Birth Control History

Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879-1966) was a nurse, birth control activist, and writer. In Woman and the New Race (1920) Sanger advocates contraception to prevent overpopulation and promotes the practice of eugenics in order to limit population growth among "defectives", as she refers to certain people groups. Sanger delivered the speech, "The Morality of Birth Control" on November 18, 1921, at the first American Birth Control Conference in New York City. She addresses the moral arguments against birth control, calling for the church and the state to trust women’s decisions....

When Communist Party leaders adopted the one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birthrates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China closes the book on the policy after more than three decades, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers. Mei Fong has spent years documenting the policy's repercussions on every sector of Chinese society.

Margaret Sanger was an American sex educator and birth control activist. Woman and the New Race argues for the legality of birth control, which was closely tied to the labor and the Eugenics movements. Sanger believed that birth control would free women from the bondage of forced motherhood.

The Whitsun Daughters is a story of three contemporary teenage girls - sisters and cousins - in a small Midwestern town, narrated by the ghost of a young woman who, over a century earlier, lived and loved on the same small patch of farmland the girls now call home. The book follows both the present-day story of the three Whitsun girls and the story of Jane Murphy a century earlier as they fight to assert their own desires in worlds determined to ignore and minimize them.