Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was the founder of
the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and the International
Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). As an activist in the birth-control and
population-control movements, she was one of the most influential figures of the
twentieth century. Many questions have been raised concerning her real views on
eugenics, race, and human rights, and it is hard to separate the facts from
fiction. The information presented here is drawn directly from her writings,
with references.
LIFE AND ORGANIZATIONS
EUGENICS
(sub-links: Positive and negative eugenics --
politics --
persons with
disabilities -- “racial responsibility” --
immigration --
“human horticulture” --
Birth Control Review --
charity --
forced
sterilization --
organizational connections to the eugenics movement)
PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S CONNECTIONS TO EUGENICS
RACE
(sub-links: Eugenicists --
Margaret Sanger -- Negro Project--
Harry
Laughlin -- Lothrop Stoddard -- Guy Irving Burch --Clarence Gamble
-- Hans Harmsen)
MISATTRIBUTED QUOTES
PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S CLAIMS AND THE TRUTH
RECOMMENDED SOURCES
LIFE
AND ORGANIZATIONS
1879: Born Margaret Higgins in Corning, New York
1902: Marries Bill Sanger
1914: Founds the magazine Woman Rebel but flees to Europe a few months later
when charged under the federal Comstock postal laws
1914-1915: Lives in England studying with the Neo-Malthusians and visits Dutch
birth-control clinics
1916: Founds America’s first birth-control clinic in Brownsville, NY and is
almost immediately arrested; this clinic is considered the first version of
Planned Parenthood
1921: Founds the American Birth Control League (ABCL) and organizes the First
American Birth Control Conference in New York; divorces Bill Sanger
1922: Remarries millionaire James Henry Noah Slee; begins publishing the Birth
Control Review
1923: Opens the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB) in New York City
1928: Resigns as president of the ABCL and publisher of the Birth Control Review
1929: Initiates the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control
(NCFLBC)
1933: Merger between NCFLBC, ABCL, and the American Eugenics Society proposed
and studied but does not occur
1936: Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling United States v. One Package
Containing 120, More or Less, Rubber Pessaries to Prevent Conception allows the
promotion and distribution of contraceptives under the Comstock laws; NCFLBC
disbands
1939: Sanger’s old ABCL reunites with the BCCRB and forms the Birth Control
Federation of America (BCFA); Sanger does not lead the BCFA
1942: BCFA changes name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA)
1948: Founds the International Planned Parenthood Committee (IPPC)
1952: IPPC changes name to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)
1966: Death
EUGENICS
What is most clear about Sanger, as will be shown from the excerpts that follow,
is that she was an elitist bigot who believed in eugenics (which means,
literally, “well born”), a popular pseudo-science that claimed to be able to
blame societal ills on the heredity of the people who suffered those same ills.
Eugenics designated some types of people “unfit” (generally, the poor and the
disabled) and attempted to discourage or forcibly prevent those people from
reproducing.
Originating in the late 19th century as a hybrid of evolutionary theory and
Mendelian genetics by Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, “eugenics” literally
means “well born.” It was popularized in the United States by Charles Davenport,
who founded the Eugenic Records Office in Cold Springs Harbor, NY, with money
from the Harriman railroad fortune.
Following other eugenicists, Sanger distinguished between “positive” and
“negative” eugenics in her self-described “head book,” The Pivot of Civilization
(New York: Brentano’s, 1922), p. 187. She disagreed with the former, which
encouraged “fit” couples to have more children, but whole-heartedly supported
the latter, which discouraged the “unfit” from reproducing, by force, if
necessary. Sometimes Planned Parenthood claims she was not a eugenicist because
she did not advocate positive eugenics, but this view overlooks her numerous
statements in support of negative eugenics.
“We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for critical
and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates . . . that uncontrolled fertility
is universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the
transmission of hereditable traits” (Pivot of Civilization, p. 174).
“This degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that two-thirds of
our manhood of military age are physically too unfit to shoulder a rifle; that
the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the irresponsible and the defective breed
unhindered; . . . that the vicious circle of mental and physical defect,
delinquency and beggary is encouraged, by the unseeing and unthinking
sentimentality of our age, to populate asylum, hospital and prison. All these
things the Eugenist sees and points out with a courage entirely admirable”
(Ibid., p. 175).
On the relation between eugenics and politics:
“The danger of recruiting our numbers from the most ‘fertile stocks’ is further
emphasized when we recall that in a democracy like that of the United Sates
every man and woman is permitted a vote in the government, and that it is the
representatives of this grade of intelligence who may destroy our liberties, and
who may thus be the most far-reaching peril to the future of civilization”
(Pivot of Civilization, p. 177).
“On its [eugenics’] negative side it shows us that 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—that the wealth of
individuals and of state is being diverted from the development and the progress
of human expression and civilization” (Ibid., p. 187).
On the disabled:
“Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every
congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite
importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the
rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for
these biological and racial mistakes” (Pivot of Civilization, p. 274).
“No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves,
find that their children are physically or mentally defective” (Woman and the
New Race [NY: Blue Ribbon Books, 1920], p. 89).
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” (Ibid., p. 229).
On “racial
responsibility”:
“Feeble-mindedness perpetuates itself from the ranks of those who are blandly
indifferent to their racial responsibilities. And it is largely this type of
humanity we are now drawing upon to populate our world for the generations to
come. In this orgy of multiplying and replenishing the earth, this type is pari
passu multiplying and perpetuating those direst evils which we must, if
civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots” (“The Need of Birth
Control in America,” in Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities, edited by
Adolf Meyer, 11-49 [Baltimore: The Williams and Wilkins Co., 1925]).
On
immigration and parenthood:
“Anybody in this vast country is at perfect liberty to become a father or a
mother! You may be diseased, you may be a mental defective, a moron, a pauper, a
habitual criminal; you may be insane, irresponsible, with no knowledge of the
laws of health, hygiene, or common decency; yet you may bring not merely one
child into these United States. You are encouraged to bring a dozen. . . . I,
for one, believe that it is high time to recognize that if it is not right to
import into our country individuals from whom we must later protect ourselves,
it is even more imperative to protect ourselves and to protect American society
today and tomorrow from the procreation of such individuals within our gates”
(Ibid., p. 27-28).
On human
horticulture:
“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,
who die, 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” (Ibid.,
p. 47-48).
Birth Control Review (BCR)
Sanger founded and edited the Birth Control Review (BCR) from 1917 to 1929. Many
eugenicists were published in it, and she made many eugenic comments in her own
articles. Be aware that Sanger did not edit the journal after January 1929, so
any articles published after that time cannot be attributed to her editorial
work. (There were, for example, articles by Nazis in the BCR in the 1930s, but
Sanger would not have had anything to do with their presence in the journal.)
The following are just a few examples:
“But it is well to emphasize that we advocates of birth control are not so much
disturbed by the stationary birth rate of the thinking classes, as by the
reckless propagation of the ignorant” (“An Answer to Mr. Roosevelt,” BCR, vol.
1, no. 5 (Dec. 1917), p. 14.
“From the lips of the mother of handicapped children, from the bearers of the
unfit, comes up the cry for Birth Control. . . . Did this birth help the race?”
(“The Cry for Deliverance,” BCR, Feb. 1919, p. 5, editorial comment and heading)
“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. . . . 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” (“Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” ibid.,
p. 11-12.)
“. . . the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is
practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics. . . . the most
urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the
mentally and physically defective. . . . Possibly drastic and Spartan methods
may be forced upon society if it continue complacently to encourage the chance
and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism”
(“The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” BCR, Oct. 1921, p. 5).
Sanger on Charity
A recurrent theme in Sanger’s and in all eugenicists’ writings was the perceived
burden which the “unfit” put on them, the self-proclaimed “fit.” They deeply
resented the fertility of the poor and felt that they had to pay for the poor’s
reproductive “mistakes.”
In a chapter in her book The Pivot of Civilization entitled “The Cruelty of
Charity,” Sanger accuses charities of perpetuating the very problems that they
try to solve by enabling the poor to reproduce more.
“Organized charity is itself the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those
vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the
spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of
this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has
bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of
defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed
at the ‘failure’ of philanthropy, but rather at its success” (The Pivot of
Civilization [NY: Brentano’s, 1922], p. 108).
Sanger’s strongest objection is that she is expected to help these people:
“Such philanthropy . . . encourages 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” (Ibid., pp. 116-117).
Those who would help the poor and unfortunate through charity suffer from
excessive sentimentalism:
“. . . let us not close our eyes to one of the greatest dangers inherent in such
warm-hearted humanitarianism. For it is a curious but neglected fact that the
very types which in all kindness should be obliterated from the human stock,
have been permitted to reproduce themselves and to perpetuate their group,
succored by the policy of indiscriminate charity of warm hearts uncontrolled by
cool heads” (“The Need of Birth Control in America,” Birth Control: Facts and
Responsibilities, Adolf Meyer, editor [Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Co.,
1925], p. 15).
Sanger on Forced Sterilization
Instead of charity, Sanger believed that one of the only ways to control the
alleged over-reproduction of the “unfit” was to sterilize them, through
incentives or through force. She was not alone. In 1927, in the Buck v. Bell
case, the Supreme Court determined that the state of Virginia’s law allowing the
forced sterilization of the inhabitants of its state mental institutions was
constitutional. Representing the seven other justices who assented, Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the majority opinion, “Three generations of
imbeciles are enough.” A friend of Holmes, British socialist and jurist
Professor Harold Laski, wrote him jovially after the decision, “My love to you
both. Get that stomach better, please. Sterilise all the unfit, among whom I
include all fundamentalists.” From 1907 through 1963, over 63,000 sterilizations
in over 30 states occurred in accordance with state eugenic sterilization laws
(see Jonas Robitscher, editor, Eugenic Sterilization [Springfield, Ill.: Charles
C. Thomas Publisher, 1973]).
According to Sanger, who should be sterilized:
“But modern society, which has respected the personal liberty of the individual
only in regard to the unrestricted and irresponsible bringing into the world of
filth and poverty an overcrowding procession of infants foredoomed to death or
hereditable disease, is now confronted with the problem of protecting itself and
its future generations against the inevitable consequences of this long-practised
policy of laiser-faire. The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization
must be faced immediately. . . . Moreover, when we realize that each
feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we
prefer the policy of immediate sterilization. . .” (The Pivot of Civilization,
pp. 101-102).
Her only objection to sterilization was its limited efficacy:
“While I personally believe in the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the
insane and the syphiletic [sic], 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” (“Birth Control
and Racial Betterment,” Birth Control Review, Feb. 1919, p. 12).
The role of the federal government:
“It now remains for the United States government to set a sensible example to
the world by offering a bonus or a yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents
who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means. In this
way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy
condition. . . . [A]sk the government to first take off the burdens of the
insane and feebleminded from your backs. Sterilization for these is the remedy”
(“The Function of Sterilization,” BCR, Oct. 1926, p. 299).
She called for Congress to set up a “Parliament of Population,” among whose
tasks would include: “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” (“A Plan for Peace,” BCR, April 1932, p.
107).
Harry H. Laughlin wrote the “Model Sterilization” law for eugenic sterilization,
the law on which the Nazis later based their 1933 sterilization law. Laughlin
was on Sanger's American Birth Control League board.
Organizational Connections to the Eugenics Movement
Sanger worked with the American Eugenics Society (AES). This was the major
eugenics organization in America; its name was changed in 1974 to the Society
for the Study of Social Biology. Sanger had many organizational connections to
the AES, among other eugenic groups.
Of the clergymen, scientists, and physicians listed on the National Council of
her American Birth Control League (ABCL) in the 1920s, at least 23 of the 50
people were involved at a prominent level in eugenics, either as members of the
Board of Directors of the AES or by otherwise publicly supporting her eugenics
agenda.
The first issue of The Birth Control Review (Feb. 1917, p. 15) contains a
“Working Bibliography on Birth Control” which lists half a dozen eugenics books
as recommended reading.
Sanger was a dues-paying member of the AES (see the Library of Congress
Manuscript Division, Margaret Sanger Papers Collection, letter, AES to Margaret
Sanger, 9/29/63).
The AES officially endorsed her group (Ibid., note, 5/32).
The AES testified for birth control bills which Sanger’s National Committee on
Federal Legislation for Birth Control (NCFLBC, a forerunner of Planned
Parenthood) supported, and they pledged their complete support of her efforts
(Ibid., AES Board Meeting minutes, 1/9/35).
Sanger and her birth control clinic’s main doctor, Dr. Hannah Stone, wrote
several times on eugenic topics for Eugenics, the journal of the American
Eugenics Society. See, for example, “Symposium on Genius and Birth Control,”
featuring both Stone and Sanger, vol. 2, no. 3 (March 1929), pp. 22-24; and
Stone, “The Birth Control Clinic of Today and Tomorrow,” vol. 2, no. 5 (May
1929), pp. 9-11.
Sanger friend and colleague Dorothy Brush was on the board of the Brush
Foundation, specifically founded for the purpose of pursuing eugenic goals (see
Dorothy Brush, “The Brush Foundation (Eugenical Institutions 5),” Eugenics, vol.
2, no. 2 [Feb. 1929], pp. 17-19). The Brush Foundation funded Sanger and her
groups often, and it provided the start-up money for the International Planned
Parenthood Federation (Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the
Birth Control Movement in America [NY: Simon and Schuster, 1992], p. 410).
PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S CONNECTION TO EUGENICS
Planned Parenthood marks its founding from the establishment in 1916 of the
nation’s first birth-control clinic, even though the name “Planned Parenthood”
was not given to the organization until 1942. The fact that Planned Parenthood
owns up to having been in existence throughout Sanger’s birth control career
means that all of her eugenic statements, made as president of the American
Birth Control League and of her other organizations, can be attributed to the
president of an early form of PPFA. The organization has gone through many forms
and name changes—the American Birth Control League, the Clinical Research
Bureau, the National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control, the
Birth Control Federation of America—but Sanger made eugenic statements when she
was actively running each of them.
The first office of the IPPF in London was given free of charge by the Eugenics
Education Society, the foremost eugenics group in England.
Dr. Alan Guttmacher, president of PPFA from 1962-1974, was a former
vice-president of the American Eugenics Society. Most of the other major
activists in PPFA had eugenic connections.
Guttmacher once admitted, “As a physician in private practice I have done
occasional sterilizations on adolescent females brought to me by their parents
for sterilization because of serious mental retardation” (Eugenic Sterilization,
Jonas Robitscher, editor [Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1973], p. 54).
In 1933, a merger was attempted between Sanger’s organization, the American
Birth Control League, and the American Eugenics Society. It did not succeed due
to organizational difficulties, but all the leaders agreed that all the groups
had the same fundamental goals. (Black, op. cit., 141-42)
RACE
Eugenicists were often racists, but not always; they discriminated on the basis
of perceived “fitness,” which was often but not always correlated to race.
Criteria for “fitness” included intelligence, sanity, physical health, and
wealth. Those who were designated “unfit” invariably included the poor,
epileptics, syphilitics, alcoholics, the “feeble-minded,” criminals, the
physically and mentally disabled, and the insane. Insofar as racial minorities
were often poor, sick, and illiterate, they came under attack, but usually
indirectly.
Sanger’s own views seems to be in accordance with such eugenics. Racist comments
sometimes appeared in the Birth Control Review while it was under Sanger’s
editorship, but they were in articles not written by her. Little direct evidence
has been uncovered to date that she herself specifically drew the distinction
between “fit” and “unfit” along racial lines. She did believe in preventing the
“unfit” from reproducing, and insofar as large portions of racial minorities
fell into the categories of “unfitness,” she believed that their reproducing
should be limited, by force if necessary. It is correct, therefore, to call
Sanger an “elitist bigot” in that she advocated the control of the alleged
over-production of the “unfit,” a population specified by categories that often
included large portions of racial minorities. There is insufficient evidence to
argue that she was an out-and-out racist.
The Negro Project is the most questionable activity of Sanger regarding race. In
1939, the Birth Control Federation of America initiated the project, which was
to promote family planning among the black population of the South, using black
ministers. A letter to Clarence Gamble says: “We do not want 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 to Clarence Gamble, October 19, 1939, Sanger Smith
Collection, quoted in Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control
in America, second edition [New York: Penguin Books, 1990], 332-33)
Some people believe that this letter reveals a sinister intent to exterminate
the black population; others argue that it is simply expressing a possible
misconception that blacks might have about the project and how to address that
misconception. Given the lack of further evidence, it is not clear how to
interpret the letter. This is the only really questionable statement about
blacks in Sanger’s writings; elsewhere she claims to oppose “race prejudice.”
The fact that Sanger printed articles that contained racist statements points to
the difference between what she said and what she is responsible for. What she
said can be proved by her writings. What she is responsible involves her effects
on others. She certainly attracted to her cause racists and other bigots. Since
she reprinted and legitimatized their opinions, she bears a huge measure of
responsibility for perpetuating racism. Let us look at some of the racists with
whom Sanger worked.
Harry Laughlin was the “Expert Eugenic Agent” for the House Committee on
Immigration and Naturalization in the 1920s. He almost single-handedly ensured
that racial quotas would keep out what he called the “dross in American's modern
melting pot.” He worked to prevent Jews seeking asylum in the United States from
receiving visas. In so doing, he was indirectly responsible for the deaths of at
least tens of thousands of Jews. (See Edwin Black, War Against the Weak:
Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race [New York: Four Walls
Eight Windows, 2003], 392-93.)
Laughlin said: “The logical conclusion is that the differences in institutional
rations, by races and nativity groups . . . represents real differences in
social values, which represent, in turn, real differences in the inborn values
of the family stocks from which the particular inmates have sprung. These
degeneracies and hereditary handicaps are inherent in the blood.” (House
Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Statement of Dr. Harry H. Laughlin,
67th Congress, 3rd Session, November 21, 1922, 756, 725, quoted in Edwin Black,
op. cit., 191)
In articles appearing in the Eugenical News, he promoted Nazism during the
1930s, approving of its racist laws.
Lothrop Stoddard was a famous racist who wrote The Rising Tide of Color Against
White World Supremacy, which became a best-seller. The text contained such
inflammatory statements as the following: “'Finally perish!' That is the exact
alternative which confronts the white race. . . . Just as we isolate bacterial
invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their
food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat .
. .” (Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy
[New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926], 303, 306, quoted in Black, op. cit.,
133)
He worked with the American Birth Control League in the following capacities: he
was on the National Council, the fifteen-member Board of Directors, and on the
conference committee of the First American Birth Control Conference and by
publishing eugenicist articles in the Birth Control Review (for example, in the
December 1921 issue). (Black, op. cit., 133-34; www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/abcl.htm)
Guy Irving Burch was a eugenicist and anti-immigration activist who worked for
Sanger's National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control (NCFLBC)
in the 1930s while running the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, DC.
His interest in birth control was purely eugenic: on NCFLBC letterhead, he wrote
that he had worked to prevent sound American stock from “being replaced by alien
or negro stock, whether it be by immigration or by overly high birth rates among
others in this country.” (Quoted in Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret
Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America [New York: Simon & Schuster,
1992], 343)
Clarence Gamble was elected president of the Pennsylvania Birth Control
Federation (PBCF) in 1933 and served as the Pennsylvania representative on the
board of the ABCL and then of PPFA from 1933-46. He was also a member of the
Planned Parenthood Federation of America executive committee from 1939-42 and
actively involved in the International Planned Parenthood Federation. He founded
the Pathfinder Fund, a population-control organization. He was a personal friend
of Margaret Sanger.
Gamble was an ardent eugenicist and racist. He was actively involved in the
eugenic sterilization group, the Human Betterment Association, and opened more
than twenty sterilization clinics in the Midwest and the South.
He wrote: “To date less [sic] than 2,000 insane and mentally defective North
Carolinians have been sterilized under the existing law—a figure that represents
less than one out of every 41 of the State's estimated mentally unfit. This
means that for every one man or woman who has been sterilized, there are 40
others who can continue to pour defective genes into the State's blood stream to
pollute and degrade future generations.” (Clarence J. Gamble, “Better Human
Beings Tomorrow,” Better Health, October 1947, 14, 15)
Hans Harmsen, a German physician, was an important scientific and academic
supporter of Nazi policies in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the inhumane 1933
sterilization law that mandated coercion. As a bureaucrat in Nazi Germany, he
was responsible for approving eugenic sterilizations performed on the disabled.
He “supported forced sterilizations of the mentally handicapped and helped to
carry them out in the Protestant Inner Mission institutions for which he was
responsible.” (Report by Monika Simmel-Joachim and Elke Kiltz to the National
Board of Pro Familia, May 16, 1984, quoted and translated in Atina Grossmann,
Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Aboriton Reform,
1920-1950 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 211)
Harmsen became the president of Pro Familia, the German affiliate of the
International Planned Parenthood Federation, in 1952. He continued to promote
ostensibly “voluntary” eugenic sterilization and campaigned for a new law in the
post-Nazi age. In 1980, after decades of leadership roles within Pro Familia, he
was awarded an honorary presidency. Only in 1984 was he forced to resign
(Grossmann, op. cit., 204-11).
MISATTRIBUTED QUOTES
The quote, “blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race,” has been
attributed to Sanger, but it appears to have been fabricated. The proposal of
the Negro Project reads: “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly
and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the
increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent
and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.” This quote has been
attributed to Sanger; actually, it is was originally written by W. E. B. DuBois,
founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and
quoted in the proposal. The above quotes should never be attributed to Sanger.
Other publications have argued that Sanger was a Nazi or an anti-Semite, with no
evidence to substantiate those positions; she should not be given those labels.
Many people have in good faith reprinted citations or statements that have
appeared in publication without realizing that the original author did not have
his or her facts straight. In general, one should be careful about quotes
attributed to Sanger: they should always be documented.
PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S CLAIMS AND THE TRUTH
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) claims, despite the
overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that “Margaret Sanger was not a . . .
eugenicist.” Let us now examine their allegations and respond, point by point.
(See the lengthy fact-sheet, “The Truth About Margaret Sanger,” on the PPFA
web-page, www.plannedparenthood.org/about/thisispp/sanger.html.)
1) PPFA’S CLAIM: First the fact-sheet claims that eugenicists were “opposed to
the use of abortion and contraception by healthy and ‘fit’ women.”
THE TRUTH: PPFA here confuses positive eugenics [make a link here to the
“positive and negative eugenics” section under EUGENICS above] with all forms of
eugenics. In fact, only some eugenicists (and probably the minority at that)
held the view that PPFA described.
2) PPFA’S CLAIM: Next the web-page quotes the following from the February 1919
issue of the Birth Control Review (BCR): “Eugenists imply or insist that a
woman’s first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her
first duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate
knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and
conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further
maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to
determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she
shall bear if she chooses to become a mother” (“Birth Control and Racial
Betterment,” BCR, Feb. 1919, p. 11).
THE TRUTH: Sounds “pro-choice,” right? Unfortunately, as many women have found
out too late, the “choices” that Planned Parenthood tends to promote are
“planned” (by them) but have little to do with parenthood. So too the only
“choice” Sanger promoted was the one she determined best for you. The above
quote comes in the context of an article on eugenics, the title of which (“Birth
Control and Racial Betterment”) PPFA neglects to mention, and the whole article
makes clear that only the “fit” woman is deemed worthy of making reproductive
decisions.
Sanger advocates forced sterilization for the unfit just a few paragraphs after
the quote given above. The quote PPFA extracts is in the context of Sanger’s
critique of positive eugenicists encouraging “fit” women to bear more children
(the sentences immediately before read: “The eugenist also believes that a woman
should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. We hold
that the world is already over-populated” [Ibid.]), something which Sanger
almost always repudiated. As far as “negative eugenics” (the elimination of
reproduction of the “unfit”) was concerned, she was an enthusiastic supporter.
3) PPFA’S CLAIM: In addition, PPFA says that the phrase “To create a race of
thoroughbreds,” used as a banner on the cover of the November 1921 issue of the
Birth Control Review, was not used with a eugenic intent. PPFA claims that the
remark, originally attributed to Dr. Edward A. Kempf, was pulled by Sanger from
a paragraph by Dr. Kempf concerning the need for maternal and infant care
clinics and “how environment may improve human excellence,” and she used it with
this in mind.
THE TRUTH: PPFA’s interpretation gets points for originality but demerits for
untruthfulness. Again they neglect the larger context of her writings. Sanger
consistently used metaphors of plant and animal culture and applied them to
humans; see, for example, the first article and the following: “‘Nature
eliminates the weeds, but we turn them into parasites and allow them to
reproduce.’ Could any business maintain itself with the burden of such an
‘overhead’? Could any breeder of livestock conduct his enterprise on such a
basis? I do not think so.” (“Is Race Suicide Probable?” Collier’s, vol. 76,
8/15/25, p. 25)
In addition, Sanger had an unpublished article entitled “We Must Breed a Race of
Thoroughbreds” that advocated giving birth control to various categories of the
“unfit,” such those with transmissible disease, the “feeble-minded,” and so
forth (Library of Congress, Margaret Sanger Papers, unpublished manuscript,
1929). Clearly, Sanger used this phrase with a eugenic intent.
4) PPFA’S CLAIM: Sanger’s quote, “The most merciful thing that the large family
does to one of its infant members is to kill it” (Woman and the New Race [NY:
Brentano’s, 1920], p. 63) was “taken out of context,” according to PPFA. “Sanger
was making an ironic comment—not a prescriptive one—about the horrifying rate of
infant mortality among large families of early 20th-century urban America.”
THE TRUTH: PPFA’s interpretation is unlikely. While there may be no way to prove
irony or the lack thereof, there is a decided absence of humor in all of
Sanger’s writings. Sanger elsewhere speaks of people “who never should have been
born,” and she also frequently refers to infanticide as a primitive form of
birth control. “The earliest methods of primitive society have been infanticide
. . . ; the abandonment of babies; and feticide or abortion . . .” (“The Need of
Birth Control in America,” Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities, Adolf
Meyer, editor [Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Company, 1925], p. 12).
Rather than decrying these methods, Sanger says that “all true aristocracies,
whether of politics or of genius, are the products of such control” (ibid.).
5) PPFA’S CLAIM: The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy is the
title of a book mistakenly attributed to Sanger. PPFA claims that the book,
written by noted racist Lothrop Stoddard, was reviewed by Havelock Ellis in the
October 1920 issue of the Birth Control Review and criticized because it
advocated “distinctions based on race or ethnicity alone.”
THE TRUTH: As we have seen, the book was indeed not written by Sanger. Stoddard,
however, was not such an unpopular person as PPFA would have you believe. See
here [link to Lothrop Stoddard, under the RACISM section]. PPFA is correct that
all of Stoddard’s views (i.e., racism) cannot be assumed to be shared by Sanger,
but he is one more tie that Sanger had to the eugenics movement, and she
certainly expressed similar eugenical statements.
6) PPFA’S CLAIM: Lastly, PPFA maintains that we should not judge its
early-20th-century foundress with our “late 20th-century values.”
THE TRUTH: Many people, mostly those not part of the social and economic elite,
challenged Sanger during her life—thereby showing that our supposed “late
20th-century values” are actually enduring and eternal ones—and they still
challenge PPFA today. Would PPFA suggest that we not judge the Nazi eugenicists
(who borrowed their sterilization law from the “model law” written here in
America) because their bigotry was popular and culturally conditioned?
RECOMMENDED SOURCES
Primary Sources:
Margaret Sanger. 1919. “Birth Control and Racial Betterment.” Birth Control
Review, February, pp. 11-12.
----------. 1920. Woman and the New Race. New York: Blue Ribbon Books.
----------. 1921. “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda.” Birth Control
Review, October, p. 5.
----------. 1922. The Pivot of Civilization. New York: Brentano’s.
----------. 1925. “The Need of Birth Control in America,” in Birth Control:
Facts and Responsibilities, Adolf Meyer, editor, pp. 11-49. Baltimore: The
Williams and Wilkins Co.
----------. 1926. “The Function of Sterilization.” Birth Control Review,
October, p. 299.
See also The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928,
Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, vol. 1, ed. Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo,
and Peter C. Engelman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2002). Three
other volumes will eventually be published.
Some Secondary Sources:
Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a
Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)
Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., forthcoming)
Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of
World Population Control, second edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999)
The following are books that do not represent a pro-life view, and they also
address issues on which Black Americans for Life and the National Right to Life
Committee does not take a position, such as contraception. They are, however, of
interest to blacks because these works provide more detail about the topics
summarized here, such as eugenics, Planned Parenthood, population control, and
race.
Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (New York:
Harper & Row, 1984)
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body:Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of
Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997)