United States v. One Package

"Comstockery" resulted in the jailing of Margaret Sanger at least nine times for campaigning for the right of women to use birth control. Born Margaret Higgins on 14 September 1879, in Corning, New York, the future reformer was one of eleven children. She attributed her mother's early death at age fifty to her frequent pregnancies.

After the death of her mother, the young teacher turned to medicine, enrolling in White Plains Hospital--a drafty 12-bed building with no plumbing or central heating--where she completed two years of nurse's training. She became head nurse in the woman's ward, and in 1912, married William Sanger in a quick ceremony--reporting for her 4:30 a.m. shift the next day.

With $50, Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne opened the first birth control clinic in America on 16 October 1916--an act of civil disobedience. The clinic occupied two rooms at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. In the ten days before police closed the clinic, almost 500 women arrived to get information about birth control and contraceptive devices. Sanger was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in prison. Her appeal to the New York Court of Appeals resulted in a 1918 ruling that allowed doctors to advise their married patients about birth control for health reasons.

Five years after opening her clinic, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which lobbied politicians to make contraception legal. The group urged Congress to exempt doctors from laws that banned the prescription and mailing of contraceptive devices.

To achieve that end, Sanger asked the staff of her American Birth Control League to find proof that the Comstock Act did impede the distribution of birth control materials. They found it in the 1930 amendment to the Tariff Act. This law used original 1873 Comstock Act language prohibiting "the importation into the United States, from any foreign country, any article whatever for preventing conception, or induced abortion."

In 1932, at Sanger's request, a Japanese doctor sent her a package of contraceptive supplies. Customs officers stopped the package. Sanger asked the physician to mail the package again, this time addressing it to her part-time employee, Dr. Hannah M. Stone, a qualified, licensed gynecologist. At the arrival of the package of 120 rubber pessaries (devices placed in the vagina to block conception), agents again confiscated it, ordering Dr. Stone to return it. Sanger, the American Birth Control League, Dr. Stone, the National Committee on Maternal Health, and lawyer Morris Ernst immediately went to court, claiming the supplies were medical exemptions under the law. Using Dr. Stone as the claimant, they filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District in New York City on 10 November 1933.