Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story

TV Movie
1995
1h 32m

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Henry Czerny, Dana Delany, and Rod Steiger in Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story (1995)

In 1914, nurse Margaret Sanger became a pioneering crusader for women's reproductive rights after she published a booklet on birth-control techniques that flew in the face of a law establish... Read allIn 1914, nurse Margaret Sanger became a pioneering crusader for women's reproductive rights after she published a booklet on birth-control techniques that flew in the face of a law established by Anthony Comstock forbidding the dissemination of information on contraception. Sange... Read allIn 1914, nurse Margaret Sanger became a pioneering crusader for women's reproductive rights after she published a booklet on birth-control techniques that flew in the face of a law established by Anthony Comstock forbidding the dissemination of information on contraception. Sanger later helped to establish America's first birth-control clinic in 1916, and in 1925 was ... Read all

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IMDb RATING

6.6/10

189

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Awards
- 1 win & 10 nominations total

User reviews5

Featured review

9/10

Like my daughters

Dana Delaney is Irish/Anglo like my daughters. Her resemblance to Margaret Higgins Sangers is uncanny. The Higgins is crucial. Higgins is a Roscommon (Ireland) name and people from there have a ten percent leg up toward sainthood.

Sanger thought abortion was dangerous. Better to prevent pregnancy. Her mother 11 births and 7 miscarriages in 22 years and died of tuberculosis at. Say, 42. It's lie, "See. She had all those births and lived." It's like she was the Catholic Mother of the Year. Like the early planes: we're up in the air, 5 seconds, ten seconds and so so on, we're flying! Then, Crash! Wish I had used birth control.

Comstock was against pornography, immorality, prostitution, indecency. His group was. He used the group for his main goal: making sure that the right people did not limit their offspring. A kind of eugenics. Like anti-immigrant, including the Irish of which Sanger was one. But decency: in one scene the board of the group reads Sanger's instructions for inserting a pessary into the vagina. They visibly shiver in disgust. Puritanical vs. Sanger's realistic scientific experience. She was a public health nurse. You know. An essential person.

I see her as one of the three women New York City saints: Mother Elizabeth Seton, Dorothy Day and Sanger. Saving lives. Not so much concerned about whether God exists or Bishops are infallible.