This is the Final Installment in a three part series about the Sexual Revolution. Press the ‘Previous’ button to read parts I and II.

In September of 1966, Margaret Sanger, a prominent proponent of the sexual revolution and founder of Planned Parenthood died in Tucson, Arizona. As a passionate sexual libertine, Sanger’s legacy of selfishness, even towards her own family is startling. Finding child rearing tedious she abandoned her three children to caretakers so that she could move about in the ‘fast lane’ unhindered. Even when her daughter died of pneumonia, Sanger showed scant remorse. Her son Grant observed that she was seldom around. “She just left us with anybody at hand and ran off, we didn’t know where.” Sanger referred to birth control as her ‘religion’ and devised her own Credo of Woman’s Rights: “The right to be lazy. The right to be an unmarried mother. The right to create. The right to destroy. The right to love; and the right to live.” And by love Sanger meant frequent sexual encounters with her extensive stable of lovers, just as her right to live did not include the unborn. In fact, Sanger was so zealous in her defense of abortion that one lover, Havelock Ellis, had to warn her to tone down her rhetoric, focusing instead on the woman’s right “to create or not create new life.” Continue reading →