LIFE ISSUES NO. 2811

MARGARET SANGER – Part 1

It is erroneously thought in some circles that Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was against abortion.  This is completely untrue.  She was strongly pro-abortion.  It is well known that she founded Planned Parenthood.  Less known is that this group came from her earlier Birth Control League.  What is now known, and Planned Parenthood folks are in no hurry to tell you, is that she was a wealth society elitist who looked with total distain, fear and even loathing at the under classes around her.  She was probably the most prominent eugenics advocate in the United States during the early years of this century.

“Eugenics.”  What is that?  Eugenics is a movement that would purify the human race, or the gene pool, if you please.  It would do this either by aborting those who don’t measure up to their elitist standards of physical and mental perfection or, and often forcibly, by sterilizing poor people and thus limiting the number of children they can have.

Eugenics encourages the more successful and wealthy human types and races to beget more children.  It tries to do this voluntarily by education but then would move more and more into instituting government policies that would aid the survival of the fittest and, on the other hand, suppress those who have been less successful in this world.  Eugenicists believe that man’s social and economic situation in life is determined by only one thing—his or her inherent, inherited genetic talents and abilities.

Margaret Sanger and her followers felt that our welfare and aid to the underprivileged of society has thrown nature all out of balance.  Such charity and private and governmental assistance, medical care and so forth, they said, has been artificially keeping people alive who otherwise long ago would have been eliminated by natural selection.  Eugenicists feel that people who live in the slums and I quote: “because of their animalistic nature, breed like rabbits.  These folks will soon overrun the boundaries of their slum, their country, and contaminate the better elements of society with diseases and inferior genes.” 

And Margaret Sanger’s solution—let me quote again:  “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.  That is the aim of birth control.”  Or again, she said:  “Birth control to create a race of thoroughbreds.”  Here’s one:  “The kindest thing that a large family can do for its youngest member is to kill it.”  Or here again:  “If you must have welfare, give it to the rich, not to the poor.”  Her Birth Control Review, a periodical published during the ‘20s and ‘30s, and her book The Pivot of Civilization contain many more such quotes.

Tomorrow I’m going to tell you a little more about this woman who has had so much to do with today’s abortion holocaust.

[04/15/02]