On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brownsville, Brooklyn, distributing contraceptive information to working-class immigrant women. She had the clinic's address published in Yiddish and Italian as well as English. It was open for nine days before the police raided it. She was arrested and eventually convicted under the Comstock Act, which classified contraceptive information as obscene material.

Sanger was born in 1879 in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children. Her mother, who had eighteen pregnancies and survived eleven births, died at fifty. Sanger trained as a nurse and worked in New York's Lower East Side, where she documented the consequences of unwanted pregnancy, self-induced abortion, and childbirth without medical care for poor women. She began writing and distributing information about contraception in 1914. The Post Office confiscated her newsletter under the Comstock Act.

She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which became Planned Parenthood in 1942. She funded research into contraceptive methods, including working with biologist Gregory Pincus on what would become the oral contraceptive pill. She traveled to India and Japan to promote access to family planning.

Her record is complicated by her involvement with the eugenics movement, which was widespread in progressive circles in the early twentieth century and which she engaged with in terms that have become more, not less, troubling with time. The eugenics associations were real and require accounting.

She died in 1966. The oral contraceptive pill had been FDA-approved in 1960.