Margaret Higgins was born in Corning, New York, later becoming the founder of the U.S. birth control movement.
Margaret Higgins was born on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children born to Michael Hennessey Higgins, an Irish-born stonemason and freethinker, and Anne Purcell Higgins, a devout Catholic who endured eighteen pregnancies. Growing up in a large, financially strained working-class family gave Margaret an early and visceral understanding of the toll that repeated childbearing took on women's health and economic stability.
Her father's radical political views and skepticism toward religious orthodoxy shaped her independent spirit, while she watched her mother's health decline from the strain of frequent pregnancies and tuberculosis, dying at only 49. These early experiences planted the seeds for what would become her life's mission: ensuring women had access to reliable contraception and the ability to control their own reproductive futures.
Sanger would go on to train as a nurse, work among impoverished immigrant women on New York's Lower East Side, and eventually found the birth control movement in America, coin the term "birth control," and lay the groundwork for organizations like Planned Parenthood. Her birth in 1879 marks the beginning of a life that would fundamentally reshape reproductive rights, medicine, and women's autonomy in the twentieth century.