by Sophia Neilson
The first Planned Parenthood clinic opened on October 16, 1916 in Brownsville, Brooklyn under the leadership of Margaret Sanger, Ethel Byrne and Fania Mindell. Over the years, Planned Parenthood has worked to provide affordable to no-cost sexual and reproductive health care, as well as sexual education. Today, there are over 600 Planned Parenthood clinics in the United States, which provide care to more than 2 million people annually.
Transcript
The first Planned Parenthood clinic opened on October 16, 1916 in Brownsville, Brooklyn under the leadership of Margaret Sanger, Ethel Byrne and Fania Mindell. It was the country’s first birth control clinic, and women lined the block that day trying to access birth control and reproductive health information. Unfortunately, nine days later, police raided and shut down the clinic, charging all three women with crimes related to sharing birth control information. Margaret Sanger refused to pay the fines, and spent 30 days in jail, which she used to educate the other inmates about birth control.
After the Brownsville Clinic was shut down, Margaret Sanger continued to provide resources and share her vision by traveling across the country. It is important to note that Margaret Sanger believed in Eugenics, a racist and abelist theory that society can be improved through planned breeding for “desirable traits.” She talked a lot about and published these ideas in the scientific journal “Birth Control Review.” This is not something that Planned Parenthood currently stands for or believes in. Further information about these historical issues can be found on the Planned Parenthood website, but for the sake of time, I will not dive any further into these ideas.
In 1923, Sanger opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in Manhattan. They provided birth control devices to women, and collected statistics about the safety and long-term effectiveness of different forms of birth control. That same year, Sanger incorporated the American Birth Control League, and the two organizations eventually merged to become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The efforts of Sanger and other proponents of birth control led to a court ruling in 1936 that birth control devices and information would no longer be classified as “obscene,” and could be legally distributed in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.
It unfortunately took another 30 years for those rights to make their way across the country, and even then, they were only accessible to married couples. However, this was still a major step in the right direction to making birth control accessible to everyone.
In 1948, Planned Parenthood gave Gregory Pincus, John Rock, and M.C. Chang funding to conduct research for a birth control pill.
In 1956, the first large-scale clinical trial of the birth control pill took place in Puerto Rico, making huge strides in the development of the pill. These tests on Puerto Rican women were sadly done without proper informed consent, and women were only told that the pill prevented pregnancy, not that it was still highly experimental with potentially dangerous side effects. The pills in the trial had hormone levels 20 times higher than modern birth control pills.
After many other trials, the FDA approved the sale of birth control pills for contraception on May 9, 1960. By 1965, one in four married women in the U.S. under the age of 45 had used the pill.
In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut struck down laws prohibiting married couples from accessing contraception, leading to the legalization of birth control in 10 states. Seven years later, in 1972 this right was extended to unmarried individuals, ensuring universal access to contraceptives.
In 1970, the Public Health Services Act introduced Title X, which provided public funding for family planning and sex education programs. This enabled organizations like Planned Parenthood to expand reproductive health services, particularly in low-income communities.
In 1973, The Supreme Court ruled in favor of establishing the right to safe and legal abortion in the first trimester nationwide in Roe v. Wade. This sparked a brief era of expanded abortion rights, during which laws requiring spousal consent and strict parental consent for minors were struck down.
However, the 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibited the use of Medicaid funds for abortion except in very limited cases, making access increasingly difficult for low-income individuals and those reliant on government-funded health care.
In 1980, Planned Parenthood published “The Planned Parenthood Issues Manual” to help guide employees on how to answer difficult questions from patients. The topics covered in the manual range from sex education, to contraception, to abortion access.
One chapter of the manual featured information about when abortion was legalized, as well as the federal rules regarding abortion access in different stages of pregnancy. The page even included a blank-lined area for care providers to write in the specific laws in the state they were practicing in.
Another segment of the same chapter said “Recent Surveys indicate that a majority of Americans believe that abortion should remain legal, and that only a woman and her doctor should be involved in the decision whether to have an abortion” I find this very interesting, since 40 years later, abortion rights were suddenly under attack again in the United states.
In September of 2021, Texas enacted S.B. 8, a near-total abortion ban prohibiting abortions after six weeks and allowing private citizens nationwide to sue anyone who aided in an abortion, with a minimum $10,000 reward for successful lawsuits. Despite its challenge to then-established constitutional rights, the U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly declined to block the law and ultimately ruled that federal courts lacked the power to intervene in citizen-enforced measures like S.B. 8.
On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade and ending the federal constitutional right to abortion.
In April of 2023, a federal judge in Texas ruled in favor of anti-abortion organizations that challenged the approval of mifepristone, a safe and commonly used abortion drug which has been approved for over 20 years. This ruling would have made mifepristone unavailable in every state, but The Supreme Court issued a stay that protects access to it, at least for now.
Over the years, Planned Parenthood has worked to provide affordable to no-cost sexual and reproductive health care, as well as sexual education. Today, there are over 600 Planned Parenthood clinics in the United States, which provide care to more than 2 million people annually. Planned Parenthood is committed to doing everything they can to keep reproductive healthcare affordable and accessible to everyone, even under the Trump administration.
On November 7th, the day after the election, Planned Parenthood posted on their Instagram saying “Planned Parenthood has always fought to ensure everyone has access to the healthcare they need. Today is no different. Tomorrow won’t be either.”
References
Planned Parenthood Issues Manual: What It Is and How to Use It, approximately 1980. Planned Parenthood Federation of America Records Group II records, Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Special Collections. Box 139. https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/252374
The History & Impact of Planned Parenthood. (n.d.). Planned Parenthood. https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history
Guttmacher, Alan, and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. 1979. Planned Parenthood Beginnings : Affiliate Histories / Compiled by Mrs. Alan Guttmacher for the Margaret Sanger Centennial Celebration [Sic] 1979 PPFA Annual Meeting, Houston, Texas, November 15, 1979. Office of the President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=7765eae9-cdc1-3144-8a8c-950990bee357.
McGill Johnson, Alexis. “Alexis McGill Johnson Remarks on Margaret Sanger.” YouTube, April 16, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqoi-LN1Z78.
