Margaret Sanger opens first U.S. birth control clinic in Brooklyn, arrested and convicted after nine days

On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, and activist Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in the United States at 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, providing contraceptive information to working-class immigrant women in deliberate violation of New York's Comstock-era law. Police shut it down nine days later; Sanger was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in Queens County jail when she refused to pay a fine. The arrest drew national media coverage and galvanized the birth control movement. A 1918 New York appellate ruling that followed, People v. Byrne, created the first legal exception allowing physicians to advise patients on contraception for disease prevention.