Birth Control

In grainy monochrome reverie, a camera stalks the corridors of early-twentieth-century obstetrics wards, where rusted forceps and whispered rosaries once ruled. Sanger appears—petite, iron-eyed—smuggling diaphragms past postal censors, dodging Comstockian crusaders who equate latex with Lucifer. Archival nitrate flickers: immigrant mothers birthing their twelfth child in a Ludlow tenement; a Brooklyn judge sentencing her to thirty days for disseminating ‘obscene’ pamphlets; Berlin clinics in 1935, where Nazi eugenicists pervert her phrase ‘planned parenthood’ into sterilization quotas. The film’s montage spirals like a fever dream: storefront meetings where whispered Dutch cap instructions morph into Greenwich Village poetry readings; love letters to Havelock Ellis intercut with courtroom sketches of priests wagging crucifixes at jurors. A final reel dissolves the decades: Puerto Rican pill trials, Black Panther suspicion, Supreme Court victories, and the rueful admission that the movement’s liberating flame occasionally singed those it meant to emancipate. The documentary refuses hagiography, instead threading Sanger’s contradictions—her socialism, her flirtation with eugenics—onto a Möbius strip of history that refuses tidy closure.