- Moderator
- #81
Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sangor and Race.
The OP's arguments are based on little more than cherry picked quotes stripped from their context and made more laughable by the irony (and ignorance from the right's obsession with Sangor) is that she opposed abortion. Her cause and PP's origins were about legal birth control on demand, for women.
Women did not always had the ability to control their fertility and practice birth control.
Sangor was a product of her era - she did not advocate sex outside marriage - however married women women had no rights to refuse sex with their husband, sex on demand was considered a peragative of marriage and a woman's duty. Birth control was illegal. Education about birth control was illegal. Advertising birth control was illegal. Women relied on highly faulty methods in an attempt to reduce pregnancies - those methods were seldom very effective. The damage done to a woman's body from repeated pregancies can have terrible consequences - fistulas, internal damage to ligaments, not to mention increasing mortality as a woman gets older. In addition, the poorest suffered the most as they were least able to support large families. Women had no control legally or culturally over pregnancies until fairly recently and especially not until the pill. Prior to that - the only birth control was condoms for men and they were pretty ineffective and men disliked them.
That's the historical reality that Margaret Sangor experienced and what led to her crusade to make the pill legal and birth control education legal - not killing off blacks.
The OP refers to the following cherry picked quotes:
"[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring."
Woman and the New Race, ch. 6
I looked up the chapter that is quoted from: 5. The Wickedness of Creating Large Families. Sanger, Margaret. 1920. Woman and the New Race
It appears to be talking about the damaging affects of large families: high infant mortality, disease and birth defects, poverty, the effect of excessive childbearing on a woman's health and similar things - in support of birth control. I don't see anything about breeding a race out of existence in this - in fact, she is arguing against those who pressure women to bear many children to prevent "racial suicide".
For example, from the article quoted (keep in mind this was written in 1920:
First of the manifold immoralities involved in the producing of a large family is the outrage upon the womanhood of the mother. If no mother bore children against her will or against her feminine instinct, there would be few large families. The average mother of a baby every year or two has been forced into unwilling motherhood, so far as the later arrivals are concerned. It is not the less immoral when the power which compels enslavement is the church, state or the propaganda of well-meaning patriots clamoring against race suicide. The wrong is as great as if the enslaving force were the unbridled passions of her husband. The wrong to the unwilling mother, deprived of her liberty, and all opportunity of self-development, is in itself enough to condemn large families as immoral. 3
The outrage upon the woman does not end there, however. Excessive childbearing is now recognized by the medical profession as one of the most prolific causes of ill health in women. There are in America hundreds of thousands of women, in good health when they married, who have within a few years become physical wrecks, incapable of mothering their children, incapable of enjoying life.
That quote DOES NOT EXIST in that source.
That is from a completely different source: My Way to Peace
In it she is referring to the passing on of genetic diseases or "defective traits" assumed to be genetic. It's also important to remember this is written in 1920, before welfare, social security, birth control and effective child labor laws. Poorhouses and workhouses still were in existence. People conflated character traits with genetic traits. "Uppity" women could be sterilized against their wills as could all manner of disabled people. It was a common belief that certain classes of people were inferior (genetically) as well as races and ethnicities. Her view was representative of her era.
"Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race."
April 1932 Birth Control Review, pg. 108
You can't even get the quote right. Where are you copying it from?
In it's entirety: The Public Papers of Margaret Sanger: Web Edition
Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race
When you read the article - it has nothing to do with racism or inferior "races" but with common perceptions of her era that poverty/mental and physical defectives/genetics all somehow ran together.
If you want to damn her, out of her historical time period, then why stop with Sangor? The real reason is you don't really care that much about eugenics - but rather, you are looking for anything you can find (regardless of whether it's accurate) to demonize Planned Parenthood.
Eugenics is a terrible thing but was embraced by many: Eugenics in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - compulsary sterilization of "mental defectives", "loose women" etc continued into the modern era. Sangor's name is so low on the list she doesn't come up on the main article and the reason is simple - her main focus was on liberating women from the shackles of perpetual pregnancy. Read her actual articles - what she witnessed in nursing and saw on a daily basis. Sure, her views represent an era we do not agree with, but then - so do the views of many people we call "great".
"We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the 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."
Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12.
That's another quote that was completely stripped of it's context.
For better or worse, she was typical of her generation in terms of racial attitudes, but it certainly did not extend to extermination nor was that what PP was founded upon..
From Wikipedia: Margaret Sanger - Wikipedia
Sanger's writings echoed ideas about inferiority and loose morals of particular races that were widespread in the contemporary United States. In one "What Every Girl Should Know" commentary, she observed that Aboriginal Australians were "just a step higher than the chimpanzee" with "little sexual control," as compared to the "normal man and Woman."[85]
Such attitudes did not keep her from collaborating with African-American leaders and professionals who saw a need for birth control in their communities. In 1929, James H. Hubert, a black social worker and leader of New York's Urban League, asked Sanger to open a clinic in Harlem.[86] Sanger secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and opened the clinic, staffed with black doctors, in 1930. The clinic was directed by a 15-member advisory board consisting of black doctors, nurses, clergy, journalists, and social workers. The clinic was publicized in the African-American press and in black churches, and it received the approval of W. E. B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP.[87] She did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects.[88] Sanger's work with minorities earned praise from Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1966 acceptance speech for the Margaret Sanger award.[89]
From 1939 to 1942 Sanger was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America, which included a supervisory role — alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble — in the Negro Project, an effort to deliver birth control to poor black people.[90] Sanger wanted the Negro Project to include black ministers in leadership roles, but other supervisors did not. To emphasize the benefits of involving black community leaders, she wrote to Gamble "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 quote has been cited by Angela Davis to support her claims that Sanger wanted to exterminate black people.[91] However, New York University's Margaret Sanger Papers Project, argues that in writing that letter, "Sanger recognized that elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow South, unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the Project had a humanitarian aim."[92]
Essentially, the OP has taken out of context and even mangled and altered quotes in an attempt to claim PP was created to abolish the black race.
At least I know now where the mangled quotes come from even though you omitted the source - because it's been used before in the exact same argument:
10-Eye-Opening Quotes From Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger | LifeNews.com
Per your post:
"Sanger's writings echoed ideas about inferiority and loose morals of particular races that were widespread in the contemporary United States. In one "What Every Girl Should Know" commentary, she observed that Aboriginal Australians were "just a step higher than the chimpanzee" with "little sexual control," as compared to the "normal man and Woman."
If anyone today said a race was one step higher than the chimpanzee, how many nanoseconds would elapse before that person was derided as a racist? There is no context that can put that statement by her in a positive and civil manner.
Of course, but she was a product of her times and that was a common view then. That doesn't mean that she wanted to eliminate a race.
If you start judging people from another era based on today's ethics - how would you judge many of the people today deemed "great" who regarded certain races as "subhuman"? Who's quotes reflect the attitude of the times? ...is your judgement extended to all or limited to Sangor?
Quoting a spin from New York University's Margaret Sanger Papers Project is simply stating their personal slant on her statement. It is mere opinion on their part. Her statement about exterminating blacks can be taken one of two ways - she didn't want to be falsely portrayed as trying to exterminate blacks, or she didn't want to have it known she was trying to exterminate blacks. We don't know either way, it is opinion on that one statement.
She did not make a statement about exterminating blacks - that's the fallacy of your OP. The only way you're able to create such a claim is through manipulating quotes - in some cases, quite severely.
BUT, when you add up all of the other statements she made about nonwhites and the poor being an inferior species, you have only one way you can interpret it.
Actually, there are a whole lot of ways you can interpret it and that is by looking at her entire body of work. I hardly think she would have been commemerated by black leaders had she wanted to exterminate them - do you? In fact, in the black community - views on her were complicated. She clearly was a product of her time - where the predominant view on race would today be considered racist. She also dipped into the eugenics movement, another prevailing movement of pre-ww2 America and Europe. Are those ideas repugnant today? Yes. But they were common then.
What's more important is to look at Sangor's background, what she witnessed when she worked with poor, mostly immigrant white women forced to bear child after child and unable to afford them. That was what drove her movement for legal birth control for all women. THAT is what PP is founded on.
If a conservative had made any of the over a dozen quotes from her shown in this thread, that person would be publicly destroyed for being a racist.
The OP is valid, she was as racist as they come.
If a CONSERVATIVE or LIBERAL TODAY made those quotes, they probably would be judged as racist by TODAY's standards.
However - in order to attempt to portray Sangor as an extreme racist - you (or rather your source) had to actually mangle the quotes and in one case - the quote was not even from the source listed and when you read the actual article - it's in reference to something else entirely.
Your OP is a complete flop in it's intended argument - that PP was founded on abolishing the black race.
Here's another article that goes into the complicated figure that was Margaret Sangor:
What You MUST Know About Planned Parenthood and Black Women - EBONY