Kolloquium: The Impact of Margaret Sanger‘s Birth Control Clinics on Early 20th CenturyU.S. Fertility and Mortality

Abstract:
In 1916, Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in U.S. history.From the mid-1920s, “Sanger clinics” spread over the entire U.S. Combining newlydigitized data on the roll-out of these clinics, full-count Census data, and historicalvital statistics, we find that birth control clinics accounted for 5.0–7.8% of the overall fertility decline until 1940. Moreover, birth control clinics significantly reducedthe local incidence of stillbirths by 4.7% and infant mortality by 7.4% within tenyears after establishment. The effect of birth controlclinics on puerperal deaths isconsistently negative, yet insignificant.