The Language of Politics

Planned Parenthood drives deep into genocide

by positioning its clinics in minority districts

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was a pioneer in the birth control movement and a founder of groups that would become our modern Planned Parenthood. Life Magazine has ranked Sanger as one of the most important persons of this century. She suffered for her beliefs and activities promoting knowledge of birth control methods which were considered obscene and which were thought to promote promiscuity. Her view that suffering was associated with large families persisted throughout her life and was reinforced when she worked as a nurse in her early years. 'I remember that ever since I was a child, the idea of large families associated itself with poverty in my mind.' She saw motherhood as at its core degrading to the female when women were forced by circumstances and lack of knowledge to continue to bear children into a life a misery and squalor. 'Can children carried through nine months of dread and unspeakable mental anguish and born into an atmosphere of fear and anger, to grow up uneducated and in want, be a benefit to the world?' she asked in The New Motherhood. She didn't like large families as a general proposition: 'Large families among the rich are immoral...they invade the natural right of woman to the control of her own body, to self-development and to self-expression...'

She was a disciple of the Rev. Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus who stated (simply put) that four birds in the nest get more food than five. Margaret Sanger wrote that Malthus 'propounded the now widely recognized principle that population tends to increase faster than the food supply, and that unlimited reproduction brings poverty and many other evils upon a nation.' Although the details of Malthusian philosophy have been out of favor for many decades, the need to limit unbridled population growth and the sheer numbers of people are still repeated today.

Margaret Sanger was a prolific writer with a very dramatic style and many of her phrases and images have become part of feminists' vocabulary and thought. 'No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body,' she wrote and her words echo in the slogans shouted in the street. The commonly published Planned Parenthood advertisement which has the young girl jumping up joyously and seeming to kick her heals with her hair flying upwards and the word 'Free!' along side her may come directly from Sanger: A 'woman's desire for freedom is born of the feminine spirit, which is the absolute, elemental, inner urge of womanhood. It is the strongest force in her nature: it cannot be destroyed...' Our friend, Daisy, who stood in Red Square last January commemorating Roe v. Wade seemed to take ideas right out of Margaret Sanger when she spoke against adoption and orphans. Sanger wrote: 'The first right of the child is to be wanted--to be desired with an intensity of love that gives it its title to being and [to the] joyful impulse of life.' Sometimes an idea may seem funny to us today: 'I believe that this fear [of pregnancy] at the time of conception and the unsuccessful practice of coitus interruptus are responsible for the timidity, the fretfulness and feebleness of many infants.'

Any writer deserves some slack because of time and place and the science of their times. Margaret Sanger promoted what may be called 'Utopian Eugenics' which was a technique for pruning or directing the growth of the population. She saw a woman as a 'brood animal for the masculine civilizations of the world' who 'through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the earth.' She blamed 'too prolific mothers' for famine and plague. 'While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing human tinder for racist conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for the prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.'

Writing after the terrible war of the early 20th century, she had an solution: 'When we people the earth with men and woman who are not "accidents," these human holocausts cannot occur. When we have men and women whose wills, whose moral and spiritual natures have not been marred by fear and hate [from being unwanted] from the moment of conception, war will be impossible' (my boldface throughout). 'War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers...will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.' 'She will kill war by the simple process of starving it to death. For she will refuse [any] longer to produce the human food upon which the monster feeds.' Margaret Sanger had extreme ideas by any measure: 'The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it' (Women and the New Race).

Margaret Sanger's brave new world called for manipulation of the population beyond the modern slogan of 'every child a wanted child.' She wrote in Birth Control Review in November 1921, that the purpose in promoting birth control was 'to create a race of thoroughbreds.' In Birth Control Review in May 1919, she wrote: 'More children from the fit, less from the unfit--that is the chief aim of birth control.' She favored the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act and wrote about it in Birth Control Review in April 1932 that the Act worked to ‘to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others…’

Over time Sanger focused her efforts on minorities and the poor. A birth control clinic was illegally operated by her in October 1916 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York that serviced the newly immigrated Slavs, Latins, Italians and Jews that populated the area. It eventually closed. On November 21, 1930, Sanger and the American Birth Control League (a forerunner of Planned Parenthood) opened an ‘experimental clinic’ in Harlem, New York. Harlem was an overpopulated area of the city that was home for more than two-thirds of the city’s blacks. Sanger gave special attention to the black population and wrote to Dr. Clarence Gamble in 1939 about the techniques to use with them: ‘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.’