Meet the Jewish Woman Who Helped Lay the Groundwork for Planned Parenthood - Culture - Forward.com
Four years before women won the right to vote in the United States, Margaret Sanger — the future founder of Planned Parenthood — and her sister, Ethel Byrne, met a young Jewish immigrant named Fania Mindell. On October 16, 1919, the trio opened the country’s first birth control clinic, located in a tenement in Brownsville, New York.
As Planned Parenthood makes contemporary headlines, both for a planned Republic attempt to discontinue its federal funding and for the vigorous response of the organization and its many supporters, that tiny clinic’s legacy looms large.
It stayed open only ten days, after which it was shut down for violating the Comstock Law, a federal act that made it illegal to disseminate information about birth control. It served over 100 women on its first day in business, many mothers arriving with their children in tow, an unmistakable sign of the community’s need for services like those the clinic provided. Sanger, a public figure for years prior to opening the clinic, rode a wave of national popularity upon emerging from the monthlong prison sentence she served after her arrest for operating it. That approbation enabled her to make her next big move in 1921, when she founded the first American Birth Control Conference. In 1942, that Conference renamed itself as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
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