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Then one day, as it had all happened before, her clinic was raided. It happened on March 29, 1929 without warning or proper warrant. The staff was all taken to jail, the case files confiscated, and the patients bullied into leaving. The medical community was outraged, though the magistrate admitted there had been a mistake made. While the physicians defended themselves on the grounds that there was a doctor/patient privilege to be upheld, Margaret seized the opportunity to have the Crane decision enlarged to establish birth control clinics as essential to the public health of women.

The outcome of the court battle was a decision that favored birth control. The judge ruled that birth control clinics were “an important public health measure and a valuable aid in the conservation of family health” (Miller, p.233). Encouraged by this victory, Margaret set up the National Committee on Federal Birth Control Legislation; it’s goal: to lobby for the passing of legislation favorable to the birth control movement. The gem of the Committee was a “Doctor’s Bill” that had been written from the ground up, starting on a local level and gaining support until it was introduced by Senator George Norris in 1931. In the years between 1931 and 1935, the bill was killed in Congress more than 5 times, each time by the direct influence of the Roman Catholic Church. At one hearing for the bill, after hours of expert and emotional personal testimony, the opposition took the stand in the form of Father Charles Coughlin; his only comment being “All this bill means is how to fornicate and not get caught” (Miller, p. 235). The bill failed that time as well. The time spent lobbying in Congress was not wasted, though, as Margaret and her movement came to have the backing of the entire medical profession and a majority of the population (who, by that time, was in the midst of the Great Depression).

It became apparent to Margaret that the movement would go no further if it depended on what happened in Washington D.C., and so, when a package from Japan containing contraceptives was confiscated and not delivered to her, she saw another golden opportunity. Margaret quickly wrote to Japan and had another package with the same contents mailed to the head physician of her Clinical Research Bureau, Dr. Stone. The package was again confiscated and Margaret knew that her showdown with the Comstock Laws had finally come. She and Dr. Stone took the matter to court in December of 1935; their attorney argued “The government cannot prevent contraceptive material from being mailed to a physician, even from a foreign country, when it is to be used to safeguard the life and health of mothers and children” (Miller 237). The court ordered the package delivered. The government appealed, but lost. In January of 1937, it was announced by the Supreme Court that the government would not challenge the second ruling. In a case that came to be known as U.S. v. One Package, Margaret and her birth control movement had their long awaited day in court and won. With this decision, the Comstock law lost a great deal of footing in the federal arena, so much so that the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control disbanded, considering itself no longer necessary.

Though elated over her victory, Margaret realized that the poorest women were the ones that still had to be reached. She took the field organization of the newly disbanded Committee and made it a part of the Bureau, creating the Educational Department. The first target of the Department was the impoverished South, from there it moved on to the dustbowl of the Southwest. Then, in 1939, the Department merged with the Bureau to become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (Miller 237).

With that done, Margaret tried to turn her attention to the world effort, but was interrupted by World War II. After that there was a string of personal tragedies in Margaret’s life that conspired to keep her from actively participating in the birth control movement, the most detrimental of which was the stroke that her husband suffered in December of 1941. They both moved to Tucson, Arizona in the hopes that the warm weather and sunshine would help Noah, but he died less than a year later. It seemed to those around Margaret that, at 60, she was content to live the life of a wealthy socialite (Miller 238).

In actuality, Margaret was simply biding her time until the end of the war and the time when she could once again focus her efforts on the rest of the world. The first trip after her semi-retirement was to Japan. Then, in 1952, Margaret went to India for the first meeting of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She then returned to the States to turn the Clinical Research Bureau over to a board of directors to ensure its continuance; the clinic was renamed the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau (which was fundamental to the development of The Pill). In her 80’s, Margaret Sanger threatened to leave the country when she head that a Catholic (JFK) would be elected President. Fortunately, John F. Kennedy was the first U.S. President to recognize the world’s population problem. Margaret Sanger lived to see the right to privacy triumph in the courts in 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut. Margaret died a year later in September of 1966, just 8 days after her 87th birthday (Miller 238-239).

At first glance, Margaret Sanger’s career seems much like that of any dedicated

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