Margaret Sanger in the US–Mexico Borderlands

On 15 April 1952, Margaret Sanger gave a radio address to El Pasoans in celebration of Planned Parenthood of El Paso’s fifteenth anniversary. In a firm voice, 73-year-old Sanger spoke of the important work of the birth control clinic aiding poor families along the border. It was through these clinics that they received the most critical information about family limitation. She reminded her audience of the dearth of resources that surrounded them. “These are the only clinics in 300-hundred miles in any direction,” she declared. Sanger thanked the gracious families who had supported the organization for over a decade stating, “These parents are our best self-supporting citizens in the nation. They are producing and educating children to become an asset to our country.” Quickly her address turned toward the evils of overpopulation and the great need for continued support of birth control as a key component of population control. Despite the shadow of the Holocaust’s horrors hovering over recent memory, Sanger chastised Italy and Germany for not doing more to curb excess births. She also invoked the potential population explosions in China and India. She cautioned her audience that by the end of her on-air statement an additional “500 babies” would be born who needed food and clothes on an already bursting planet. This paper examines the history of Sanger’s population control rhetoric in the US-Mexico borderlands and how it connected international fears of overpopulation to the United States’s southern border. Her words fostered Anglo’s obsession with population control ideology that comprised control of the majority Mexican-origin community’s access to health care, including various forms of reproductive health.