Scion of birth control pioneer backs abortion

Alexander Sanger didn't begin his professional life with thoughts of carrying his grandmother's banner.

Placed by birth, rather than choice, into the family of the founder of the birth control movement -- Margaret Sanger -- he accumulated Ivy League degrees in history, business administration and the law, opening the law offices of White and Case in Palm Beach County in 1978.

But as he aged, he felt increasingly the need to live up to the burden of his name, saying he believed his whole life was preparation for it.

Sanger continues his feminist grandmother's work

Eighty-six years ago in Coronado, the son of Margaret Sanger told his schoolyard tormenters that the world-famous feminist was not his mother.

Friday afternoon in Carlsbad, her grandson, Alexander Sanger, told a gathering of Planned Parenthood's ardent North County supporters that the re-reading of his grandmother's first book, "Woman and the New Race," written during a winter vacation in Coronado, inspired him to publish his own first book on procreative freedom.

How strange, I thought.

How had I -- as well as the Coronado and San Diego historical societies -- failed to hear of this local link to a colossal figure who, more than any other individual in American history, advanced the reproductive health of women?