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To: Lorianne; L`enn
This in stark contrast to many others of her time quoted further down in your post, who advocated not only abortion, but mandated and forced abortion .... including I'll point out, many men.

Sanger looks good by comparison.

The problem is that those later quotes, advocating forced abortions, were printed in a periodical owned and edited by Sanger.

If she had been so very opposed to abortion, why did she repeatedly publish articles calling for its legalization and coercion?

Sanger was only opposed to abortion for medical reasons. She was pragmatic; it hurt women because medical science had not yet advanced (still hasn't) to the point that abortions were safe.

However, there is absolutely no evidence that she had any philosophical opposition to abortion whatsoever.

16 posted on 12/03/2002 6:52:00 AM PST by Polycarp
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To: Polycarp
However, there is absolutely no evidence that [Sanger] had any philosophical opposition to abortion whatsoever.

I disagree. She repeatedly made statements that abortion was abnormal and in opposition to the natural inclinations of women, throwing them into turmoil (as infanticide did as well). She repeatedly portrayed women who aborted as desperate people with few options and dire consequences for themselves and their existing children. This was her unrelenting theme in promoting contraception.

She may not have opposed abortion for the reasons you would like, but she did oppose it.

As for her newletter, it was in the form of an open forum to which other eugenicists contributed. To say she agreed with all the view would be equivalent to saying that FR agrees with every view posted on its website.

In personal writings of her I have read, Sanger never advocated mandated or forced abortion. But many others did, mostly men, a fact not missed by early feminists contemporaries who also opposed abortion on the grounds that it would be used to unfairly target women for grave abuse. They also recognized in abortion the escalation of the tradition of laying blame for all social ills on women by dent of their unique biological role. As it turns out, they were right.

18 posted on 12/03/2002 10:18:35 AM PST by Lorianne
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