 He later became the first legal manufacturer of diaphragms in the United States.Some countries in northwestern Europe had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States at the time, and when Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she learned about diaphragms and became convinced that they were a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had been distributing back in the United States.Diaphragms were generally unavailable in the United States, so Sanger and others began importing them from Europe, in defiance of United States law.