Margaret Sanger Quotes

Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.

It is not because woman is lacking in responsibility, but because she has too much of the latter that she demands to know how to prevent conception.

Contraceptives unlock one of the most dormant but potentially powerful assets in development: women as decision makers.

Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone.

…American women… have learned it should be for them to decide when and how often they shall take upon themselves the sacred duties of motherhood, but as law and custom give to the husband absolute control of the wife’s person, she is forced to not only violate physical law, but to outrage the holiest instincts of her being to maintain even a semblance of that freedom which by nature belongs to every human soul.

With the development of the [birth control] pill, “womanhood” would no longer mean the same thing as “motherhood”.

The idea of not being able to control my own fertility genuinely terrifies me. That one mistake might change your life. That everything I am, and do, could be ended by the repeal of laws our mothers fought so hard for, that women had waited for the entire span of humanity to come about.

Placing Margaret Sanger on the $20 bill will remind us of what she has done for women and our reproductive health and how the fight for reproductive freedom is an ongoing one.

No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

World fertility surveys indicate that anywhere from one third to one half of the babies born in the Third World would not be if their mothers had access to cheap, reliable family planning, had enough personal empowerment to stand up to their husbands and relatives, and could choose their own family size.

I feel very strongly about contraception even though I know people say that, as a good Catholic girl, I shouldn't. But I disagree because I think one of the keys to women's progression in the 20th century is being able to control their fertility.

In order to stabilize human population growth, we must prioritize the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the provision of ubiquitous access to the knowledge and techniques of fertility management, and the continued raising of child survival rates.

Liberating women from repeated childbirth can liberate them from poverty as well.

We support reproductive rights and will stand with women and men around the country to support keeping abortion and birth control safe, legal and accessible.

This is about celibate men making decisions for millions and millions of women

We shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, the majority of whom are men, making decisions for women.

If you want to control human reproduction you have to control women’s bodies.

I think women have to be able to choose... sort of, the right of choice. They are the ones that have to make the decision because they're the ones that are going to decide to bring up that child or not.

Contraceptive protection is something every woman must have access to, to control her own destiny.

Without the means to prevent, and to control the timing of, conception, economic and political rights have limited meaning for women. If women cannot plan their pregnancies, they can plan little else in their lives.

Trying to block women from getting access to contraception or defunding Planned Parenthood is completely nonsensical from a policy standpoint.

I used to think it a pity that her mother rather than she had not thought of birth control.

Studies have shown that since women have had access to the pill and family planning measures, they have made huge gains in both wages and in careers that were dominated by men.

Margaret Sanger didn't just introduce the idea of birth control into our culture at large, she freed women from indenture to their bodies.

Legislative proposals that would enable an employer to determine whether or not a woman's insurance would cover the cost of birth control strikes women as particularly bizarre. Is the boss going to take care of the children that are conceived accidentally? Stop treating us like children. Women are grown ups.