Margaret Sanger
Abortion

Sanger opposed abortion and sharply distinguished it from birth control. She believed that the latter is a fundamental right of women, and the former is a shameful crime. In 1916, when she opened her first birth control clinic, she was employing harsh rhetoric against abortion. Flyers she distributed to women exhorted them in all capitals: "Do not kill, do not take life, but prevent." Sanger's patients at that time were told "that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but it was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun." Sanger consistently distanced herself from any calls for legal access to abortion, arguing that legal access to contraceptives would remove the need for abortion. Ann Hibner Koblitz has argued that Sanger's anti-abortion stance contributed to the further stigmatization of abortion and impeded the growth of the broader reproductive rights movement.

While Sanger condemned abortion as a method of family limitation, she was not opposed to abortion intended to save a woman's life. Furthermore, in 1932, Sanger directed the Clinical Research Bureau to start referring patients to hospitals for therapeutic abortions when indicated by an examining physician. She also advocated for birth control so that the pregnancies that led to therapeutic abortions could be prevented in the first place.
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