"THE REPACKAGING OF MARGARET SANGER"

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.

Your comment: The difference between pro-abortion and pro-life is one of different perceptions of reality and different ethical structures. Pro-abortion people believe that it is entirely unrealistic to expect people to give up sexuality outide of marriage, or to be be willing to see off-spring result from such unions. Therefore it is as reasonable to legalize abortion as it is to legalize alcohol. . . . Pro-life people respond by saying there's a great difference between drunkenness and murder. And so there is. . . . But there are legitimate questions - probably never resolveable scientifically - about when human life actually begins. . . . And finally there's the issue of birth control. Far too many pro-lifers are against birth control (except abstinence) and do everything they can to prevent dissemination of information and devices - despite what you say about its morality.
My reply: But this can be said [different perceptions of reality and different ethical structures] of most anything. The Bible addresses this (etc.).
Your responses: The men of the Torah and the Mishnah (and their Christian equivalents) are rightly famed for their wisdom. I am not one of them.
And: I didn't, and don't, understand how you mean to apply your quotations and commentary to the subject at hand.

My college professors always criticized my lack of clarity (seems it persists). My apologies. I will try to explain myself better here.

In the discussion regarding, for example, abortion (and this can be applied to genocide, as well), you had said people are polarized by their differences in perception of reality or their ethical upbringing. By this I believe you meant it causes people to view the world differently, their perceptions of right and wrong being based upon their own experiences or how they were taught by society and/or their family structures. Catholics, for example, for the most part (due to church doctrine) believe that any form of birth control immoral. By contrast, in China it is "acceptable" to practice genocide. In the one case, i.e., Catholic doctrine, by merely practicing birth control it can be considered the prevention of creation which is to them a form of murder; in the other, it is a crime not to commit genocide.

What I was attempting to state was society/church may dictate to its members what's "right" and what's "wrong." But just because it either gives its blessing or punishment for certain actions, does not mean those judgments are "right." Our consciences are accountable to God. We are to, individually, look to Him to determine what truly is right and wrong within ourselves.

For example, if, in my own consience, it is better I do something against the law, then I will break the law. (The best example I can think of concerning this goes back to the slave trade days, when many people harbored slaves and helped them). To God, they did the right thing; to the confederate society, they didn't.

On the reverse, if I look to God to direct my actions, then I must be careful that breaking a law or one of His commandmant's (i.e., thou shalt not kill) would withstand scrutiny. (The best example I can think of concerning this: if someone enters my home with obvious evil intent, I would be justified to protect myself/my family and shoot to kill the intruder.)

Then there are grey areas, where behaving a certain way may cause emotional or spiritual problems for another. I must be as sensitive to those needs. (Example would be drinking, as I previously mentioned).

To state succintly, there is a higher moral code than man-made laws, which laws are, obviously, sometimes quite immoral. We should all strive to live by those higher moral codes as dictated by our consciences. In the grey areas, we should not condemn those whose consciences do not condemn themselves. And we should live our lives as peaceably as possible, one with another. The reason I brought up the alcohol example is because that would be a grey area. Some church sects forbid it as a sin, others do not. If it would cause a problem for another, then refrain until a time when it can be consumed without jeopardizing either a friendship or their spiritual walk.

I don't know if this clarified what I was attempting to say. I am hoping so.

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