Margaret Sanger, One person's icon is another's mass murderer
By Bob Parks
Canadian Free Press | It’s sad that one person’s icon is another’s mass murderer. One would think the choice would be clear, but when history is disseminated based on political preference, the truth becomes a casualty. Take for example an exhibition at the Smithsonian celebrating “Women of Our Time”.
In the book accompanying the Smithsonian exhibit, “Women of Our Time: 75 Portraits of Remarkable Women,” Sanger is described as being notable for pursuing her goal of helping women “whose health had been devastated by excessive child-bearing” despite being imprisoned and attacked for advocating birth control. But Sanger, who opened hundreds of birth control clinics across the country, was also well-known for her support of eugenics and abortion.
If taxpayer monies can be used to celebrate a woman who advocated the deaths of those she deemed unworthy and useless, imagine what can happen if the same people who idolize her ideas get a greater hold on funding them.
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Wikipedia | Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 with Lothrop Stoddard and C. C. Little. In 1922, she traveled to Japan to work with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue promoting birth control; over the next several years, she would return another six times for this purpose. In this year she married her second husband, the oil tycoon, James Noah H. Slee.In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established the Clinical Research Bureau (CRB). Sanger eventually found a loophole in the system when she had learned that physicians were exempt from the law that prohibited the distribution of contraceptive information to women when prescribed for medical reasons. With the help of her wealthy supporters, Sanger was finally able to open the first legal birth control clinic that was staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers. It was the first legal birth control clinic in the US (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1940). It received crucial grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s Bureau of Social Hygiene from 1924 onwards, which were made anonymously to avoid public exposure of the Rockefeller name to her agenda. The family also consistently supported her ongoing efforts in regard to population control.
Sanger was a proponent of negative eugenics, a social philosophy which claims that human hereditary traits can be improved through social intervention. Methods of social intervention (targeted at those seen as "genetically unfit") advocated by some negative eugenicists have included selective breeding, sterilization and euthanasia. In A Plan for Peace (1932), for example, Sanger proposed a congressional department 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 in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.
And, following:
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.
Her first pamphlet read:
It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. Herein lies the key of civilization. For upon the foundation of an enlightened and voluntary motherhood shall a future civilization emerge.
