Sanger helped women plan families

Early in the 20th century, many people were talking about eugenics. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was not in favor of “positive eugenics,” the kind carried out by the Nazis, involving killing Jews and others to “purify the race.” She believed a woman should make her own personal decision as to how many children she should have, and when.

It is on this principle that Planned Parenthood was founded. Planned Parenthood provides family planning information, contraception, reproductive health care (annual exams and Pap smears) and, in some facilities, safe, legal abortions. Planned Parenthood does not advocate eugenics. Tying Planned Parenthood with eugenics in any way (8/1, Letters) is a false association.
 
If anti-abortion people want to prevent abortions, they ought to support the family planning services Planned Parenthood provides. Preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place is the best way to prevent abortions.

Liz Craig
Roeland Park

Comments

[GCYL]

renfro | Aug 5, 2009 11:33:18 AM
ggbridge | Aug 5, 2009 10:24:03 AM

The trains ran on time!

My second favorite line form eugenics supporters.

“Logical discussion of the abortion issue….” - renfro

Let’s talk about your fantasy called denial. The discussion is about Margret’s well documented history of supporting eugenics and PP’s absence of renouncing them. Can you please explain the logic behind not renouncing eugenics? You would think that under these circumstances it would be perfectly understandable for PP to say “Our founder was juuuuuust a little crazy but we turned out okay anyway.”

“Still confused as to why pro lifers are so anti birth control and women's health care.” gg

When did Margret’s strongly held belief of forced sterilization of “undesirables” become synonymous with birth control and women’s health care? While you may think they are I don’t. Much to renfro’s and gg’s dismay, the discussion has always been specific: Margret’s well documented history of supporting eugenics and racist views. Period.

“Glad GC will never need their services, and am also glad Planned Parenthood is there for his daughters.” – gg

I’m glad our country never accepted a more “positive eugenics” platform in the 1920’s. I’m glad my family isn’t found on Margret’s list of “undesirables” and I‘m very glad that I was never forced to file DNA and paper work with PP so they could approve/deny my request to have children.

Still, I’m looking forward to the day when Amtrak runs on time.

[Marctnts]

...

[Marctnts]

"The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

-Margaret Sanger. The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.

"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.

"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. 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.

"Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need ... We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock."

-Margaret Sanger, April 1933 Birth Control Review.

"Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.

-Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5.

"Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, 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."

-Margaret Sanger.

"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.

"The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics."

-Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5.

"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. Chapter on "The Cruelty of Charity," pages 116, 122, and 189. Swarthmore College Library edition.

"The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."

-Margaret Sanger, quoted in Charles Valenza. "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" Family Planning Perspectives, January-February 1985, page 44.

"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.

"The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order..."

-Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.

"Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization."

-Margaret Sanger, April 1932 Birth Control Review.

You don't have to have a religious dogma to be against abortion as the ending of a human life.

...and if Margaret Sanger is the best you have to look up to, I pity your perspective

[Zeno]

GG, I tell you what, stop the abortions and PP can do all its other work unabated. OH yaeh and stop doing "reproductive services" for under age children too while they are at it. I never understand why pro abortionists are OK with this organization which does such good other work, KILLING babies!
GCYL, Lizzie understands she is lying. i wonder why she feels the need to lie about Ms. Sanger and her beliefs?

[renfro]

Your reasoning to the continued offering of Planned Parenthood services Ms. Craig is logical but the Sanger thing and the big eugenics word just stirs the “Thumpers” up to invent more inane clap-trap to disband one of few organizations dedicated to heath, welfare and preservation of a woman’s freedom to choose.
Logical discussion of the abortion issue with “Intelligent Designers” is futile! – They equate and believe Logic and Fantasy to be synonymous!

[ggbridge]

Still confused as to why pro lifers are so anti birth control and women's health care. Planned Parenthood provides health care for women who don't have insurance. They are a life saver for women just out of college (which is when I used their services). They help women with prenatal care. I'm trying to get the vitriol towards Planned Parenthood when they do so much good work. Glad GC will never need their services, and am also glad Planned Parenthood is there for his daughters.

[GCYL]

The Negro Project
Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan for Black Americans
By Tanya L. Green

“Sanger built the work of the ABCL, and, ultimately, Planned Parenthood, on the ideas and resources of the eugenics movement. Grant reported that “virtually all of the organization's board members were eugenicists.” Eugenicists financed the early projects, from the opening of birth control clinics to the publishing of “revolutionary” literature. Eugenicists comprised the speakers at conferences, authors of literature and the providers of services “almost without exception.” And Planned Parenthood's international work was originally housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society. The two organizations were intertwined for years.”

----------------------------------------

Tell me Liz, what part of the word “positive” do you not understand?

[GCYL]

“Early in the 20th century, many people were talking about eugenics. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was not in favor of “positive eugenics,” the kind carried out by the Nazis, involving killing Jews and others to ‘purify the race.’”

So Margaret Sanger was a “passive eugenics” type of person because she couldn’t get her eugenics views legislated.

Who says Eugenics supporters don’t have a sense of humor? I always enjoyed this one liner from them: “I was only following orders.”

[deprofundis]

You say that associating Planned Parenthood with eugenics is a false association. Very simply, you are gravely mistaken. Aside from Margaret Sanger having been a member of the American Eugenics Society (along with Alan Guttmacher president of Planned Parenthood in the 1970's)even Planned Parenthood's own publications reveal an explicit and intrinsic promotion of eugenics.

In The Birth Control Review (Planned Parenthood's original newsletter) it stated, "And none need hesitate to heartily take up a fully Eugenic attitude towards life through fear that it will perhaps mean a departure from our ancient Aryan civilization."
— "Eugenics for India." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 11 (November 1925), page 316.

In April of 1933 the Birth Control Review published an article written by Dr. Ernst Rudin, head of the Nazi sterilization program, entitled, "Eugenic Sterlization: An Urgent Need". Later, Ernst Rudin became the president of Planned Parenthood in Germany and moved on to greater positions within international Planned Parenthood.

Not to mention that the facilities to open Planned Parenthood's offices in London were donated by the Eugenics Society in England as well as the Race Betterment League.

As much as I am sure you would like to believe that Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with the push of eugenics in America it's own history and writings prove precisely the opposite.

"First of all, the hordes of degenerates, diseased, idiotic, feeble-minded, alcoholic, and vicious criminals must be wiped out. Their sterilization commends itself all the more, in that it will not occasion them the least discomfort. Very simple operations like vasectomy insure the painless suppression of any possible descendants of those physically or mentally unfit."
— G. Hardy. "Eugenics and Child Culture." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 9 (September 1919), page 18.

[Mainstream Coalition]

Sanger was a racist and a eugenicist. Planned Parenthood is simply an extension of her genocidal racist views.