Margaret Sanger

Born Margaret Higgins on September 14, 1879, she worked as a nurse in New York City's slums in the early 1900s, treating mothers desperate to avoid more children — many of whom had turned to back-alley abortions. Believing women should decide if and when to have children, she began campaigning to legalize contraceptives, deliberately breaking laws that banned even discussing them. Her activism, shaped by first-wave feminism and also by eugenics and Malthusian population concerns, led to court rulings that opened access: one allowed physicians to dispense contraceptives, another — Griswold v. C…