#052 How Was Margret Sanger’s Work Connected To Nazi/American Eugenics? And Why Should It Bother Us?


#052 How Was Margret Sanger’s Work Connected To Nazi/American Eugenics? And Why Should It Bother Us?


Physical or Biological Determinism will always cause the sort of societal pain that comes from stripping man of his rights as an image bearer of God. If we view people as simply the flesh that they inhabit, we will rob them of what makes them special: God breathed life and a spirit into each one of us. This gives us a unique value. This realization of the infinite value should move us to view every human as priceless.



The trouble with Secular Humanism that neither the value of God nor the value of man is recognized. Only the need for self actualization is acknowledged. So what would happen to a culture saddled with such a worldview if a certain minority were to be singled out as an obstacle to the majority's self-actualization, whether through pseudoscience, religious innuendo, or avarice? We only need to look to recent history to see the results.

In the 1700s a man named Thomas Robert Malthus produced the theory that the exponential population growth, combined with an arithmetic food supply growth, would produce immense human suffering in the inevitable overpopulation that would occur. The Malthusian Theory of Population, when combined with Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, bred an incredibly dangerous atmosphere where man thought it best to play God considering God's absence from man's worldview. This playing God took the form of Eugenics, or Good Birth (Eu-Greek for Good, Genes Greek for birth).

Eugenics was rather popular during Margret Sanger's day. It is important to remember that while she was a product of her times, those times are not that far behind us and neither are the propositions that motivated people like Margret Sanger.

So now that we have partially set the stage, let's not use some Pro-Life source. (Unfortunately, in the zeal for the Pro-Life cause, so many in the Pro-Life movement are not always accurate when representing Sanger. We should always build the strongest version of the opposition's argument when forming a response. Dismantling steelmen, not strawmen, prepares us to engage our culture successfully.) Let us use scholars like Edwin Black (not a conservative), Planned Parenthood, and most importantly, Sanger herself to look at the founder of the contraceptive movement that has evolved into the abortion movement.



From Planned Parenthood on Margret Sanger:

“Was Sanger Racist?

Arguments continue about whether or not her

outreach to the Black community was racist. We

know that Sanger was conscious of race, and that

she was capable of revolutionary thinking that

defied sexism of the time. She did not apply that

revolutionary thinking to race and class, choosing

instead to follow the paternalistic attitudes of the

time and willfully ignoring how Black people were

harmed by her movement. However, there is no

evidence that Sanger, or the Federation, intended to

coerce Black women into using birth control:

“The fundamental belief, underscored at

every meeting, mentioned in much of the

behind-the-scenes correspondence, and

evident in all the printed material put out

by the Division of Negro Service, was that

uncontrolled fertility presented the greatest

burden to the poor, and Southern blacks

were among the poorest Americans. In fact,

the Negro Project did not differ very much

from the earlier birth control campaigns in

the rural South...it would have been more

racist, in Sanger's mind, to ignore African

Americans in the South than to fail at trying

to raise the health and economic standards

of their communities” (“Birth Control or Race

Control,” 2001).”

There are several issues here. First, Sanger herself was an ardent supporter of sterilizing the “unfit”. Quote “As an advocate of birth control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out the unbalance between the birth 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 classes.” -Sanger 1919

This was not simply one race, but many for the average eugenist. The Appalachian, the Southern Italian, the Jew, the Black were all common targets of Sanger's peers in the movement. She was somewhat tight lipped about race, though those she considered to be mentally unfit were fair game (again the issue of IQ was often deduced by race through weighted IQ tests as scholars like Edwin Black are quick to point out.) However, let's look at her actions and words as they speak volumes about her end goals.




More from Planned Parenthood

“However, it is true that Margaret Sanger made a

speech on birth control to a women's auxiliary branch

of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, in 1926

(Sanger, 1938, 366). Sanger was so intent on her

mission to advocate for birth control that she chose

to align herself with ideologies and organizations

that were explicitly ableist and white supremacist.

In doing so, she undermined reproductive freedom

Black people, Latino people, Indigenous people,

immigrants, people with disabilities, people with low

incomes, and many others…”

But these were the targets of the Eugenics movement. Just recontextualize this with any other person who is not affiliated with Planned Parenthood. Someone who believed in breeding better humans, proposed her ideas to racists, who then furthered her cause. But she was not a racist. She only did racist things surrounded by racist people.

“Sanger and Eugenics

Eugenics is the theory that society can be improved

through planned breeding for “desirable traits”

like intelligence and industriousness. In the early

20th century eugenic ideas were popular among

highly educated, privileged, and mostly white

Americans. Margaret Sanger pronounced her belief

in and alignment with the eugenics movement in

her writings, especially in the scientific journal Birth

Control Review. At times, Sanger tried to argue for

a eugenics that was not applied based on race or

religion (Katz, 1995, 47).”

Point of order, this is what someone else has postulated posthumously to save the face of Planned Parenthood.

“But in a society built on the belief of white supremacy, physical and mental

fitness are always judged based on race. Eugenics,

therefore, is inherently racist.”

Sanger also argued that reproductive choices should

be made by each woman, not by the state.

“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. ... Only upon a free,

self-determining motherhood can rest any

unshakable structure of racial betterment”

(Sanger, 1919a).”

Also from Sanger: “A marriage license shall in itself give a husband and a wife only the right to a common household and not the right to parenthood.” Sanger- Article 3, 27 March 1934

This provokes the question: Was she speaking about two different groups of people? She often referred to the fit and unfit. She doubled down even further in the same publication when she wrote: “No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child and no man shall have the right to become a father without a permit for parenthood.”

These last two quotes came after Sanger supported the Supreme Court Decision Buck v Bell.

“Yet Sanger's points of disagreement did not

prohibit her from embracing harmful eugenic ideas.

For example, she endorsed the 1927 Buck v. Bell

decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that

states could forcibly sterilize people deemed “unfit”

without their consent and sometimes without their

knowledge. The acceptance of this decision by

Sanger and other thought leaders laid the foundation

for tens of thousands of people to be sterilized, often

against their will. (Chesler, 1992, 485)

A majority of states would go on to adopt

involuntary sterilization policies, leading to more

than 60,000 people being sterilized by the states

in the 20th century. These policies targeted people

with disabilities and people broadly labeled

“feebleminded” or “mentally defective” by the state.

Sterilization policies were violently ableist, and

were applied in deeply racist ways. In the South,

so many Black women were given unnecessary

hysterectomies that it gave rise to the euphemism

“Mississippi appendectomy.” In California, 20,000

people were sterilized between 1909 and 1979,

among them a disproportionate number of Black,

Mexican American, and Asian American people. In

the 1970s and 80s, Indigenous women were sterilized

at staggering rates, without their consent: At least

25% of Native American women were sterilized

between 1970 and 1976. The ripples of the Buck

v. Bell decision are still felt today. In 2020 at Irwin

County Detention Center in Georgia, immigrant

detainees were sterilized against their will.

Sterilization policies in the U.S. in the 1930s would

ultimately inspire some of the worst human rights

atrocities in the history of the world, including the

Nazi regime's eugenics laws. While Sanger was not

associated with Nazism — her books were among the

first burned by Nazis in their campaign against family

planning (“Sanger on Exhibit,” 1999/2000), and she

helped several Jewish women and men and others

escape the Nazi regime in Germany (“Margaret

Sanger and the ‘Refugee Department',” 1993) — she is

not absolved of her endorsement of Buck v. Bell and

the harm it caused.

Sanger's belief in eugenics undermined reproductive

freedom and caused irreparable damage to the

health and lives of generations of Black people,

Latino people, Indigenous people, immigrants,

people with disabilities, people with low incomes,

and many others. Planned Parenthood denounces

Margaret Sanger's belief in eugenics.”

Sanger may not have liked where things ended up in Germany, but she had already met the Nazis half way with the Buck v Bell case. It is important to note, that she shifted her approach in light of the Nazi situation, but Edwin Black in his book “The War Against the Weak” is clear to note that he does not believe that Sanger was a racist, but consorted with the worst of them. Why might she have done this? She would say herself: “These two words (Birth Control) sum up our whole philosophy. It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extinction of defective stocks… Those human weeds which threaten the finest flowers of American Civilization.” -Sanger “Highlights in the History of Birth Control” October 1923.

All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class… Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately a cleaner race.” -Sanger “Morality and Birth Control.” Feb 1918.

She may have even had good intentions. But shouldn't that scare us all the more? Should this idea that all of this was done for the betterment of the human race and female sex be all the more frightening? We need a standard. The one that our Father in Heaven has set.






https://youtu.be/HsrOPDdbTzM

18:45 Quotes on Sanger arguing for sexual freedom

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/uploads/filer_public/cc/2e/cc2e84f2-126f-41a5-a24b-43e093c47b2c/210414-sanger-opposition-claims-p01.pdf

https://sangerpapers.wordpress.com/tag/edwin-black/



NM Holocaust Video On Eugenics:

https://youtu.be/jeSM9vz6ylg