Posted on 12/01/2001 12:28:35 PM PST by He Rides A White Horse
I was personally offended when Planned Parenthood recently announced plans to give its Margaret Sanger Award to the BBC documentary "The Dying Rooms."
Don't get me wrong: The documentary is a wonderful and courageous piece of work. An undercover camera crew managed to gain entry to China's state-run orphanages and videotape the mistreatment and murder of the girls there. I appeared in the documentary, testifying that this tragedy is a direct consequence of the country's one-child policy.
It was the award, named after Planned Parenthood's founder, to which I objected. For Sanger had little but contempt for the "Asiatic races," as she and her eugenicist friends called them. During her lifetime, she proposed that their numbers be drastically reduced. But Sanger's preferences went beyond race. In her 1922 book "Pivot of Civilization" she unabashedly called for the extirpation of "weeds .... overrunning the humnan garden"; for the segregation of "morons, misfits, and the maladjusted"; and for the sterilization of "genetically inferior races." It was later that she singled out the Chinese, writing in her autobiography about "the incessant fertility of [the Chinese] millions spread like a plague."
There can be no doubt that Sanger would have been wildly enthusiastic over China's one-child policy, for her "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children," published in 1934, decreed that "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit ... no permit shall be valid for more than one child." As for China's selective elimination of handicapped and abandoned babies, she would have been delighted that Beijing had heeded her decades-long call for exactly such eugenicist policies.
Indeed, Sanger likely would have turned the award on its head, choosing to praise publicly rather than implicitly criticize China's government for its dying rooms. Even the inhuman operators of Chinese orphanages might have gotten an honorable mention, in order to underline the importance of their front-line work in eliminating what she called the "unfit" and "dysgenic." Sanger was not one for subtlety in such matters. She bluntly defined "birth control," a term she coined, as "the process of weeding out the unfit" aimed at "the creation of a superman." She often opined that "the most merciful thing that the large family does to one its infant members is to kill it,", and that "all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class."
Sanger frequently featured racists and eugencists in her magazine, the Birth Control Review. Contributor Lothrop Stoddard, who also served on Sanger's board of directors, wrote in "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy" that "We must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally non-Asiatic regions inhabited by the really inferior races." Each issue of the Birth Control Review was packed with such ideas. But Sanger was not content merely to publish racist propaganda; the magazine also made concrete policy proposals, such as the creation of "moron communities," the forced production of children by the "fit," and the compulsory sterilization and even elimination of the "unfit."
Sanger's own racist views were scarcely less opprobrious. In 1939 she and Clarence Gamble made an infamous proposal call "Birth Control and the Negro," which asserted that "the poorer areas, particularly in the South ... are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations." Her "religion of birth control" would, she wrote, "ease the financial load of caring for with public funds ... children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation."
War with Germnay, combined with lurid tales of how the Nazis were putting her theories about "human weeds" and "genetically inferior races" into practice, panicked Sanger into changing her organization's name and rhetoric. "Birth control," with its undertone of coercion, became "family planning." The "unift" and the "dysgenic" became merely "the poor." The American Birth Control League became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Following Sanger's death in 1966, Planned Parenthood felt so confident that it had safely buried her past that it began boasting about "the legacy of Margaret Sanger." And it began handing out cutely named Maggie Awards to innocents who often had no inkling of her real views. The first recipient was Martin Luther King-who clearly had no idea that Sanger had inaugurated a project to set his people free from their progeny. "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," Sanger wrote Gamble. Had Dr. King known why he may have been chosen to receive the award, he would have recoiled in horror.
The good news is that Sanger's-and Planned Parenthood's-patina of respectability has worn thin in recent years. Last year Congress came within a few votes of cutting a huge chunk of the organization's federal funding. The 1995-96 Planned Parenthood annual report notes that it has closed up shop in Mississippi, and that the number of its staff and volunteers has fallen by 4,000 over the previous year.
Perhaps the next time the Maggie Award is offered to someone of character and integrity-and more than a passing knowledge of Sanger's bigotry-he will raise an indignant cry of refusal. He will have ample grounds.
Which in the end will be........nobody.
Yep.
It’s a wonder that they are not assassinating each other.
On African-Americans:"[We propose to] hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. 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.''On infanticide: "The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.''
On eugenics: "Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.''
Sanger was a Nazi sympathizer. She was strongly anti-Semitic. She was a partner in a birth control organization with a man named Henry Pratt Fairchild, who wrote The Melting Pot Mistake, in which he accused "the Jews" of diluting the true American stock. In his book, Race and Nationality, Fairchild blamed anti-Semitism and the holocaust in part on "the Jews."
Because of the strong association in the public mind between The American Birth Control League and Sanger's Nazi sympathies, during WWII she changed its name to Planned Parenthood.
Margaret Sanger, the still-revered founder of Planned Parenthood, was an undiluted eugenicist committed to, in her words, the elimination of "weeds . . . overrunning the human garden" and the segregation of "morons, misfits, and the maladjusted." Her journal, The Birth Control Review, was a repository for racist bile. I would like to see Planned Prenthood reissue some of the articles that ran in it. The resulting fireworks and gasps among today's left-leaning cognescenti who support Planned Parenthood would be spectacular to behold. Lothrop Stoddard, who also was on Sanger’s Board of Directors, wrote in The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy that "we must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally non-Asiatic regions inhabited by the really inferior races."
All of this is on the public record. Spend a moment, Sarah [my debating opponent on that occasion], and try to disprove any of it.
I think Mosher and I must have used some of the same sources. For the life of me, since it was four years ago, I can't remember where I got this stuff.
Hey, maybe we should.
All we ever do is reel under the blows coming from these leftwing lightweights.
Which is a joke, as they have soooo many weak points, it's not even funny.
The best defense is attacking them
I am a complete ignorant of Margaret Sanger. Not of Hitler, of course. But the ideas she proposed are also in Plato's Republic, a master race created by a breeding perfect elite--those who exhibited perfection in mind and body. I found that concept frightening. Planned Parenthood, I have always believed, to be an evil in our society. Any group that targets the young to influence against parental mores, as Planned Parenthood does, concerns me greatly.
Thanks for the post and the bump. Very interesting.
Ahhh..but you do know her then. Because they share many, many of the same philosophies, which the author of this article points out very adeptly.
Thanks for the post and the bump.
Anytime, nicmarlo.
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