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| Margaret Sanger |
Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret
Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966, also
known as Margaret Sanger Slee) was an American birth
control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized
the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in
the United
States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation
of America.
Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to
promote her way of thinking. She was prosecuted for her book Family
Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914. She was afraid of what would
happen, so she fled to Britain until she knew it was safe to return to the US. Sanger's
efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize
contraception in the United States. Due to her connection with Planned Parenthood Sanger
is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of abortion, although Planned
Parenthood did not begin providing abortions until 1970, after Sanger had
already died. Sanger, who has been criticized for supporting negative eugenics,
remains an admired figure in the American reproductive rights movement.
In 1916 Sanger opened the first birth control
clinic in the United States, which led to her arrest for distributing
information on contraception after an undercover policewoman bought a
copy of her pamphlet on family planning. Her subsequent trial and appeal
generated controversy. Sanger felt that in order for women to have a more equal
footing in society and to lead healthier lives, they needed to be able to
determine when to bear children. She also wanted to prevent so-called back-alley
abortions, which were common at the time because abortions were illegal in
the United States. She believed that while abortion was sometimes justified it
should generally be avoided, and she considered contraception the only
practical way to avoid them.
In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which
later became the Planned Parenthood Federation
of America. In New York City, she organized the first birth control clinic
staffed by all-female doctors, as well as a clinic in Harlem with an all
African-American advisory council, where African-American staff were later
added. In 1929, she formed the National
Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, which served as the
focal point of her lobbying efforts to legalize contraception in the United
States. From 1952 to 1959, Sanger served as president of the International Planned
Parenthood Federation. She died in 1966, and is widely regarded as a
founder of the modern birth control movement.
INTERNET SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
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[PHOTO SOURCE: https://twitter.com/liveaction/status/736993069644578816]
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Margaret Sanger Quotes, History, and
Biography
Margaret
Louise Sanger (1879 – 1966) was a birth control, population control, and
eugenics activist. She changed the world, but for the worse.
By 1911,
Sanger had moved to New York City, where she became heavily influenced by
anarchist, socialist, and labor activists. She began joining and participating in radical groups and causes.
In March
1914, Sanger published the first issue of her own paper, The Woman Rebel. Along with providing information about
birth control, Sanger wholeheartedly supported the use of violence to achieve
political, economic, and social goals. Case in point, the Lexington Avenue bombing. On July 4th of that year, a bomb
accidentally exploded in a Harlem apartment, killing three men and one woman.
The three men were planning to bomb the home of industrialist John D.
Rockefeller, but the bomb exploded prematurely. The plan was devised at the
Ferrer Center, an educational institution, which also served as the meeting
place for a movement of radicals. Sanger lectured at the institution, and
was active in the movement.
After the
failed terrorist attempt, Sanger wrote a commentary, calling the deaths a display of “courage,
determination, conviction, a spirit of defiance.” She argued the “real tragedy”
was “the cowardice and the poisonous respectability” of the movement’s leaders
who offered apologies, rather than defiance, for the episode. Sanger urged
those in the movement to “accept and exult in every act of revolt against
oppression,” including terrorist acts. She also published a complementary article that defended the assassination of
political or industrial leaders.
The
following month, August 1914, Sanger was indicted for inciting murder and assassination, and for
violating obscenity laws. But instead of facing the charges, she fled the
country. On the trip to England, after the ship had entered international
waters, Sanger instructed her supporters to distribute 100,000 copies of her
pamphlet, Family Limitation. In February 1916, the charges
were dropped.
In
October 1916, Sanger opened America’s first birth control clinic. Located in
Brownsville, New York, the clinic permanently closed a month later, after
Sanger was charged with maintaining a public nuisance. In February 1917, she
was convicted and given a thirty day prison sentence.
Also in
February 1917, the first issue of Sanger’s journal, The Birth Control Review,
was published. She was The Review’s editor until 1929, and used her
editorials to promote birth control and eugenics. For Sanger, these issues were
inseparable.
The word eugenics,
which means well born, was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, a
cousin of Charles Darwin. Positive eugenics was a movement that attempted to
“improve” the human population by encouraging “fit” people to reproduce.
Negative eugenics, conversely, attempted to “improve” the human population by
discouraging “unfit” people from reproducing. The “unfit” people included the
poor, the sick, the disabled, and the “feeble-minded,” the “idiots,” the
“morons,” and the “insane.” And “discouragement” from reproducing included the
use of force.
Sanger
rejected positive eugenics, while embracing negative eugenics. She wrote, “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.” She stressed the need to merge eugenics with birth control, adding, “Eugenics without Birth Control seems to us a house
builded upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit.”
And
Sanger advocated birth control backed up by forced sterilization or segregation
to achieve her aims, writing, “While I personally believe in the sterilization
of the feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic, I have not been able to
discover that these measures are more than superficial deterrents when applied
to the constantly growing stream of the unfit. They are excellent means of meeting
a certain phase of the situation, but I believe in regard to these, as in
regard to other eugenic means, that they do not go to the bottom of the
matter.”
The
bottom of the matter was “to create a race of thoroughbreds.” So the government,
Sanger concluded, needed “to 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” and “to give certain dysgenic groups in our
population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”
In her
1920 book, Woman and the New Race, Sanger wrote that birth
control “is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of
weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who
will become defectives.”
She had a
plan. And she was about to get an organization. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which (following
a 1939 merger with the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and then a 1942
name change) became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. While the
organization was growing, the close association between the birth control
movement and the eugenics movement had made a name change necessary. Nazi
Germany had implemented racial hygiene policies, including mass sterilizations,
inspired by the eugenics movement in America. So “birth control” was removed
from the name to create a new public image. The agenda, though, stayed the
same. And in 1948, Sanger helped form the International Committee on Planned Parenthood,
which (in 1952) became the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
Through
it all, the underlying theme, eliminating the unfit, never changed. In her 1922
book, The Pivot of Civilization, she attacked charity as
counterproductive, and dangerous, for helping the poor to produce even more
“human waste.” (Sanger’s term for the children of the poor.) She wrote,
“Organized charity is itself the symptom of a malignant social disease.” And,
“Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks [of people] that are
most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render
them to a menacing degree dominant.”
In a 1925
book, Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities, Sanger
contributed an essay, writing, “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. In his last book, Mr. [H.G.]
Wells speaks of the meaningless, aimless lives which cram this world of ours,
hordes of people who are born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing
to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions. All that
they have said has been said before; all that they have done has been done
better before. 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.”
Then in
1926, Sanger spoke at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey. Writing
about the event in her autobiography, she highlighted its success, noting that “a
dozen invitations to speak to similar groups” were offered.
And in
1939, Sanger went to work “cultivating the garden.” She initiated the Negro Project
to weed out the unfit from the black population. In bringing birth control to
the then largely poor (i.e. unfit) population of the South, with a few
influential black ministers promoting the project as the solution to poverty,
Sanger hoped to significantly reduce the black population. Martin Luther King,
Sr., as the eldest son of nine children born into poverty in a family of
sharecroppers, would have made the perfect target for “elimination.” But his
birth had already taken place.
In her
later years, Sanger still believed that there were people “who never should have been born at all.” In a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace, she said, “I think the
greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world – that have
disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human
being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when
they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin – that people can – can commit.”
Sanger’s
impact during her lifetime was highly negative, and included the cruelty of
forced sterilization, which became a common practice. In America, over 60,000 people were sterilized against their will. And most
occurred during the 1930s and 1940s when Sanger and the birth control and
population control movements were pushing states hard to enact and enforce
compulsory sterilization laws. Among the victims
were the blind, the deaf, epileptics, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill,
and people with low IQs diagnosed as “feeble-minded.”
Sanger’s
legacy today, which is being carried on by Planned Parenthood, includes the
devastating impact of “birth control” on the black community. Planned Parenthood
has continued the practice of targeting the black population. Over 30% of all abortions are performed on black women and close
to 40% of black pregnancies end in abortion.
Planned
Parenthood successfully created a public image of an organization working to
help the poor, while hiding the reality that it targets
the vulnerable. That was Sanger’s plan from the start.
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I think the greatest sin in the world is
bringing children into the world. - Margaret Sanger
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/1021594]
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