The Public Papers of Margaret Sanger: Web Edition
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.
What Did Margaret Sanger Think about Abortion? | RedState
From
Chapter II of her 1920 book
Woman and the New Race, she states the following:
So, too, with woman’s struggle for emancipation. Women in all lands and all ages have instinctively desired family limitation. Usually this desire has been laid to economic pressure. Frequently the pressure has existed, but the driving force behind woman’s aspiration toward freedom has lain deeper. It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion.
From
Chapter X of the same:
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.
She doesn’t stop there, though.
In a speech to the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference, she said the following:
Human society must protect its children–yes, but prenatal care is most essential! The child-to-be, as yet not called into being, has rights no less imperative.
In her 1938 autobiography, Sanger says the following on page 217:
To each group we explained simply what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not begun.
One final misconception about Mrs. Sanger must also be addressed, it seems, and in this case the truth will terribly inconvenience the propaganda efforts all around. It is not right, pace Planned Parenthood, that Margaret Sanger declined to advocate abortion on grounds that it was then a dangerous and illegal surgery. “There are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician,” she wrote in 1920, and “we know that abortion, when performed by skilled hands, under right conditions, brings almost no danger to the life of the patient.” On the evidence in “The Woman Rebel,” the real reason Sanger declined to advocate abortion, notwithstanding the law’s flexibility and what she took to be the procedure’s safety, is that abortion appalled her.