood organization has formally repudiated.
