Dispelling the Margaret Sanger lies

[badbabysitter]

the anti-choice crowd here is once again jumping on the "Sanger was a racist who wanted to control black people" myth


so now I have to quote myself again in the hopes this will stick in your dumbass skulls

ahem...part 1


The Negro Project, instigated in 1939 by Margaret Sanger, was one of the first major undertakings of the new Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA), the product of a merger between the American Birth Control League and Sanger's Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, and one of the more controversial campaigns of the birth control movement. Developed by white birth control reformers, who consulted with African-Americans for help in promoting the project only well after its inception, the Negro Project and associated campaigns were, nevertheless, widely supported by such black leaders as Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Influenced strongly by both the eugenics movement and the progressive welfare programs of the New Deal era, the Negro Project was, from the start, largely indifferent to the needs of the black community and constructed in terms and with perceptions that today smack of racism.

What it became was not the project Sanger had first envisioned. As she wrote in an initial fund-raising request to Albert Lasker, the wealthy advertising executive just beginning his post-business career in medical philanthropy, she simply hoped to help "a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste' system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation." Sanger viewed the Negro Project as another effort to help African-Americans gain better access to safe contraception and maintain birth control services in their community as she had attempted to do in Harlem a decade earlier when Sanger's Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB), in cooperation with the New York Urban League, opened a birth control clinic there. (MS to Lasker, July 10, 1939, Mary Lasker Papers, Columbia University (to be microfilmed in a later addendum to the MSM)

By the late 1930s, the birth control activists began to focus on high birth rates and poor quality of life in the South, alerted to alarming Southern poverty by a 1938 U.S. National Resource Committee report which asserted that Southern poverty drained resources from other parts of the country. Starting in the mid-1930s, Sanger sent field workers into the rural South to establish birth control services in poor communities and conduct research. She sought to test various contraceptive jellies and foam powders to see if they could effectively be used without a diaphragm, which would be cheaper and easier for poor women to use. Physician and philanthropist Clarence Gamble (1894-1966), who was on a quest to find the best birth control for the "uneducated masses," funded and supervised several of these rural Southern projects. The birth control movement also looked to Southern states as the ideal region in which to secure funding under New Deal legislation and to establish birth control services as part of state and federal public health programs. These birth control initiatives were designed, in part, to demonstrate to government bureaucrats on the county, state and federal levels that contraceptive clinics were essential in impoverished Southern communities and could be successfully duplicated in other regions.

In 1937, North Carolina became the first state to incorporate birth control services into a statewide public health program, followed by six other southern states. However, these successes were clouded by the failure of birth controllers to overcome segregated health services and improve African-Americans' access to contraceptives. Hazel Moore, a veteran lobbyist and health administrator, ran a birth control project under Sanger's direction and found that black women in several Virginia counties were very responsive to birth control education. A 1938 trip to Tennessee further convinced Sanger of the desire of African-Americans in that region to control their fertility and the need for specific programs in birth control education aimed at the black community. (Hazel Moore, "Birth Control for the Negro," 1937, Sophia Smith Collection, Florence Rose Papers.)

In 1939 Sanger teamed with Mary Woodward Reinhardt, secretary of the newly formed BCFA, to secure a large donor to fund an educational campaign to teach African-American women in the South about contraception. Sanger, Reinhardt and Sanger's secretary, Florence Rose, drafted a report on "Birth Control and the Negro," skillfully using language that appealed both to eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and progressives committed to shepherding African-Americans into middle-class culture. The report stated that "[N]egroes present the great problem of the South," as they are the group with "the greatest economic, health and social problems," and outlined a practical birth control program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and that "still breed carelessly and disastrously," a line borrowed from a June 1932 Birth Control Review article by W.E.B. DuBois. Armed with this paper, Reinhardt initiated contact between Sanger and Albert Lasker (soon to be Reinhardt's husband), who pledged $20,000 starting in Nov. 1939. ("Birth Control and the Negro," July 1939, Lasker Papers)

However, once funding was secured, the project slipped from Sanger's hands. She had proposed that the money go to train "an up and doing modern minister, colored, and an up and doing modern colored medical man" at her New York clinic who would then tour "as many Southern cities and organizations and churches and medical societies as they can get before" and "preach and preach and preach!" She believed that after a year of such "educational agitation" the Federation could support a "practical campaign for supplying mothers with contraceptives." Before going in and establishing clinics, Sanger thought it critical to gain the support and involvement of the African-American community (not just its leaders) and establish a foundation of trust. Her proposal derived from the work of activists in the field, discussions with black leaders and her experience with the New York clinics. Sanger understood the concerns of some within the black community about having Northern whites intervene in the most intimate aspect of their lives. "I do not believe" she warned, "that this project should be directed or run by white medical men. The Federation should direct it with the guidance and assistance of the colored group – perhaps, particularly and specifically formed for the purpose." To succeed, she wrote, "It takes a very strong heart and an individual well entrenched in the community. . . ." (MS to Gamble, Nov. 26, 1939, and MS to Robert Seibels, Feb. 12, 1940 [MSM S17:514, 891].)

Sanger reiterated the need for black ministers to head up the project in a letter to Clarence Gamble in Dec. 1939, arguing that: "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 more rebellious members." This passage has been repeatedly extracted by Sanger's detractors as evidence that she led a calculated effort to reduce the black population against their will. From African-American activist Angela Davis on the left to conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza on the right, this statement alone has condemned Sanger to a perpetual waltz with Hitler and the KKK. Davis quoted the incendiary passage in her 1983 Women, Race and Class, claiming that the Negro Project "confirmed the ideological victory of the racism associated with eugenic ideas." D'Souza used the quote to buttress erroneous claims that Sanger called blacks "human weeds" and a "menace to civilization" in his best-selling 1995 book The End of Racism. The argument that Sanger co-opted black clergy and community leaders to exterminate their own race not only gives Sanger unwarranted credit as a remarkably cunning manipulator, but also suggests that African-Americans were passive receptors of birth control reform, incapable of making their own decisions about family size; and that black leaders were ignorant and gullible.

In the end, Sanger's plan for an educational campaign to precede the demonstration project lost out to the white medical and public relations men running the new Federation. They were particularly swayed by Robert Seibels (1890-1955), chairman of the Committee on Maternal Welfare of the South Carolina Medical Association, who was chosen by the BCFA to direct a Negro demonstration project in that state. Seibels distrusted Sanger and her loyal crew of field workers, calling them "dried-up female fanatics" who had the gall to tell doctors what to do. Robert E. Seibels to Frederick C. Holden, Jan. 28, 1939, Sophia Smith Collection, Records of PPFA.) He saw no need for prerequisite education and propaganda and advised incorporating birth control services for blacks into a general public health program. The BCFA then dismissed the notion of building a community-based, black-staffed demonstration clinic that could become permanent, and instead set in motion a plan that closely resembled the vaccination and VD caravans that swept in and out of the region.

Lasker's money was used to set up demonstration projects between 1940 and 1942 in several rural South Carolina counties, under Seibels's direction, and in urban Nashville, TN under the auspices of the Nashville City Health Department. In South Carolina, the BCFA hired two African-American nurses to make house calls and meet with women in groups at schools and community centers to encourage them to visit a clinic, but contraceptives were dispensed by white doctors only. In Nashville, demonstration clinics were opened at the Bethlehem Center, a black settlement house, and later at Fisk University, and black nurses were eventually employed with some success there as well.

The Federation immediately claimed that the Negro Project had exceeded its expectations and even persuaded Life Magazine to carry a photo spread of the demonstration clinics in South Carolina in May 1940. But relatively few women, (only about 3,000) visited the demonstration clinics to receive contraceptive instruction. And among those that did, the dropout rates were high as many women would not return to white doctors for follow-up exams, though the black nurses in both Nashville and South Carolina met with greater success. In 1942 the Federation ended funding for the demonstration clinics claiming to have developed "workable procedures" for providing contraception to African-Americans in both rural and urban communities; but no other clinics appear to have opened as a result of the Project. ("Better Health for 13,000,000," PPFA Report, April 16, 1943, Rose Papers; John Overton, "A Birth Control Service Among Urban Negroes," Human Fertility, Aug. 1942, 97-101.)

However, the "Division of Negro Service," a department created at the BCFA initially to oversee the Negro Project, did implement some of the educational goals Sanger outlined. Under the direction of Florence Rose, with money raised by Sanger, and inspired by an advisory council of eminent black leaders, educators and health professionals, the Division undertook significant education projects from 1940-1943. Rose flooded every black organization in the country with planned parenthood literature, set up exhibits, instigated local and national press coverage and hired a black woman doctor, Mae McCarroll, to teach birth control techniques to black doctors and lobby medical groups. Though still stinging from the rejection of her earlier proposal for the Negro Project, Sanger wrote enthusiastically to Albert Lasker in July of 1942 about what she now framed as a pioneering effort: "I believe that the Negro question is coming definitely to the fore in America, not only because of the war, but in anticipation of the place the Negro will occupy after the peace. I think it is magnificent that we are in on the ground floor, helping Negroes to control their birth rate, to reduce their high infant and maternal death rate, to maintain better standards of health and living for those already born, and to create better opportunities for those who will be born. In other words, we're giving Negroes an opportunity to help themselves, and to rise to their own heights through education and the principles of a democracy." (MS to Lasker, July 9, 1942, MSM S21:404)

But the BCFA (which changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942) forced Florence Rose to leave in 1943 – a result of her inability to follow new bureaucratic procedures and her allegiance to Sanger, who was immersed in her own clashes with Federation staff. With Rose's departure, the Division of Negro Service floundered and soon shut down. The Federation delegated "Negro" work to other departments and eventually passed off remnants of the program to state affiliates.

Arguments persist about whether or not the Negro Project was purely a racist endeavor (search for "Sanger" "Negro Project" and "racism" on the Internet and be prepared for the onslaught). Certainly the patriarchal racism of the time that guided many of the social policies in Washington and the practices of philanthropic and charitable organizations working to "lift up" African-Americans, dictated both the Federation's and Sanger's approach to blacks and birth control. The public rationale for the Project was rooted in economics, tax-payer burden, and the social threats posed by what was perceived to be an exploding black underclass, rather than the health and sexual liberation of black women (though it should be notes that the birth control movement largely ignored the issue of women's —black or white— sexual autonomy in the interwar years). And there is no doubt that a good number of medical professionals involved in the birth control movement exhibited strong racist sentiments, some of them arguing for and even carrying out compulsory sterilization on black women considered to be of low intelligence and therefore not capable of choosing not to control their fertility, as well as on those deemed morally or behaviorally deviant. But there is no evidence that Sanger or even the Federation coerced or intended to coerce black women into using birth control. The fundamental belief, underscored at every meeting, mentioned in much of the behind-the-scenes correspondence, and evident in all the printed material put out by the Division of Negro Service, was that uncontrolled fertility presented the greatest burden to the poor, and Southern blacks were among the poorest Americans. In fact, the Negro Project did not differ very much from the earlier birth control campaigns in the rural South designed to test simpler methods on poor, uneducated and mostly white agricultural communities. Following these other efforts in the South, it would have been more racist, in Sanger's mind, to ignore African-Americans in the South than to fail at trying to raise the health and economic standards of their communities.

 

[badbabysitter]

MLK on Sanger

Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.

There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.

What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.

It is easier for a Negro to understand a social paradox because he has lived so long with evils that could be eradicated but were perpetuated by indifference or ignorance. The Negro finally had to devise unique methods to deal with his problem, and perhaps the measure of success he is realizing can be an inspiration to others coping with tenacious social problems.

In our struggle for equality we were confronted with the reality that many millions of people were essentially ignorant of our conditions or refused to face unpleasant truths. The hard-core bigot was merely one of our adversaries. The millions who were blind to our plight had to be compelled to face the social evil their indifference permitted to flourish.

After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action.

We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern.

Recently the subject of Negro family life has received extensive attention. Unfortunately, studies have overemphasized the problem of the Negro male ego and almost entirely ignored the most serious element — Negro migration. During the past half century Negroes have migrated on a massive scale, transplanting millions from rural communities to crammed urban ghettoes. In their migration, as with all migrants, they carried with them the folkways of the countryside into an inhospitable city slum. The size of family that may have been appropriate and tolerable on a manually cultivated farm was carried over to the jammed streets of the ghetto. In all respects Negroes were atomized, neglected and discriminated against. Yet, the worst omission was the absence of institutions to acclimate them to their new environment. Margaret Sanger, who offered an important institutional remedy, was unfortunately ignored by social and political leaders in this period. In consequence, Negro folkways in family size persisted. The problem was compounded when unrestrained exploitation and discrimination accented the bewilderment of the newcomer, and high rates of illegitimacy and fragile family relationships resulted.

For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command.

This is not to suggest that the Negro will solve all his problems through Planned Parenthood. His problems are far more complex, encompassing economic security, education, freedom from discrimination, decent housing and access to culture. Yet if family planning is sensible it can facilitate or at least not be an obstacle to the solution of the many profound problems that plague him.

The Negro constitutes half the poor of the nation. Like all poor, Negro and white, they have many unwanted children. This is a cruel evil they urgently need to control. There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted. That which should be a blessing becomes a curse for parent and child. There is nothing inherent in the Negro mentality which creates this condition. Their poverty causes it. When Negroes have been able to ascend economically, statistics reveal they plan their families with even greater care than whites. Negroes of higher economic and educational status actually have fewer children than white families in the same circumstances.

Some commentators point out that with present birth rates it will not be long before Negroes are a majority in many of the major cities of the nation. As a consequence, they can be expected to take political control, and many people are apprehensive at this prospect. Negroes do not seek political control by this means. They seek only what they are entitled to and do not wish for domination purchased at the cost of human misery. Negroes were once bred by slave owners to be sold as merchandise. They do not welcome any solution which involves population breeding as a weapon. They are instinctively sympathetic to all who offer methods that will improve their lives and offer them fair opportunity to develop and advance as all other people in our society.

For these reasons we are natural allies of those who seek to inject any form of planning in our society that enriches life and guarantees the right to exist in freedom and dignity.

For these constructive movements we are prepared to give our energies and consistent support; because in the need for family planning, Negro and white have a common bond; and together we can and should unite our strength for the wise preservation, not of races in general, but of the one race we all constitute — the human race.

 

[badbabysitter]

Sanger as Nazi apologist or eugenicist

Search for Margaret Sanger's name on the Internet and you will quickly be bombarded by claims that she supported Hitler and the Nazi's human elimination programs, or at the very least inspired the Nazi architects of race improvement. "Hitler and Sanger Join Hands" blares one anti-Sanger diatribe; "Margaret Sanger, Sterilization and the Swastika" is the title of another; "Let us look forward to the day when Planned Parenthood clinics are made into holocaust museums," concludes another attack on Sanger's writings. One web site features photos of Sanger and Hitler united under a Swastika. Another inserts the phrase "concentration camps" into a 1932 Sanger speech to demonstrate her real motives, a novel form of textual annotation that is then passed on like a virus to other sites who point to the phrase as documented evidence of Sanger's final solution.

Though this disinformation campaign, designed to arouse anger and anti-choice activism, resides largely on the Internet, in colorful, sensationalized pages, even the more respectable print outlets have picked up many of the most extreme Nazi-related allegations about Sanger as voiced by anti-abortion activists at newsworthy events or on Op-Ed pages. They then print them without comment, in effect publishing them as fact. The Associated Press, for example, reported on an anti-abortion march in Birmingham on October 14 of this year, quoting a participant who described Sanger "as racist as she could be," and linked her to Hitler's race policies. A Canadian paper, the Calgary Sun, ran a Sept. 1 opinion piece that claimed Sanger "backed the Nazi race purification program until it became unfashionable." And even though mainstream publications are not actually calling Sanger a Nazi, they are, increasingly, referring to her (as the New York Times did in a September 19 article on the opening of the Museum of Sex in New York City) as a "eugenicist" before associating her with birth control.

Every year there are dozens more characterizations of Sanger as a pro-Nazi, genocidal racist appearing in newspapers, right-wing biographies and purported histories of planned parenthood, and especially on the Internet. Sanger is by no means alone among controversial social reformers and liberators painted as grotesques by extremist opponents of their beliefs and accomplishments; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Eleanor Roosevelt can ably compete with her for this posthumous fame. But the attacks against Sanger resonate in a way that attacks on others do not, largely because of the emotions generated by the abortion debate.

Unfortunately these misrepresentations of Sanger as a Nazi sympathizer who carried out her own quiet form of genocide through abortions, the spread of harmful contraceptives and the advocacy of racist "eugenic" policies – supported by the circulation of Sanger's controversial writings on eugenics – have begun to infect unbiased student research that is increasingly dependent on unverified and unsubstantiated information only a mouse click away. Granted most of the Internet sites that link Sanger and Hitler as the dark angels of human carnage don't hide their pro-life, anti-choice associations. But the "Big Lie" theory works – the more you say it, the more it sticks.

Sanger never met Hitler, except in her unconscious (see below). And the reality is that despite the fact that Sanger's anti-militarism and isolationism during the 1920s and 1930s at times obscured her abhorrence of the Nazis, she was deeply shocked and horrified by the evils and dangers of fascism, Hitler and the Nazi party. "All the news from Germany is sad & horrible," she wrote in 1933, "and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right. The sudden antagonism in Germany against the Jews & the vitriolic hatred of them is spreading underground here & is far more dangerous than the aggressive policy of the Japanese in Manchuria." (MS to Edith How-Martyn, May 21, 1933 [MSM C2:536].) She joined the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda and "gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler's rise to power in Germany." ("World War II and World Peace," 1940? [MSM S72:269].) For Hitler the feeling was mutual; in 1933 the Nazis burned Sanger's books along with those of Ellis, Freud, German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, and others. (Ellis to MS, Sept. 3, 1933 [LCM 3:385].)

How then does Sanger end up keeping company with Hitler? In this predominantly Internet-based netherworld of revisionist Sanger profiles there are two paths linking Sanger to Hitler, and they frequently intersect. On one, Sanger is accused of murdering millions through abortion, either directly as an abortionist, or as the primary force in creating a culture that devalues human life as evidenced by the rising number of abortions through the twentieth century. This is the unacknowledged "holocaust" commandeered by Sanger. In these absurd depictions she was an even more efficient killer than Hitler or Stalin. One well-quoted assault on Sanger's legacy, George Grant's 1995 book, Killer Angel, charges Sanger with the "brutal elimination of thirty million children in the United States and as many as two and a half billion worldwide." The fact that Sanger's clinic did not offer abortions and that she advocated birth control as the only remedy for abortion does little to dispel the myth that Sanger pressed abortion upon the masses.

But the main vehicle used to metamorphose this feminist liberator into a Nazi is Sanger's limited and largely self-serving role in the short but spectacular rise of American eugenics – a movement that sought to apply the principles of genetics to improving the human race. By lifting passages from Sanger's writings on eugenics and sterilization while failing to provide the complete argument or proper context, and by linking her with notorious racists within the eugenics movement, debunkers of Sanger's achievements have given her a fiendish make-over.

In one of the seminal texts in this extremist assault on Sanger, the 1979 Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society (both its title and cover – pictured here– prepare the reader for the many leaps of faith to come), the author suggests that Sanger, through her "eugenic" writings and speeches, put into motion a "‘polite' genocide with an army of biologists, sociologists, eugenicists and psychologists at her side," and did so without raising any suspicions among the people. (p. 24) So effective was Sanger as a propagandist, claims the author, that her debased "values" have become "those of modern Western civilization and are rapidly becoming the morals which dominate the rest of the world." (p. 9)

What is, of course, overlooked is that Sanger used the popular eugenics movement to help promote birth control as a science-based remedy for overpopulation, poverty, disease and famine. Incorporating the rhetoric of the eugenics movement into her writings allowed Sanger to make a stronger biological argument that fertility control was necessary for the improvement and health of the entire human race, not only as a means to liberate women. Sanger did seek to discourage the reproduction of persons who were, in the terms of her day, "unfit" or "feebleminded," those, it was believed, who would pass on mental disease or serious physical defect. And she did advocate sterilization in cases where the subject was unable to use birth control. This was a popular position espoused by many progressive medical leaders, scientists and health reformers of the day – those groups who Sanger hoped to win over to the birth control fight. But in approaching eugenics as a propagandist rather than a scientist, Sanger's language became dehumanizing, her eugenic recommendations overly simplistic, and her understanding of genetics flawed. Take the oft quoted 1931 "My Way to Peace," in which Sanger recommends that the government:

. . . keep the doors of Immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble-minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphiletic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class . . . apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization, and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. (Jan. 17, 1932 [LCM 130:198].)

These are harsh words intended to appeal not only to eugenicists, but social and health workers who came in contact with all manner of sickness and suffering. Sanger was not referring to short stature or pattern balding when she used the phrase "objectionable traits," rather she was talking about diseases such as syphilis that were ravaging especially the poor. Unfortunately, she did sometimes apply the term to moral as well as mental defects, though never as virulently as others in the eugenics community.

Offensive terminology aside, Sanger's beliefs, however inhumane they may seem in the current age of medical enlightenment when human suffering is much less visible in our daily lives, actually came from her direct experience with the poor and oppressed. An illustration can be found in a 1932 letter written to Sanger by a woman requesting birth control advice:

"I will be thirty-six years old on December 16, 1932. and I shall have been married fifteen years on December 13, 1932. During this time I have given birth to eleven children, of whom four are now living–a boy of 13 1/2 years–a girl of 12 years and twin boys two years old. Three of these eleven children were born badly deformed–one with a hare lip and split palate and two with excessive water and a frog-like form. The last birth (one of the deformed ones) was in August 1931 and had to be accomplished with instruments and the Doctor . . . feared for my life and warned us against further pregnancy." (Client to MS, July 5, 1932 [MSM S7:218].)

Such dilemmas led Sanger to the strongly held belief that the best way to reduce human suffering was to first provide greater access to birth control. It was also necessary, she argued, to somehow regulate the procreation of those individuals likely to pass on physical or mental disease and disability who were incapable of using or denied access to contraception. But her writings on eugenics, including her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, argued that eugenic measures in and of themselves were not practicable. Instead, she concluded that women's empowerment through birth control offered the only viable means of improving the human condition.

While "My Way to Peace" is brutally frank and among the most extreme of any of Sanger's eugenic writings, it does not condone race-based eugenics. Sanger never accepted the racial hierarchies that led to the deadly racist policies of the Nazis. Rather, she vehemently rejected any definition of the "unfit" when it referred "to race or religions." (MS to Sidney Lasell, Jr., Feb. 13, 1934 [MSM S8:541].) This was not true of the broader eugenics movement, both in Europe and the United States, which blurred the distinction between good science and racial prejudice, and generally failed to protest the perversion of its ideals under the Nazis. A number of American eugenicists excused or even commended reprehensible Nazi race policies camouflaged, however poorly, under the veneer of science.

Sanger did write to and share organizational memberships and conference programs with any number of eugenicists, including such champions of scientific racism as Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, who ran the genetics laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York; and Leon Whitney, secretary of the American Eugenics Society. All of them conflated physical and mental deficiencies with racial ones. While Sanger publicly criticized these most notable eugenicists for their opposition or indifference to birth control, she never publicly condemned their racial views. Her silence is damning in retrospect, but it does not make her a Nazi.

Those who insist on labeling Sanger a Nazi claim time and again that she inspired the men who unleashed the barbarism lurking in eugenics, yet many of the men she supposedly roused to action had, in the main, only a grudging respect tinged with contempt for the woman they saw as a major deterrent to their quest to breed more of the "best." And though Sanger sought their support for birth control, in most cases she failed to win their endorsement. With few exceptions, American eugenicists advocated increased breeding among the "fit," defined by them as white Anglo-Saxon Protestants with middle or upper class values, and viewed birth control as the major impediment to the proliferation of these "better stocks."

Even more than her links with American eugenicists, Sanger's so-called association with Ernst Rudin, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, who helped align prevalent eugenic theories with Nazi race policy, has been featured in nearly every right-wing assault on Sanger's legacy. The grounds for charges that she knew, corresponded with, or influenced Rudin stem from the April 1933 Birth Control Review (BCR), a special "sterilization number." Rudin did contribute an article to this issue, as did Harry Laughlin and Leon Whitney and other eugenicists. The issue also included excerpts from the works of Havelock Ellis and influential gynecologist Robert Dickinson. Taken as a whole, the issue presents a clear, if not always comfortable, debate on compulsory sterilization, with forceful arguments for and against, and calls for further research on sterilization as a eugenic measure. But Sanger had resigned as editor of the BCR in 1929 and no longer had any affiliation with the publication. Nevertheless the BCR issue has been held out like a smoking gun in the campaign to brand Sanger a sterilization missionary and Nazi sympathizer. What is never noted is that the one voice absent in the issue is Margaret Sanger's.

Historians must grapple with the phenomenal amount of material that is being dumped on the Internet. This flood of historical "evidence" is at once liberating and dangerous, for it includes information and disinformation, and there are no help menus to tell the difference. This has become an immense challenge to historical editors who seek to deliver accurate texts in historical context. Some of the incredible attacks on Sanger have existed in book and pamphlet form for several decades now, but in the past only the most zealous would pay for them or go to the trouble to track them down. Now search engines bring them in an instant to our desktops. With sensational headlines, comical juxtapositions, bold assertions and a kind of Twilight Zone aura about them, these anti-choice, anti-Sanger web sites appear to have a sizeable and growing audience. And therein lies the problem; the proliferation of extremist material makes it all seem less extreme, more acceptable to students, journalists and others looking for a quick take on a controversial and complicated figure. History is never that easy

 

[badbabysitter]

Lookie that.. Sanger was pro-life too

SOCIETY has not yet learned the significance of the age-long effort of the feminine spirit to free itself of the burden of excessive childbearing. It has been singularly blind to the real forces underlying the cause of infanticide, child abandonment and abortion. It has permitted the highest and most powerful thing in woman’s nature to be hindered, diverted, repressed and confused. Society has permitted this inner urge of woman to be rendered violent by repression until it has expressed itself in cruel forms of family limitation, which this same society has promptly labeled “crimes” and sought to punish. It has gone on blindly forcing women into these “crimes,” deaf alike to their entreaties and to the lessons of history.

As we have seen in the second chapter of this book, child abandonment and infanticide are by no means obsolete practices. As for abortion, it has not decreased but increased with the advance of civilization. The reader will recall that one authority says that there are 1,000,000 abortions in the United States every year, while another estimates double that number.

Most of the women of the middle and upper classes in America seem secure in their knowledge of contraceptives as a means of birth control. Under present conditions, when the laws in most states regard this knowledge, howsoever it be imparted, as illicit, and the federal statutes prohibit the sending of it through the mails, even the women in more fortunate circumstances sometimes have difficulty in getting scientific information. Nevertheless, so strong is their purpose that they do obtain it and use it, correctly or incorrectly.

The great majority of women, however, belong to the working class. Nearly all of these women will fall into one of two general groups—the ones who are having children against their wills, and those who, to escape this evil, find refuge in abortion. Being given their choice by society—to continue to be overburdened mothers or to submit to a humiliating, repulsive, painful and too often gravely dangerous operation, those women in whom the feminine urge to freedom is strongest choose the abortionist. One group goes on bringing children to birth, hoping that they will be born dead or die. The women of the other group strive consciously by drastic means to protect themselves and the children already born.

“Our examinations,” says Dr. Max Hirsch, an authority on the subject, “have informed us that the largest number of abortions (in the United States) are performed on married women. This fact brings us to the conclusion that contraceptive measures among the upper classes and the practice of abortion among the lower class, are the real means employed to regulate the number of offspring.”

Thus a high percentage of women in comfortable circumstances escape overbreeding by the use of contraceptives. A similarly high percentage of women not in comfortable circumstances are forced to submit to forced maternity, because their only alternative at present is abortion. When accidental conception takes place, some women of both classes resort to abortion if they can obtain the services of an abortionist.

When society holds up its hands in horror at the “crime” of abortion, it forgets at whose door the first and principal responsibility for this practice rests. Does anyone imagine that a woman would submit to abortion if not denied the knowledge of scientific, effective contraceptives? Does anyone believe that physicians and midwives who perform abortions go from door to door soliciting patronage? The abortionist could not continue his practice for twenty-four hours if it were not for the fact that women come desperately begging for such operations. He could not stay out of jail a day if women did not so generally approve of his services as to hold his identity an open but seldom-betrayed secret.

The question, then, is not whether family limitation should be practiced. It is being practiced; it has been practiced for ages and it will always be practiced. The question that society must answer is this: Shall family limitation be achieved through birth control or abortion? Shall normal, safe, effective contraceptives be employed, or shall we continue to force women to the abnormal, often dangerous surgical operation?

This question, too, the church, the state and the moralist must answer. The knowledge of contraceptive methods may yet for a time be denied to the woman of the working class, but those who are responsible for denying it to her, and she herself, should understand clearly the dangers to which she is exposed because of the laws which force her into the hands of the abortionist.

To understand the more clearly the difference between birth control by contraceptives and family limitation through abortion it is necessary to know something of the processes of conception. Knowledge of these processes will also enable us to comprehend more thoroughly the dangers to which woman is exposed by our antiquated laws, and how much better it would be for her to employ such preventive measures as would keep her out of the hands of the abortionist, into which the laws now drive her.

In every woman’s ovaries are imbedded millions of ovules or eggs. They are in every female at birth, and as the girl develops into womanhood, these ovules develop also. At a certain age, varying slightly with the individual, the ripest ovule leaves the nest or ovary and comes down one of the tubes connecting with the womb and passes out of the body. When this takes place, it is said that the girl is at the age of puberty. When it reaches the womb the ovule is ready for the process of conception—that is, fertilization by the male sperm.

At the time the ovule is ripening, the womb is preparing to receive it. This preparation consists of a reinforced blood supply brought to its lining. If fertilization takes place, the fertilized ovule or ovum will cling to the lining of the womb and there gather its nourishment. If fertilization does not take place, the ovum passes out of the body and the uterus throws off its surplus blood supply. This is called the menstrual period. It occurs about once a month or every twenty-eight days.

In the male organs there are glands called testes. They secrete a fluid called the semen. In the semen is the life-giving principle called the sperm.
When intercourse takes place, if no preventive is employed, the semen is deposited in the woman’s vagina. The ovule is not in the vagina, but is in the womb, farther up, or perhaps in the tube on its way to the womb. As steel is attracted to the magnet, the sperm of the male starts on its way to seek the ovum. Several of these sperm cells start, but only one enters the ovum and is absorbed into it. This process is called fertilization, conception or impregnation.

If no children are desired, the meeting of the male sperm and the ovum must be prevented. When scientific means are employed to prevent this meeting, one is said to practice birth control. The means used is known as a contraceptive.

If, however, a contraceptive is not used and the sperm meets the ovule and development begins, any attempt at removing it or stopping its further growth is called abortion.

There is no doubt that women are apt to look upon abortion as of little consequence and to treat it accordingly. An abortion is as important a matter as a confinement and requires as much attention as the birth of a child at its full term.

“The immediate dangers of abortion,” says Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, in his book, “The Practice of Obstetrics,” “are hemorrhage, retention of an adherent placenta, sepsis, tetanus, perforation of the uterus. They also cause sterility, anemia, malignant diseases, displacements, neurosis, and endometritis.”

In plain, everyday language, in an abortion there is always a very serious risk to the health and often to the life of the patient.

It is only the women of wealth who can afford the best medical skill, care and treatment both at the time of the operation and afterwards. In this way they escape the usual serious consequences.

The women whose incomes are limited and who must continue at work before they have recovered from the effects of an abortion are the great army of sufferers. It is among such that the deaths due to abortion usually ensue. It is these, too, who are most often forced to resort to such operations.

If death does not result, the woman who has undergone an abortion is not altogether safe from harm. The womb may not return to its natural size, but remain large and heavy, tending to fall away from its natural position. Abortion often leaves the uterus in a condition to conceive easily again and unless prevention is strictly followed another pregnancy will surely occur. Frequent abortions tend to cause barrenness and serious, painful pelvic ailments. These and other conditions arising from such operations are very likely to ruin a woman’s general health.

While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.

The effects of such operations upon a woman, serious as they may be, are nothing as compared to the injury done her general health by drugs taken to produce the same result. Even such drugs as are prescribed by physicians have harmful effects, and nostrums recommended by druggists are often worse still.

Even more drastic may be the effect upon the unborn child, for many women fill their systems with poisonous drugs during the first weeks of their pregnancy, only to decide at last, when drugs have failed, as they usually do, to bring the child to birth.

There are no statistics, of course, by which we may compute the amount of suffering to mother and child from the use of such drugs, but we know that the total of physical weakness and disease must be astounding. We know that the woman’s own system feels the strain of these drugs and that the embryo is usually poisoned by them. The child is likely to be rickety, have heart trouble, kidney disorder, or to be generally weak in its powers of resistance. If it does not die before it reaches its first year, it is probable that it will have to struggle against some of these weaknesses until its adolescent period.

It needs no assertion of mine to call attention to the grim fact that the laws prohibiting the imparting of information concerning the preventing of conception are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year in this country and an untold amount of sickness and sorrow. The suffering and the death of these women is squarely upon the heads of the lawmakers and the puritanical, masculine-minded person who insist upon retaining the abominable legal restrictions.

Try as they will they cannot escape the truth, nor hide it under the cloak of stupid hypocrisy. If the laws against imparting knowledge of scientific birth control were repealed, nearly all of the 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 women who undergo abortions in the United States each year would escape the agony of the surgeon’s instruments and the long trail of disease, suffering and death which so often follows.

“He who would combat abortion,” says Dr. Hirsch, “and at the same time combat contraceptive measures may be likened to the person who would fight contagious diseases and forbid disinfection. For contraceptive measures are important weapons in the fight against abortion.

“America has a law since 1873 which prohibits by criminal statute the distribution and regulation of contraceptive measures. It follows, therefore, that America stands at the head of all nations in the huge number of abortions.”

There is the case in a nutshell. Family limitation will always be practiced as it is now being practiced—either by birth control or by abortion. We know that. The one means health and happiness—a stronger, better race. The other means disease, suffering, death.

The woman who goes to the abortionist’s table is not a criminal but a martyr—a martyr to the bitter, unthinkable conditions brought about by the blindness of society at large. These conditions give her the choice between the surgeon’s instruments and the sacrificing of what is highest and holiest in her—her aspiration to freedom, her desire to protect the children already hers. These conditionsnot the woman—outface society with this question:

“Contraceptives or Abortion—which shall it be?”

---------Margaret Sanger

 

[badbabysitter]

dear anti-choice crowd..if you have trouble with some of the big words..let me know and I'll help

 

[Skiddles2014]

tl;dr x4

 

[oggbashan]

Marie Stopes in the UK faced similar misrepresentation.

She believed that women should have the choice whether to conceive or not, and that excessive childbearing was damaging to women's health and well-being. She also believed that planned family size led to upward social mobility. She wrote some books specifically aimed at women in societies that did not allow contraception supplies e.g. Catholic or Nazi/Fascist governed states suggesting some amateur methods of contraception that could be used in the absence of anything better.

She was an Eugenic, but by women's conscious decisions, not compulsion. She believed that abortions should be unnecessary because of proper family planning. Although sometimes being accused of supporting the Nazi eugenics programme, her books were banned and burned by the Nazis because they gave women a choice denied by the German state.

 

[badbabysitter]

this thread for the win

 

[badbabysitter]

bumping again.... funny how the rwcj hasnt dared post here

 

[IrezumiKiss]

bumping again.... funny how the rwcj hasnt dared post here

Truth hurts, I reckon.

 

[badbabysitter]

Truth hurts, I reckon.

thinking hurts them

if they actually read what she wrote , instead of what was spoon fed them... their IQ's might grow and they only have room in their skulls for two active brain cells at a time

 

[2bnot2b]

no one believes your shit

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

no one believes your shit

Contrary to what you think Busybody Not So Lite, you are not everybody.

 

[badbabysitter]

no one believes your shit

still waiting for you to show me where that original Sanger quote came from...hows the progress going?

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

*reads*

It leaves me wondering how much has changed, since Sanger battled.
It does not surprise me that the Right Wing has twisted the facts to
suit their agenda. The extent of their lies is breathtaking.

 

[pointless]

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/articles/bc_or_race_control.php

plagiarist.

 

[badbabysitter]

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/articles/bc_or_race_control.php

plagiarist.

never claimed to have written them

but I'm dissapointed in the level of your vitriol, it's quality has dropped significantly towards me since your girlfriend KRC left

 

[pointless]

so when you said you were going to quote yourself again you meant you were going to steal someone else's work and post it unaccredited? good to know.

 

[badbabysitter]

http://peopleoflancaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/cry_baby_1_-_iStockphoto.png

awwww muffin

 

[pointless]

yeah, i'm not the other sock puppet. this isn't going to work. also, you've made a habit of doing this. don't get mad at me because i have a memory and i noticed or because i'm capable of using my own words to make a point.

 

[LJ_Reloaded]

dear anti-choice crowd..if you have trouble with some of the big words..let me know and I'll help

I have trouble reading the supporting citations for this.

oh wait, there was none.



And I support government funding for contraception and oppose the Federal funding of Planned Parenthood ONLY because CORPORATE WELFARE. Why do we even give them corporate welfare when there are clinics all over the place that do the same thing? Though I do not want anyone touching Federal funding for PP, least of all Republicans or the anti-contraception crowd, until we can iron out a way where people can go into PP and get their services covered. The services need to be covered, the company does not need welfare.

Sanger was a racist eugenist. Contraception should be more universally available and cheaper than it is. Drop it and move on.

 

[badbabysitter]

And I support government funding for contraception and oppose the Federal funding of Planned Parenthood ONLY because CORPORATE WELFARE.

that would be a reasonable thing to say.. if PP was a for profit business

Why do we even give them corporate welfare when there are clinics all over the place that do the same thing?

Because there aren't.. have you been paying attention to the news.. they're getting shut down left right and center across your nation.. Texas has what, 7 family planning clinics left in the entire state? and 3 of them are PP

and PP isnt a for profit business..so their funding has nothing to do with corporate welfare..I really dont know where you're getting that from

Though I do not want anyone touching Federal funding for PP, least of all Republicans or the anti-contraception crowd, until we can iron out a way where people can go into PP and get their services covered. The services need to be covered, the company does not need welfare.

so you want people to get covered by PP...but you dont want PP to cover them

and once again, PP is not for profit..

Sanger was a racist eugenist.

According to the rwcj.. glad to see you jumping to your masters defense.. the eugenicst part, absolutely and that's a huge black mark.. the racist part.. MLK had a much different view on Sanger about that. as I showed above.. but I guess MLK hated black people too right?

Contraception should be more universally available and cheaper than it is. Drop it and move on.

so you want to do that.. by ensuring the one group that is trying to do that... gets cut off at the knees?

 

[BotanyBoy]

yeah, i'm not the other sock puppet. this isn't going to work. also, you've made a habit of doing this. don't get mad at me because i have a memory and i noticed or because i'm capable of using my own words to make a point.

LOL....good one.

 

[badbabysitter]

yeah, i'm not the other sock puppet. this isn't going to work. also, you've made a habit of doing this. don't get mad at me because i have a memory and i noticed or because i'm capable of using my own words to make a point.

I have a good memory too.. say hi to KRC for me

 

[VaticanAssassin]

She was a racist cunt

You are a dumb ass cunt

You are also a liar. You did not quote yourself. You stole a non fact based article.

But nice try......