Who was Margaret Sanger? Eugenics Society, life fellow. American Eugenics Society. Founder of Planned Parenthood. Head of "The Negro Project." Girlfriend of Havelock Ellis (eugenist) and H. G. Wells (eugenist).
Term "Eugenics" coined first by Francis Galton (Chuckie Darwin's cousin). It's really kind of a family thing too: Francis Galton Darwin Medalist 1902. Charles Darwin's cousin. Coined the word eugenics in the early 1880s. Founded the Eugenics Society (the British one).
Francis Darwin Darwin Medalist 1912. Cambridge Eugenics Society member.
Horace Darwin Cambridge Eugenics Society
George Howard Darwin Cambridge Eugenics Society. Charles Darwin's son.
Charles Galton Darwin Eugenics Society life fellow, vice-president 1939, director 1939, president 1953-1959, committee 1960. Chairman of Promising Families. Grandson of Charles Darwin, son of George Howard Darwin. Wrote for the racist journal Mankind Quarterly, which was edited by Otmar Von Verschuer (Josef Mengele's mentor at Auschwitz).
Sanger... Eugenics... so what, right?
Sanger is just so quotable...
"Before eugenicists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for birth control. Like the advocates for birth control, the eugenicists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit." Sanger, Birth Control and Racial Betterment, 1919
“Organized charity itself is 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 perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.“
It [charity] 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."
The Review printed an excerpt of an address Sanger gave in 1926. In it she said:
"It now remains for the U.S. government to set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or 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. The number of the feeble-minded would decrease and a heavy burden would be lifted from the shoulders of the fit."
She founded The Harlem Clinic: 1929. The American Birth Control League. (precursor organization to Planned Parenthood) “was established for the benefit of the colored people,” Sanger wrote in a letter to Dr. W. E. B. duBois The Negro Project (1939) was promoted by Margaret Sanger to the influential within the African American community for the purpose of reducing the African American population.
Her other outfit the "Birth Control Federation of America" (BCFA) was vested with promotion of birth control and sterilization in the African American community. Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, of the soap-manufacturing company Procter and Gamble, was nominated to be the BCFA regional director of the South. Gamble wrote a memorandum in November 1939 entitled “Suggestions for the Negro Project,” in which he recognized that “black leaders might regard birth control as an extermination plot.” Gamble suggested that black leaders be placed in positions where it would appear they were in charge. Yet Sanger's reply reflects Gamble's ambivalence about having blacks in authoritative positions:
“I note that you doubt it worthwhile to employ a full-time Negro physician. It seems to me from my experience ... that, while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table, which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts. They do not do this with white people and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and ... knowledge, which ... will have far-reaching results among the colored people.”
Sanger knew blacks were a religious people—and how useful ministers would be to her project. In the context of summoning the support of "intellectuals" in launching her "Negro Project" (1939) she wrote in the same letter to Gamble:
“The minister's work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. 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."
From Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, “Planned Parenthood as a Public Health For the Negro Race,” BCFA Annual Meeting, 29 January 1942: "“The future program [of Planned Parenthood] should center around more education in the field through the work of a professional Negro worker, because those of us who believe that the benefits of Planned Parenthood as a vital key to the elimination of human waste must reach the entire population."
Everybody seems to have gotten Sanger's memo promoting "extermination." Is there a credible quotation of Sanger's that indicates she did not equate "birth control" with abortion although she spoke very freely of "extermination" -- a term most commonly applied to eliminiating already viable, living beings?
All PP is about today is abortion. When it comes to "extermination" it seems they've gotten the memo too.
Sanger... Eugenics... so what, right?
Who said that? If you wish to try to put words into my mouth, please consider that two can play that game.
I am in no way “apologizing” for Sanger. I am, however, attempting to steer potential pro-Life people away from making incorrect statements because it hurts the pro-Life cause. Sanger, IMO, was a racist and a eugenicist (as were MANY in her day) and that is very bad. But she did not advocate for abortion as a means to those ends, unlike many do today. She correctly foresaw that abortion would be used to exploit women for nefarious ends. She believed widely available contraception and reproductive education was a way to prevent that happening.
More than one by all appearances.