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In a 1921 article in the Birth Control Review, Sanger wrote, "The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective." Reviewers of one of her 1919 articles interpreted her objectives as "More children from the fit, less from the unfit." Again, the question of who decides fitness is important, and it was an issue that Sanger only partly addressed. "The undeniably feebleminded should indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind," she wrote.
Sanger advocated the mandatory sterilization of the insane and feebleminded." Although this does not diminish her legacy as the key force in the birth control movement, it raises questions much like those now being raised about our nation's slaveholding founders. How do we judge historical figures? How are their contributions placed in context?
It is easy to see why there is some antipathy toward Sanger among people of color, considering that, given our nation's history, we are the people most frequently described as "unfit" and "feebleminded."
Many African American women have been subject to nonconsensual forced sterilization. Some did not even know that they were sterilized until they tried, unsuccessfully, to have children. In 1973, Essence Magazine published an expose of forced sterilization practices in the rural South, where racist physicians felt they were performing a service by sterilizing black women without telling them. While one cannot blame Margaret Sanger for the actions of these physician, one can certainly see why Sanger's words are especially repugnant in a racial context.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America has been protective of Margaret Sanger's reputation and defensive of allegations that she was a racist. They correctly point out that many of the attacks on Sanger come from anti-choice activists who have an interest in distorting both Sanger's work and that of Planned Parenthood. While it is understandable that Planned Parenthood would be protective of their founder's reputation, it cannot ignore the fact that Sanger edited the Birth Control review from its inception until 1929. Under her leadership, the magazine featured articles that embraced the eugenicist position. If Sanger were as anti-eugenics as Planned Parenthood says she was, she would not have printed as many articles sympathetic to eugenics as she did.
Like Many Modern Feminists, Sanger Ignored Race and Class
Would the NAACP's house organ, Crisis Magazine, print articles by members of the Ku Klux Klan? Would Planned Parenthood publish articles penned by fetal protectionist South Carolina republican Lindsey Graham?
The articled published in the Birth Control Review showed Sanger's empathy with some eugenicist views. Margaret Sanger worked closely with W. E. B. DuBois on her "Negro Project," an effort to expose Southern black women to birth control. Mary McLeod Bethune and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. were also involved in the effort. Much later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. accepted an award from Planned Parenthood and complimented the organization's efforts. It is entirely possible that Sanger Ôs views evolved over time. Certainly, by the late 1940s, she spoke about ways to solve the "Negro problem" in the United States. This evolution, however commendable, does not eradicate the impact of her earlier statements.
What, then, is Sanger's legacy?
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America has grown to an organization with 129 affiliates. It operates 875 health centers and serves about 5 million women each year. Planned Parenthood has been a leader in the fight for women's right to choose and in providing access to affordable reproductive health care for a cross-section of women. Planned Parenthood has not supported forced sterilization or restricted immigration and has gently rejected the most extreme of Sanger's views.
In many ways, Sanger is no different from contemporary feminists who, after making the customary acknowledgement of issues dealing with race and class, return to analysis that focuses exclusively on gender. These are the feminists who feel that women should come together around "women's issues" and battle out our differences later. In failing to acknowledge differences and the differential impact of a set of policies, these feminists make it difficult for women to come together.
Sanger published the Birth Control Review at the same time that black men, returning from World War I, were lynched in uniform. That she did not see the harm in embracing exclusionary jargon about sterilization and immigration suggests that she was, at best, socially myopic.
That's reason enough to suggest that her leadership was flawed and her legacy crippled by her insensitivity.
Search Results
Hillary Clinton Said She “Admires” Margaret Sanger-Truth!
Rumors, hoaxes, and urband legends - TruthorFiction.comhillary-clinton-said-she-admires-margaret-sanger/
Reports have gone viral that Hillary Clinton once said she “admires” Margaret Sanger, the founder of organizations that eventually became Planned Parenthood. ... The Planned Parenthood Federation of America gave the Margaret Sanger Award to Hillary Clinton for her “contributions ...
Hillary Clinton admires Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood ...
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Feb 19, 2010 - Uploaded by PsiTechs
Hillary Clinton admires Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood. PsiTechs ... VERY REVEALING Margaret ...
Hillary Clinton is "in Awe of" Racist Planned Parenthood Founder ...
www.lifenews.com/.../hillary-clinton-is-in-awe-of-racist-planned-parent...
LifeNews.com
Hillary Clinton is “in Awe of” Racist Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger. Opinion. Paul Kengor Jan 14, 2016 | 11:36AM Washington, DC. Share this ...
Sec. Clinton Stands By Her Praise of Eugenicist Margaret Sanger ...
www.weeklystandard.com/sec...by...margaret-sanger/.../28444
The Weekly Standard
Apr 15, 2009 - Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accepted Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Award, named after the founder of the ...
Blog: Hillary Clinton carries on Margaret Sanger's legacy of class and ...
www.americanthinker.com/.../hillary_clinton_carries_on_margaret...
American Thinker
Sep 13, 2016 - The specter of Margaret Sanger's eugenic beliefs hovers over Hillary Clinton's recent unfiltered and aggressive vilification of Americans.
Margaret Sanger Awards - Wikipedia
it's a lot of info i know, but hillary wants to be president.
12 Disturbing Quotes from Margaret Sanger: Planned Parenthood’s Foundress
JUNE 25, 2014 BY KEVIN KUKLA 15 COMMENTS
Apparently, supporting and advocating eugenics earns you a place of honor in today’s world. If you’re Francis Galton, who coined the term, eugenics meaning “well born,” then you’re forgotten. If you’re Margaret Sanger, then the world’s largest abortion provider names an annual award after you.
Margaret Sanger began in 1923 the American Birth Control League. It would go on to become Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Back in March 2014, Nancy Pelosi, a self-professed Catholic, and current Minority Leader in the US House of Representatives, was given the dubious “Margaret Sanger Award.”
So, what did Sanger stand for? To give you an idea, here are 12 quotes:
1) “[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children… [Women must have the right] to live … to love… to be lazy … to be an unmarried mother … to create… to destroy… The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order… The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
– Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922 (emphasis mine).
2) “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.”
– Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976 (emphasis mine).
3) “Today eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.
“I think you must agree… that the campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics… Birth control propaganda is thus the entering wedge for the eugenic educator.
“As an advocate of birth control I wish… to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation.
“On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
– Margaret Sanger. “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda.” Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5 (emphasis mine).
4) “Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying… demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism…
“[Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste.
“Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant…
“We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
– Margaret Sanger. The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, pages 116, 122, and 189. Swarthmore College Library edition (emphasis mine).
5) “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”
– Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922, page 12 (emphasis mine).
6) “One fundamental fact alone, however, indicates the necessity of Birth Control if eugenics is to accomplish its purpose…
“Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.”
– Margaret Sanger. “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” Feb 1919 (emphasis mine).
Picture via toomanyaborted.com
7) The government ought to “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.”
And the government should “give certain dysgenic groups (those with ‘bad genes’) in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”
– Margaret Sanger, “A Plan for Peace.” Birth Control Review, April 1932, pages 107-108 (emphasis mine).
8) “The third group [of society] are those irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequences of their acts, or whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers. Many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”
– Margaret Sanger. Speech quoted in Birth Control: What It Is, How It Works, What It Will Do. The Proceedings of the First American Birth Control Conference. Held at the Hotel Plaza, New York City, November 11-12, 1921. Published by the Birth Control Review, pages 172 and 174 (emphasis mine).
9) “There is only one reply to a request for a higher birthrate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take the burden of the insane and feeble-minded from your back. [Mandatory] sterilization for these is the answer.”
– Margaret Sanger, “The Function of Sterilization.” Birth Control Review, October 1926 (emphasis mine).
10) “In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the idea of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit.’ Who is to decide this question? The grosser, the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the writings of the representative Eugenists [sic], one cannot ignore the distinct middle-class bias that prevails.”
– Margaret Sanger, quoted in Charles Valenza. “Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?” Family Planning Perspectives, January-February 1985, page 44 (emphasis mine).
11) Birth control: “To create a race of thoroughbreds.”
– Margaret Sanger, “Unity.” The Birth Control Review, Nov 1921 (emphasis mine).
12) “Birth Control is not merely an individual problem; it is not merely a national question, it concerns the whole wide world, the ultimate destiny of the human race.
“Hordes of people [are] born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions… Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.”
– Margaret Sanger. Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities, 1925 (emphasis mine).
Again, Margaret Sanger is the woman Planned Parenthood proudly affiliates with, and calls a “great hero.” In fact, although not mentioning Sanger’s obvious efforts to promote eugenics, Planned Parenthood goes on to state“Sanger’s early efforts remain the hallmark of Planned Parenthood’s mission.”
YOUR TURN
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