America Needs a Code for Babies,” 27 Mar 1934
Give dysgenic groups [people with “bad genes”] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.
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The linnk doesn't work but I found it anyway:
The Public Papers of Margaret Sanger Web Edition
Worth reading the entire article (which has nothing to do with race). Again - a sentiment common in that era. Eugenics was unfortunately a popular school of thought with poor and working class people along with non-white races considered inferior.
April 1932 Birth Control Review, pg. 108
Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.
If you had read the entire article - instead of snipping - you would have realized she was referring to the "working class" poor people and morality.
Here is a much more readible link:
The Public Papers of Margaret Sanger Web Edition
All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral. Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.
Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12.
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.
Hitler's remedy for the "perpetually pregnant" was gas. Sanger's was control of the wombs of others.
That particular quote is the one that is misused and taken out of context. Most of Sanger's work focused on combatting the poverty she saw driven by the inability of families to control the number of children they had and get out of the cycle of poverty. Her attitudes towards the poor and races was what we would consider today to be racist. Your source
does not even show the quote.
Here is more from "the Negro Project":
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/articles/bc_or_race_control.php
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)
So again - why is she so villified? Her attitudes were common to her era but hardly extreme compared to others in that time. Her huge achievement was to legalize and make available birth control - which she saw as the means for women to get control of their lives and get out of poverty. Unlike what some claim - it had nothing to do with "sex without consequences" as she only intended it to be for married women as per the morality of her time.
If she is so evil, then do you consider Thomas Jefferson, also a product of his time, to be vile? Or do his achievements trump his attitudes - again, typical of his era?
From:
Common-place Of Racism and Remembrance he defends anti-miscegenation.
Here's how Jefferson closed his chapter on "Laws": "I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people."
This argument for the separation of the races based on the natural inferiority of blacks derived from Jefferson's "observations" of the childlike simplicity of blacks, their wild imaginations, their incapacity to reason and create serious art, their "disagreeable odour." Jefferson also emphasized that blacks exhibited a uniform aesthetic preference for the "flowing hair" and "elegant symmetry of form" of whites, a preference as uniform as "the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black women over those of his own species."
