Sanger's Brownsville birth control clinic

At the start of the 20th century, giving out information about contraception or contraceptive devices was illegal under federal and state laws. American families had shrunk from an average of 7.0 children in 1800 to 3.5 in 1900, yet 6 to 9 of every 1,000 women died in childbirth. Margaret Sanger, a public health nurse troubled by the toll of frequent childbirth, miscarriage and abortion, began campaigning in 1912 to spread information about contraception, and in Holland in 1915 she saw birth control clinics at work.

In 1916 Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, a registered nurse, and Fania Mindell, an interpreter from Chicago, rented a small storefront in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and handed out flyers in English, Yiddish and Italian. The clinic opened on 16 October. For ten cents a woman received Sanger's pamphlet What Every Girl Should Know, a short talk on the female reproductive system and instruction in the use of contraceptives. More than 100 women came on the first day and some 400 by 26 October.

On 26 October an undercover policewoman and vice squad officers arrested the three women. Sanger reopened the clinic on 14 November and was arrested again. When she opened it once more on 16 November, police made the landlord evict her, and it closed for good. At trial in January 1917 Byrne was convicted and sentenced to 30 days on Blackwell's Island. She went on a hunger strike and was force-fed after 185 hours without food or water, and Governor Whitman then pardoned her. Sanger was also convicted. Offered a suspended sentence if she promised not to repeat the offense, she refused, chose jail over a fine and served 30 days in the Queens County Penitentiary. Mindell was fined fifty dollars.

In January 1918 the New York Court of Appeals upheld Sanger's conviction. Judge Frederick Crane's opinion, however, read the state's Little Comstock law as allowing physicians to prescribe contraception for general health reasons, not only against venereal disease, which gave women in New York some legal access to it. By the 1930s a few state health departments, such as North Carolina's, and some public hospitals had begun to offer family planning services.