Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood in a two-room shack in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1923, remains a hero to the abortion movement and a "liberator" to the prestige press. Sanger outlined her beliefs in several books, and in her monthly magazine entitled Birth Control Review. In Pivot of Civilization, first published in 1922, she described her objectives: "More children from the fit, less from the unfit--that is the chief aim of birth control." The people Sanger considered unfit were "all non-aryan people." She estimated that these people--the "dysgenic races"--comprised 70 percent of the American population. Sanger believed that this "great biological menace to the future of civilization . . . deserved to be treated like criminals." She proposed to "segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying." Successful implementation of her proposals, according to her, would result in "a race of thoroughbreds."I guess I will never understand liberal thinking, there is absolutely no logic involved...they really disgust me.The similarity to Nazi ideas was not a coincidence. As George Grant points out in his history of Planned Parenthood, Grand Illusions (1988), Sanger devoted the entire April 1933 issue of Birth Control Review to eugenics. One of the articles, "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," was written by Ernst Rudin, Hitler's director of genetic sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. While Sanger's early campaign was aimed primarily at east Europeans, in 1939 she began to target blacks by creating the "Negro Project," to promote birth control and sterilization specifically within the black community. To carry out her plan, she sought the support of prominent black ministers and political leaders. She wrote, "The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members." The implications of the Negro Project are all but ignored in Ellen Chesler's adoring new biography Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America.1
Isn't liberal thinking an oxymoron? I thought liberalism was all about feelings.