Letter to Dr Charles Davenport
Posted on 08/30/2015 9:02:16 AM PDT by Isara
Birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger embraced some truly horrific ideas. But she also did quite a lot of good.
Senator Ted Cruz has become the first GOP presidential candidate to formally sign on to the efforts by a group of black pastors to get a bust of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger removed from an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. The participants, who held a press conference Thursday, claim that Sanger’s appearance in the exhibit, called, “Struggle for Justice,” is offensive, because it places the reproductive rights trailblazer in a position of honor alongside such icons as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.
Thanks to the recent release of a series of controversial videos, Sanger’s link to Planned Parenthood would have likely been enough to elicit criticism of her inclusion in the exhibit. But Sanger also espoused some views about race and class that were, at times, deplorable.
So are Cruz and his fellow conservatives correct? Should black Americans find Sanger’s legacy, and the celebration of her legacy by the National Portrait Gallery and Planned Parenthood, offensive?
There is no question that Margaret Sanger, born in 1879, held some views that any reasonable person today would consider unconscionable. She viewed eugenics as sound policy and considered the Ku Klux Klan an appropriate ideological partner to advance her work as a family planning advocate. For these reasons, she’s not someone I would call a great person, particularly speaking as an African-American woman who is not from a wealthy background, meaning Sanger likely would have deemed me “unfit” to reproduce.
But that does not change the fact that all reasonable people should also be able to agree that America would be far worse off had Margaret Sanger never existed. The fact is before Sanger’s arrest in 1916 and subsequent jail sentence for aiding women in acquiring birth control, which resulted in a landmark legal ruling, most American woman did not have access to reliable forms of family planning.
This means that most American women lacked the ability to plan the number of children they would have. As a result, families were larger, poorer, and women were more likely to die earlier. Infant mortality rates were also high. This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. A woman lacking access to quality health care and nutrition is less likely to give birth to a healthy baby, or to be able to provide access to necessary nutrition or health care to a baby that was originally born healthy.
Besides the many health advantages American families experienced due to greater access to contraception thanks to the Sanger case, there have also been countless cultural benefits to society. As families have shrunk women’s participation in society has increased, as has the emergence of more women in positions of power. There are more women in colleges, corporate boardrooms and Congress. This shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, if a woman has eight children, the norm for 1800s America, she might have second thoughts about committing to the grueling schedule required to be a political candidate, particularly one who has to commute between Washington, D.C., and another state on a regular basis.
So with the exception of GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who is opposed to birth control and has a large family, it is highly likely that Republican candidates, including Senator Ted Cruz, owe a debt of gratitude to Margaret Sanger, whether they want to admit it or not. (Cruz, it should be noted, has two children, and his wife, Heidi, is a high-powered investment banker.)
For Cruz and other Sanger critics, her sins outweigh her contributions. But my question is: Who gets to decide that? While Sanger’s inclusion in the “Struggle for Justice” exhibit has drawn protests, Henry Clay’s inclusion in the “A Conversation About America” exhibit at the same institution has not.
Clay, like many of the men that shaped our nation, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. Which means if we removed the statues and portraits of every leader who contributed to this country in a meaningful way for gross moral failings, then the walls of the White House, the Capitol and most State Houses would be empty.
As a black American, I can say that while I am troubled by some of Margaret Sanger’s words, I would be remiss not to acknowledge her contributions to my community. Though some conservative critics seem to hold Sanger accountable for the high abortion rates within the black community since she founded the precursor to Planned Parenthood, Sanger’s own attitudes about abortion were complex, and not what we might call “pro-choice” today.
In 1918 she wrote, “While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.” Instead, she argued that government’s failure to not make contraception widely accessible to all women made the government culpable in any deaths resulting from abortion.
Sanger also railed against what she saw as the class inequality and hypocrisy evident in the multitude of family-planning options available to well-to-do white women versus what was available to the poor, many of them immigrants or black. Both of my grandmothers, born in the 1910s, were from large families. One of them was one of 14 children, the other was one of eight. They struggled in poverty as children, something they both talked about. When they decided to have families of their own, they were able to plan a size that worked for them, an option that had not been available to their mothers.
As a result, my parents became the first in their families to graduate from college, and I grew up a member of America’s middle class. This would not have been possible without Margaret Sanger’s contributions, which benefited millions of Americans from all walks of life. So if she doesn’t belong in American exhibit titled “Struggle for Justice,” then who does?
All the old Progressives should be remembered in their true light rather than the rosy picture painted today.
I’m not a particular fan of the Confederacy, but if Cruz is to be criticized for picking a fight with a “135-year-old feminist,” where is the criticism of those wanting to dig up the graves of Nathan Forrest, or strike down the status of Lee and Davis?
“Statues,” not, “status.”
Adolf Hitler embraced some really horrific ideas, but he did do a lot for population control. And overcrowding in many cities in Europe.
The Smithsonian is paid by tax payers.
Did Margaret Sanger get the trains to run on time?
Fixed it.
Don’t forget Prescott Bush was a cohort of Margaret. He served on the founding board as treasurer. May explain why Jeb was hesitant to save the life of Terri. Family values passed down?
Lifetime did a bio movie on Sanger. It covered up the nasty details on her life.
Wish a Christian movie maker would do a real bio on this ghoul.
She didn’t just hang with the kkk she abandonded her children to fornicate with men. No wonder leftists like her!
Leave that monster’s statue up. Edit the display to include her positions on minorities, eugenics, and keeping minority population under control. Show everyone what she is a liberal hero. Include some “inspirational” quotes from Hillary and others on the left praising this ethnic cleanser.
Look for the New York Times to run this exact story, with the headline, "Ted Cruz Beats Up On The Elderly"
It’s a special kind of stupid that champions those who would deny your right to exist.
She was a Nazi before the Nazi’s
Hitler admired Margaret Sanger and use her Eugenesia policies to advance the cleansing of not Arian peoples.
PROGRESSIVE BERKELEY MINISTER DENOUNCES ‘ GENOCIDE’
“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population….” –Margaret Sanger, Founder, Planned Parenthood:
//freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2281827/posts
June 28, 20009
By Andrew Walden
Speaking in Hilo Friday, Rev Walter Hoye of the Progressive Baptist Church of Berkeley, CA told a gathering of 50 Hawaii religious leaders about forces of “black genocide” which he says now kill as many African-Americans every three days as the KKK killed in 86 years of lynching.
Hoye arrived in Hilo after being released from an Alameda County, CA jail, where he was sent after Oakland, CA authorities crafted an ordinance designed specifically to stop him from speaking out in front of a Union City, CA Planned Parenthood abortion clinic about black women’s right to choose alternatives to abortion.
Hoye explained that “The African-American community is the abortion industry’s biggest customer…. African-Americans are now reproducing below replacement level…. Thirty-seven per-cent of abortion comes from just 12% of the population.” Hoye further pointed out that the 37% of abortions are coming from black women of child–bearing age—only 3% of the US population.
Hoye spoke at the Hawaii Family Life Issues Conference held Friday and Saturday at Hilo’s St Joseph School and sponsored by Hawaii Right to Life. Also speaking, Bobby Schindler, brother of Terry Schaivo and Joseph M. Scheidler, National Director of the Pro-Life Action League.
Hoye’s reasoning is backed up by Angela Franks, author of “Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility.” Franks explains:
Planned Parenthood dates its founding from 1916. To understand Planned Parenthood, one must understand the ideology of (its founder) Margaret Sanger.
While Planned Parenthood adamantly insists otherwise, it is clear that Sanger (1879-1966) was a eugenicist. She believed that birth control served a great eugenic purpose by stopping those she described as the genetically “unfit” from reproducing.
In her 1920 book, Woman and the New Race, Sanger explicitly called her work “nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or those who will become defectives.”
As she wrote in The Birth Control Review, “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Sanger did not rule out coercion if the “wrong” people had children. She wrote, “Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.” “Choice,” indeed.
Sanger was not the only eugenicist involved with Planned Parenthood. Alan Guttmacher, president of Planned Parenthood from 1962-1974, once told a Planned Parenthood gathering, “The mentally retarded and the mentally defective . . . insidiously are replacing the people of normal mentality.”
Guttmacher, Sanger, and others in Planned Parenthood actively courted the involvement of eugenicists. In the 1920s, the “National Council” of her American Birth Control League had at least 23 persons involved at a prominent level in eugenics-nearly one-half the entire council!
The American Eugenic Society (AES) officially endorsed her group in 1932, and Sanger was a dues-paying member of the AES through the 1960s. Among those on her council was Lothrop Stoddard, a prominent racist who wrote The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy and who also published eugenic articles in Sanger’s magazine.
Said Hoye citing figures from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, “African-Americans are first, Hispanics are second” in the percentage of abortions performed in the US. After decades of assault on the black family, progressive ministers such as Hoye are leading an effort to reverse the tide.
Interestingly black voters in California last November backed the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 by a 70% margin. Hispanics were second in their level of support for Prop 8.
The reaction among gays was ugly—but revealing. One gay activist describes the scene last November in West Hollywood when the results were announced:
It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks. YOU NIGGER, one man shouted at men. If your people want to call me a FAGGOT, I will call you a nigger. Someone else said same thing to me on the next block....
Over 500 abortions are performed in Hawaii County every year. Most are Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders.
RELATED: Hawaii Right to Life to host Family Life Issues Conference , Hawaii Right to Life Gathers in Hilo , Pastor jailed for Oakland anti-abortion acts , Union City pastor, anti-abortion leader released from jail , N-Word Hurled at Blacks During Westwood Prop 8 Protest
CONTACT: Hawaii Right to Life — Oahu , Hawaii Right to Life — Big Island
MORE INFO: The Negro Project; Margaret Sanger’s eugenic plan for Black Americans ,
http://www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html
Margaret Sanger’s Account Of Her Lecture To The Ku Klux Klan / Educational Video Film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fj-E-Yk78M
OBAMA KILLING HIS OWN GRANDCHILDREN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTB1-TtwWdQ&NR=1
THE TRUTH ABOUT MARGARET SANGER
http://www.jesus-is savior.com/Evils%20in%20America/Abortion%20is%20Murder/truth_about_margaret_sanger.htm
It’s a special kind of stupid that champions those who would deny your right to exist.
*********************
Not only champions but claims they are responsible for her existence. From the end of the column:
“As a result, my parents became the first in their families to graduate from college, and I grew up a member of America’s middle class. This would not have been possible without Margaret Sanger’s contributions, which benefited millions of Americans from all walks of life. So if she doesn’t belong in American exhibit titled “Struggle for Justice,” then who does?”
Say what?? Abortion and birth control are responsible for her success?? Not her parents? Not her church? Not the millions of armed services members who have fought to keep this great country free?
Truly deranged.
Sickening apologetics.
"The ministers 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."
No wonder she and the Nazi "Master Race" theorists were mutual admrers.
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