Who Was Margaret Sanger
WHO WAS MARGARET SANGER
Introduction
To suggest that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist is to raise the ire of many of the present-day leaders of Planned Parenthood and other anti-life organizations. However, the facts do speak for themselves.
For example, throughout the pages of the Birth Control Review, Mrs. Sanger's journal, there are countless quotes which not only suggest that she favored eugenics, but that she provided a forum to those who wished to spread their fear of human life, when that life was conceived by someone other than a member of society's elite.
This brochure is devoted to familiarizing you with the most outrageous of the statements to which Mrs. Sanger gave credence, as well as to a few of her own. Since books have been written about her, it is not necessary for us to go into her sordid background at length, but simply to give you a taste of the hypocrisy which has led so many people into the web Planned Parenthood weaves, even today. It is a web that distorts, misrepresents and ultimately cheapens the beautiful gift of human sexuality which God gives to each and every person at conception.
Who Was Margaret Sanger?
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was an adulteress, racist and bigot, a supporter of Hitler's Nazi party, and a believer in eugenics - the purification of a particular race of people by selective breeding. Her magazines and journals were filled with writings and articles by well-known eugenicists and members of Hitler's Third Reich.
Marriage
Sanger made every effort to promote philosophies which would assist the state in controlling the size of families. However, with regard to her own family, her first husband William Sanger, her children, and her subsequent divorce, she wrote in her 1931 book, My Fight for Birth Control:
"'My first marriage failed, not because of love, romance, lack of wealth, respect or any such qualities which are supposed to be lacking in broken ties, because the interest of each widened beyond that of the other" (p. 296). "From the deep waters into which I had been swept by the current of events it was impossible to return to the shallow pool of domesticity'" (p. 92).[1]
The wife who is able to stay at home and care for her family because she wants to is characterized by Sanger as someone who is simply drowning in a "shallow pool of domesticity," an attitude con-sistently promulgated in today's society by the feminist movement and those who have relegated motherhood to the lowest level of achievement.
Adultery
After a failed trial marriage at 18, she married William Sanger in 1902 and soon engaged in extramarital affairs while encouraging her husband to do the same. She pronounced the marriage bed to be "the most degenerating influence in the social order" and advocated a "voluntary association" between sexual partners.[2]
At the beginning of her "mission" to bring birth control to America, around 1912, she saw birth control as a tool in the class struggle and was clearly on the side of the poor.
However, her involvement with well-known socialists and eugenicists of the day (Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Will Durant, Clarence Darrow, and Ellen Key) changed her mind completely. Over a period of eight years she began to turn the birth control movement against the very people she had set out to help.
Jesus Christ
Mrs. Sanger, who did not have faith in God, and detested all those who did, wrote:
"I never liked to look at Jesus on the Cross. I could not see any good it did to keep looking at him. We could not help him, as he had been crucified long ago."[3]
To know Christ and to appreciate His suffering, death and resurrection for each and every one of us would obviously have been foreign to Mrs. Sanger. To her, after all, many of those created in the image and likeness of God were simply less than human.
The Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger
Instead of helping the poor, she considered them slum dwellers (particularly Blacks, Hispanics, and Jewish immigrants) who would soon overrun the boundaries of their slums, contaminating the better elements of society with their diseases and inferior genes.
Throughout the 200+ pages of this book Sanger called for the elimination of "human weeds," for the cessation of charity, for the segregation of "morons, misfits, and maladjusted," and for the sterilization of "genetically inferior races."[4] In this same book she argued that organized attempts to help the poor were the "surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating . . . defectives, delinquents, and dependents."[5] She called for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and rehabilitative concentration camps for all inferior Blacks, Hispanics, poor Whites, and Catholics.
Sanger's brand of prejudice was based on what author John L. Keller labels "Scientific Racism," the belief that as long as people demonstrated "a good quality gene pool" they were esteemed a valuable part of society. On the other hand, if a group, including Whites, demonstrated undesirable traits, their fertility had to be curbed along with other "inferiors and undesirables."[6]
George Grant stated in Grand Illusions: "In her book Women and the New Race she asserted that the 'most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.'"[7]
Minorities
On October 19, 1939, Sanger outlined a plan for stopping the growth of the Black community. She predicted that "the most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their rebellious members."[8] Her planning, which included being careful to make it appear that hand-picked Blacks are in control, is followed with success even today. Faye Wattleton's position as President of PPFA was testimony to that fact.
The Birth Control Review by Margaret Sanger
The Birth Control Review, founded by Sanger in 1917, was totally committed to the eugenics philosophy. The official editorial policy of The Review endorsed I.Q. testing, which classified Blacks, southern Europeans, and other immigrants as mentally inferior to native-born White Americans and called them a nuisance and a menace to society.[9] In the 1920s she tried to use the results from I.Q. tests, which classified the U.S. soldier as a near moron, to back up her own findings.
Sanger truly believed these groups were a "dead weight of human waste" and "a menace to the race."[10]
Abortion and Birth Control
It was in the December, 1918, Birth Control Review that Margaret Sanger wrote perhaps the most ingenious comment of all: ". . . I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization. . ."[11]
How do you sell the practice of contraception to a public that is totally opposed to it? In 1918, when she wrote the above, no religious denomination accepted the practice of contraception. Well, you sell it to the people by insisting that with better contraception there would be less abortion! It sounds very familiar, doesn't it?
Today, it is only the Roman Catholic Church that stands for the truth with regard to contraception, and among its members it is said that eighty percent practice contraception anyway. Would Mrs. Sanger be proud of her campaign if she could see the results we live with today - more than 50 strains of VD as well as the deadly AIDS virus?
And would she agree with current Planned Parenthood president Pamela Maraldo, who writes: "As Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders has so succinctly put it: 'We've taught our children in driver's education what to do in the front seat, and now we've got to teach them what to do in the back seat.'"[12]
Today American youth are told that the "responsible" thing to do is use contraception, be realistic and formulate your own values as you go, and if your contraception fails, get an abortion.[13] Responsible? Mrs. Sanger would be proud.
Thus through Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood has molded the sexual ethics of the day: Sex is a natural thing for a teenager to desire and if a teenager feels that he is to be sexually active that is his decision; all society asks is that he not produce children.
1. Goldstein, David, L.L.D., Suicide Bent: Sangerizing Mankind (Radio Replies Press, 1945) p. 23. 2. Drogin, pp. 15, 22. 3. Goldstein, David, loc. cit., p. 25. 4. Grant, George. Grand Illusions (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1988), p. 55. 5. Drogin, p. 45. 6. Grant, pp. 98-99. 7. Grant, p. 59. 8. Drogin, p. 33. 9. Drogin, p. 20. 10. Drogin, pp. 17, 46. 11. Crawford, Linda, Life Dynamics, research notes, 1/25/93. 12. Maraldo, Pamela J., "Contraceptive Use: Coping With Psychosocial Barriers," Family Planning World, 3-4/93, p. 5. 13. Reality-Based Sexuality Education, Planned Parent-hood Federation of America, 1993, p. 4 [brochure plus outline].
American Life League P.O. Box 1350 Stafford, VA 22555 (703) 659-4171
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c1992 American Life League
Revised 1993
