Margaret Sanger

Seven of her ten planets sit in earth signs, with a single planet each in fire, air and water, and five of the ten were retrograde at birth. The Sun, Mercury and Uranus spread across seventeen degrees of Virgo, and Mars, Neptune and Pluto across sixteen of Taurus. The record says Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in America and was jailed for it, and later funded the research that produced the pill, and that her involvement with the eugenics movement is a real part of the record.

Mercury sits conjunct Uranus at under four fifths of a degree, and the reading is fast, original thinking: insight arriving whole rather than by steps, an interest in systems, and impatience with anything explained slowly. Venus sits in quiet contact with that same Uranus at fourteen hundredths of a degree, independent affection without conflict, which the reading glosses as unconventional arrangements that work. For a record whose first fact is a clinic nobody had opened before and a prison sentence for opening it, both of those are fits a reader will accept easily.

The record's third sentence is the one that matters most, and it is there deliberately: her involvement with the eugenics movement is a real part of it. A chart offering unconventional arrangements that work, to a reader holding that sentence, is offering nothing of any use whatever, and this entry is not going to let a reading about independent affection stand in for an argument about who should be allowed to have children. The record states the involvement. Nothing in these ten planets qualifies it, and nothing here is to be read as softening it.

Seven planets in earth is the structural fact, and earth is the element of what gets made and kept rather than what gets argued about. Venus lies at an awkward angle to Jupiter at eight hundredths of a degree, the closest contact here, pleasure without a brake, and Jupiter sits in direct opposition to Uranus at under a quarter, growth arriving disruptively: opportunity that costs stability. Her Moon sits one degree into Virgo at noon with Leo still possible, so it is left out. Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the five retrograde planets. She died at Tucson on 6 September 1966, at eighty six. Venus stood square her natal Pluto at seven hundredths of a degree that day and Saturn sixty degrees from that same Pluto at twelve hundredths. The Moon was disseminating and sixty three per cent lit.