Category: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, supported eugenics and believed poor people and minorities shouldn’t reproduce. In her book Pivot of Civilization she wrote:

“Such parents swell the pathetic ranks of the unemployed. Feeblemindedness 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 in which we must, if civilization is to survive, extirpate by the very roots.

They are…human weeds, reckless breeders, spawning…human beings who never should have been born. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease…

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.

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 (Oxford/New York: Pergamon Press, 1922)

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From Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood:

“The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.”

Margaret Sanger Pivot of Civilization (New York: Maxwell Reprint Company, 1969 [originally published by Sanger in 1922]) 25

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From Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood:

“In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find.

It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than a chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.”

Margaret Sanger “Sexual Impulses: Part II” New York Call December 29, 1912

Black Native Australians, in Sanger’s view, were a lower order of human than white people like herself.

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Writer and researcher Edwin Black, who supports the work of Planned Parenthood, said the following about its founder, Margaret Sanger:

“[Margaret] Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist, and she would turn her otherwise noble birth control organizations [which would be renamed Planned Parenthood] into a tool for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives, mass incarceration of the unfit, and draconian immigration restrictions.

Like other staunch eugenicists, Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenicly superior strains could multiply without competition from “the unfit.”

She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and the unfit as “human waste” not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human “weeds” should be “exterminated.”

Moreover, for both political and genuine ideological reasons, Sanger associated closely with some of America’s most fanatical eugenic racists. Both through her publication, Birth Control Review, and her public oratory, Sanger helped legitimize and widen the appeal of eugenic pseudoscience. Indeed, to many, birth control was just another form of eugenics…

[Margaret] Sanger always considered birth control a function of general population control and embraced the Malthusian notion that a world running out of food supplies should halt charitable works and allow the weak to die off.”

Edwin Black War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (Washington DC: Dialog Press, 2003, 2012) 127, 128

Black cites the following sources to back up his claim:

Margaret Sanger The Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano’s, 1922) 101 – 102, 104, 108 – 109, 113 – 117, 120 – 121, 123

Julian Huxley “Toward a Higher Civilization” Birth Control Review (December, 1930) 344

“Editorial” Birth Control Review (March, 1928) 73

Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (WW Norton & Company, 1938; New York: Dover Publications, 1971) 376 – 377

Margaret Sanger “A Plan for Peace” Birth Control Review April 1932, pp. 107 – 108

Margaret Sanger “Racial Betterment” The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger: Vol. 1: The Woman Rebel, 1900 – 1928, edited by Esther Katz (Chicago: University Of Illinois Press, 2003) 446, 333 – 334

Margaret Sanger “Is Race Suicide Probable?” Collier’s (August 15, 1925) 25

Ellen Chesler Women of Valor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) 343 – 344

Margaret Sanger Papers Project “Notes on Sources” The National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control 1929 – 1937

Henry Pratt Fairchild The Melting Pot Mistake (Boston: Little, Brown and Company: 1926) 109 – 112

Roswell H Johnson “The Eugenic Aspects of Population Theory” Birth Control Review (September 1930) 256 – 258

Eleanor Dwight Jones “Practical Race Betterment” Birth Control Review (July 1928) 203 – 204

American Medicine “Intelligent or Unintelligent Birth Control?” Birth Control Review (May 1919) 12

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Margaret Sanger was discussing “relief”, i.e. charity towards the poor.

“Relief, by its very nature is not conservation [of the race]. It may serve a destructive purpose, first by keeping alive the most unfit and encouraging them by federal, state and local aid to multiply their kind.”

Margaret Sanger “Human Conservation and Birth Control” address delivered at Conference on Conservation and Development of Human Resources, Washington DC, March 3, 1938, MSP–SS, p 5

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From Margaret Sanger:

“Assuming that God does want an increasing number of worshipers of the Catholic faith, does he also want an increasing number of feebleminded, insane, criminal, and diseased worshipers? That is unavoidable if the Pope is obeyed, because, as we shall see, he forbids every single method of birth control except continence, a method which the feebleminded, insane, and criminal will not use….

Catholic doctrine is illogical, not in accord with science, and definitely against social welfare and race improvement.”

Margaret Sanger “My Answer to the Pope on Birth Control” three page report, published by the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, “The Pope’s Position on Birth Control” The Nation January 27, 1932

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In this passage, Margaret Sanger speaks out against charity, which she calls “relief”:

“Relief, by its very nature is not conservation [of the race]. It may serve a destructive purpose, first by keeping alive the most unfit and encouraging them by federal, state and local aid to multiply their kind.”

Margaret Sanger “Human Conservation and Birth Control” address delivered at Conference on Conservation and Development of Human Resources, Washington DC, March 3, 1938, MSP–SS, p 5

Her belief was that the “unfit” i.e. the poor and disabled, should be allowed to die off for the betterment of the human race.

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Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, writes about “defectives” and the “unfit”:

“The most serious charge that can be brought against modern “benevolence” is that it encouraged the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering . . .”

Margaret Sanger The Pivot of Civilization (Oxford/New York: Pergamon Press, 1922) 123

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Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger said:

“The lack of balance 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. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, 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. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.”

Margaret Sanger The Pivot of Civilization (Oxford/New York: Pergamon Press, 1922) 25

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