The Truth: Margaret Sanger Was Not Racist, Nor Was She Pro-Abortion

Why do so many people keep demonizing Margaret Sanger?  She was not, as far too many people mistakenly believe, in favor of abortion.  Nor was she preoccupied with exterminating non-white races.

Take the time to read her own accounts of this.  She had originally been charged with performing abortions for women who did not want to have more children.  Margaret Sanger herself was shocked, appalled, disgusted, and horrified at the fact that the women had to resort to this to keep from carrying pregnancies to term.  These women had no choice but to rely on having their insides sucked out, probed, prodded, scratched out, and subject to this kind of violence simply because they wanted to give their bodies a break from the grueling labor that was pregnancy and childbirth.

Because of what Margaret Sanger witnessed, she became a staunch advocate of birth control.  Precisely because she was against abortion is the reason that she founded an advocacy group that provided women with contraceptives.

She was a happily married woman who wanted safe, reliable birth control for herself and her husband.  The vast majority of women for whom she wanted access to birth control were married women who just wanted reasonable spacing between having children.

Margaret Sanger advocated BIRTH CONTROL.  Say it with me, people, birth control.  Now spell it:  B-I-R-T-H-space-C-O-N-T-R-O-L.  She did this for the express purpose of reducing abortions.

People seem to think she was racist.  Why, because she thought mentally handicapped people and poverty-stricken people should not have children?  How the hell is that racist?  That is not racist; that is common sense.  It is good judgment and it is showing concern for the future of society not to desire reproduction from mentally handicapped people.  Mental handicap and poverty can strike anyone of any race.

The fact is, mentally handicapped people and poverty-stricken people are NOT equipped to be good parents.  Social and emotionally-evolved creatures such as human beings need parents who are fully capable of raising a child with love, discipline, structure, and order.  A child fares best if he/she is raised in a stable, loving household where the two parents are married and treat each other right, neither one is violent or asshole-ish, neither one does drugs, and both are educated.  Mentally handicapped people are not capable of this.

It is a crying shame that general pop society is given to stupidly-swayed political correctness, because this prevents truth from being broadcast.  Raising children costs money.  Raising children requires nutritious, healthy food, it requires clothing, it requires ample hygiene and sanitation, that means laundry detergent, soap, toilet paper.  Raising children requires the parents to be able to afford regular doctor check-ups; it requires being able to easily afford rent each and every month; it requires being able to live in a safe, clean, secure place and not just any old ragtag slum housing; that means working functioning pipes with clean water.

I have witnessed that the type of people that are convinced that Planned Parenthood is "evil" are twisted, messed up people with horrific, tragic lack of intelligence.  This includes both extreme conservatives as well as extreme liberals.  They have a complete lack of good judgment.

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More on Sanger and the Negro Project: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/newsletter/articles/bc_or_race_control.html

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/) is an excellent resource for debunking many of the other myths about Sanger.
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Original Link: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/newsletter/articles/sanger-hitler_equation.html

“The Sanger-Hitler Equation” #32, Winter 2002/3

Search for Margaret Sanger’s name on the Internet and you will quickly be bombarded by claims that she supported Hitler and the Nazi’s human elimination programs, or at the very least inspired the Nazi architects of race improvement. “Hitler and Sanger Join Hands” blares one anti-Sanger diatribe; “Margaret Sanger, Sterilization and the Swastika” is the title of another; “Let us look forward to the day when Planned Parenthood clinics are made into holocaust museums,” concludes another attack on Sanger’s writings. One web site features photos of Sanger and Hitler united under a Swastika. Another inserts the phrase “concentration camps” into a 1932 Sanger speech to demonstrate her real motives, a novel form of textual annotation that is then passed on like a virus to other sites who point to the phrase as documented evidence of Sanger’s final solution.

Though this disinformation campaign, designed to arouse anger and anti-choice activism, resides largely on the Internet, in colorful, sensationalized pages, even the more respectable print outlets have picked up many of the most extreme Nazi-related allegations about Sanger as voiced by anti-abortion activists at newsworthy events or on Op-Ed pages. They then print them without comment, in effect publishing them as fact. The Associated Press, for example, reported on an anti-abortion march in Birmingham on October 14 of this year, quoting a participant who described Sanger “as racist as she could be,” and linked her to Hitler’s race policies. A Canadian paper, the Calgary Sun, ran a Sept. 1 opinion piece that claimed Sanger “backed the Nazi race purification program until it became unfashionable.” And even though mainstream publications are not actually calling Sanger a Nazi, they are, increasingly, referring to her (as the New York Times did in a September 19 article on the opening of the Museum of Sex in New York City) as a “eugenicist” before associating her with birth control.

Every year there are dozens more characterizations of Sanger as a pro-Nazi, genocidal racist appearing in newspapers, right-wing biographies and purported histories of planned parenthood, and especially on the Internet. Sanger is by no means alone among controversial social reformers and liberators painted as grotesques by extremist opponents of their beliefs and accomplishments; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Eleanor Roosevelt can ably compete with her for this posthumous fame. But the attacks against Sanger resonate in a way that attacks on others do not, largely because of the emotions generated by the abortion debate.

Unfortunately these misrepresentations of Sanger as a Nazi sympathizer who carried out her own quiet form of genocide through abortions, the spread of harmful contraceptives and the advocacy of racist “eugenic” policies – supported by the circulation of Sanger’s controversial writings on eugenics – have begun to infect unbiased student research that is increasingly dependent on unverified and unsubstantiated information only a mouse click away. Granted most of the Internet sites that link Sanger and Hitler as the dark angels of human carnage don’t hide their pro-life, anti-choice associations. But the “Big Lie” theory works – the more you say it, the more it sticks.

Sanger never met Hitler, except in her unconscious (see below). And the reality is that despite the fact that Sanger’s anti-militarism and isolationism during the 1920s and 1930s at times obscured her abhorrence of the Nazis, she was deeply shocked and horrified by the evils and dangers of fascism, Hitler and the Nazi party. “All the news from Germany is sad & horrible,” she wrote in 1933, “and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right. The sudden antagonism in Germany against the Jews & the vitriolic hatred of them is spreading underground here & is far more dangerous than the aggressive policy of the Japanese in Manchuria.” (MS to Edith How-Martyn, May 21, 1933 [MSM C2:536].) She joined the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda and “gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.” (“World War II and World Peace,” 1940? [MSM S72:269].) For Hitler the feeling was mutual; in 1933 the Nazis burned Sanger’s books along with those of Ellis, Freud, German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, and others. (Ellis to MS, Sept. 3, 1933 [LCM 3:385].)

How then does Sanger end up keeping company with Hitler? In this predominantly Internet-based netherworld of revisionist Sanger profiles there are two paths linking Sanger to Hitler, and they frequently intersect. On one, Sanger is accused of murdering millions through abortion, either directly as an abortionist, or as the primary force in creating a culture that devalues human life as evidenced by the rising number of abortions through the twentieth century. This is the unacknowledged “holocaust” commandeered by Sanger. In these absurd depictions she was an even more efficient killer than Hitler or Stalin. One well-quoted assault on Sanger’s legacy, George Grant’s 1995 book, Killer Angel, charges Sanger with the “brutal elimination of thirty million children in the United States and as many as two and a half billion worldwide.” The fact that Sanger’s clinic did not offer abortions and that she advocated birth control as the only remedy for abortion does little to dispel the myth that Sanger pressed abortion upon the masses.

But the main vehicle used to metamorphose this feminist liberator into a Nazi is Sanger’s limited and largely self-serving role in the short but spectacular rise of American eugenics – a movement that sought to apply the principles of genetics to improving the human race. By lifting passages from Sanger’s writings on eugenics and sterilization while failing to provide the complete argument or proper context, and by linking her with notorious racists within the eugenics movement, debunkers of Sanger’s achievements have given her a fiendish make-over.

In one of the seminal texts in this extremist assault on Sanger, the 1979 Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society (both its title and cover – pictured here– prepare the reader for the many leaps of faith to come), the author suggests that Sanger, through her “eugenic” writings and speeches, put into motion a “‘polite’ genocide with an army of biologists, sociologists, eugenicists and psychologists at her side,” and did so without raising any suspicions among the people. (p. 24) So effective was Sanger as a propagandist, claims the author, that her debased “values” have become “those of modern Western civilization and are rapidly becoming the morals which dominate the rest of the world.” (p. 9)

What is, of course, overlooked is that Sanger used the popular eugenics movement to help promote birth control as a science-based remedy for overpopulation, poverty, disease and famine. Incorporating the rhetoric of the eugenics movement into her writings allowed Sanger to make a stronger biological argument that fertility control was necessary for the improvement and health of the entire human race, not only as a means to liberate women. Sanger did seek to discourage the reproduction of persons who were, in the terms of her day, “unfit” or “feebleminded,” those, it was believed, who would pass on mental disease or serious physical defect. And she did advocate sterilization in cases where the subject was unable to use birth control. This was a popular position espoused by many progressive medical leaders, scientists and health reformers of the day – those groups who Sanger hoped to win over to the birth control fight. But in approaching eugenics as a propagandist rather than a scientist, Sanger’s language became dehumanizing, her eugenic recommendations overly simplistic, and her understanding of genetics flawed. Take the oft quoted 1931 “My Way to Peace,” in which Sanger recommends that the government:

  . . . keep the doors of Immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble-minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphiletic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class . . . apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization, and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. (Jan. 17, 1932 [LCM 130:198].)

These are harsh words intended to appeal not only to eugenicists, but social and health workers who came in contact with all manner of sickness and suffering. Sanger was not referring to short stature or pattern balding when she used the phrase “objectionable traits,” rather she was talking about diseases such as syphilis that were ravaging especially the poor. Unfortunately, she did sometimes apply the term to moral as well as mental defects, though never as virulently as others in the eugenics community.

Offensive terminology aside, Sanger’s beliefs, however inhumane they may seem in the current age of medical enlightenment when human suffering is much less visible in our daily lives, actually came from her direct experience with the poor and oppressed. An illustration can be found in a 1932 letter written to Sanger by a woman requesting birth control advice:

  “I will be thirty-six years old on December 16, 1932. and I shall have been married fifteen years on December 13, 1932. During this time I have given birth to eleven children, of whom four are now living–a boy of 13 1/2 years–a girl of 12 years and twin boys two years old. Three of these eleven children were born badly deformed–one with a hare lip and split palate and two with excessive water and a frog-like form. The last birth (one of the deformed ones) was in August 1931 and had to be accomplished with instruments and the Doctor . . . feared for my life and warned us against further pregnancy.” (Client to MS, July 5, 1932 [MSM S7:218].)

Such dilemmas led Sanger to the strongly held belief that the best way to reduce human suffering was to first provide greater access to birth control. It was also necessary, she argued, to somehow regulate the procreation of those individuals likely to pass on physical or mental disease and disability who were incapable of using or denied access to contraception. But her writings on eugenics, including her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, argued that eugenic measures in and of themselves were not practicable. Instead, she concluded that women’s empowerment through birth control offered the only viable means of improving the human condition.

While “My Way to Peace” is brutally frank and among the most extreme of any of Sanger’s eugenic writings, it does not condone race-based eugenics. Sanger never accepted the racial hierarchies that led to the deadly racist policies of the Nazis. Rather, she vehemently rejected any definition of the “unfit” when it referred “to race or religions.” (MS to Sidney Lasell, Jr., Feb. 13, 1934 [MSM S8:541].) This was not true of the broader eugenics movement, both in Europe and the United States, which blurred the distinction between good science and racial prejudice, and generally failed to protest the perversion of its ideals under the Nazis. A number of American eugenicists excused or even commended reprehensible Nazi race policies camouflaged, however poorly, under the veneer of science.

Sanger did write to and share organizational memberships and conference programs with any number of eugenicists, including such champions of scientific racism as Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, who ran the genetics laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York; and Leon Whitney, secretary of the American Eugenics Society. All of them conflated physical and mental deficiencies with racial ones. While Sanger publicly criticized these most notable eugenicists for their opposition or indifference to birth control, she never publicly condemned their racial views. Her silence is damning in retrospect, but it does not make her a Nazi.

Those who insist on labeling Sanger a Nazi claim time and again that she inspired the men who unleashed the barbarism lurking in eugenics, yet many of the men she supposedly roused to action had, in the main, only a grudging respect tinged with contempt for the woman they saw as a major deterrent to their quest to breed more of the “best.” And though Sanger sought their support for birth control, in most cases she failed to win their endorsement. With few exceptions, American eugenicists advocated increased breeding among the “fit,” defined by them as white Anglo-Saxon Protestants with middle or upper class values, and viewed birth control as the major impediment to the proliferation of these “better stocks.”

Even more than her links with American eugenicists, Sanger’s so-called association with Ernst Rudin, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, who helped align prevalent eugenic theories with Nazi race policy, has been featured in nearly every right-wing assault on Sanger’s legacy. The grounds for charges that she knew, corresponded with, or influenced Rudin stem from the April 1933 Birth Control Review (BCR), a special “sterilization number.” Rudin did contribute an article to this issue, as did Harry Laughlin and Leon Whitney and other eugenicists. The issue also included excerpts from the works of Havelock Ellis and influential gynecologist Robert Dickinson. Taken as a whole, the issue presents a clear, if not always comfortable, debate on compulsory sterilization, with forceful arguments for and against, and calls for further research on sterilization as a eugenic measure. But Sanger had resigned as editor of the BCR in 1929 and no longer had any affiliation with the publication. Nevertheless the BCR issue has been held out like a smoking gun in the campaign to brand Sanger a sterilization missionary and Nazi sympathizer. What is never noted is that the one voice absent in the issue is Margaret Sanger’s.

Historians must grapple with the phenomenal amount of material that is being dumped on the Internet. This flood of historical “evidence” is at once liberating and dangerous, for it includes information and disinformation, and there are no help menus to tell the difference. This has become an immense challenge to historical editors who seek to deliver accurate texts in historical context. Some of the incredible attacks on Sanger have existed in book and pamphlet form for several decades now, but in the past only the most zealous would pay for them or go to the trouble to track them down. Now search engines bring them in an instant to our desktops. With sensational headlines, comical juxtapositions, bold assertions and a kind of Twilight Zone aura about them, these anti-choice, anti-Sanger web sites appear to have a sizeable and growing audience. And therein lies the problem; the proliferation of extremist material makes it all seem less extreme, more acceptable to students, journalists and others looking for a quick take on a controversial and complicated figure. History is never that easy.

Men Suck at Logic and Women Suck at Communication

Can we be done already with the idea that men are good at logic and that women are good at communication?  Neither is true.  Their reciprocals are also most certainly not true, and most people know this.  But it needs to be acknowledged that these oft-held assumptions are also definitively untrue. We must tear down these universally-consented-upon notions, for they are false.

Men are not logical.  Now, women are not rational, reasonable beings; no argument there.  Everyone knows this.  But the evidence has spoken -- men are not logical/rational/reasonable/etc, either.

Men like to think that they deal only in facts, figures, and absolutes.  Things that can be quantified, measured, things that have definite right and wrong answers. Men like to spout the notion that they are logical rational beings who only acknowledge concrete information.  I don't mean that they think only in black and white. No, not at all.  They think that they appreciate nuanced variables that can be solutions to a given problem.

What they do not know is that they are governed by emotions and hormones almost as tumultuous as those of any woman.  Men experience hormonal cycles, which a lot of people do not know.  It might not follow a month-long pattern the way women's hormones round.  But men do experience hormone fluctuations that affect their ability for risk-assessment and their foresight.

This is why they approach business mergers and acquisitions with such frenzied gusto, too rashly and without that much forethought.  And it is why these hasty decisions, whether concerning money transactions or going to war, often end in disaster. 

Consider these queries.  Where did the concept of religious zealotry come from?   Who issued fatwas on people's heads?  Who said that gays caused Hurricane Katrina and felt so strongly about it that they preached this on national television?  Or at least preached this notion to mass meetings of people?  If males were logical, then we would not have psychos flying airplanes into buildings.  We would not have carbombers, we would not have airport shoe bombers, we would not have school shootings.

There would be no such thing as r--.  If males were logical, then they would realize that, she said no, let it go, that's it, move on.  If males were logical, then there would be no such thing as asking a woman out, then she said no thanks, then following the woman into a public bathroom and beating the s--- out of her.

From many men's accounts, men inflict onto other men far more damaging, abrasive abuse and harm than anything women inflict onto men.  Including sexual terrorism.  Women are not telling young boys, "oh you’re not getting any?  You’re not a stud?  What are you, a wimpy wussy sissy boy?"

Women are not the ones sending young boys, children really, into war zones to die for what is, in honesty and truth, absolutely no good reason.  Read a dam' news article or two from the last thirty years.  Women are not sending men into war zones to lose limbs or die.  Other men are.  Women are protesting wars.

Men are less safe drivers than women.  Insurance companies are well-aware of this.  This is why they charge higher premiums for male drivers than for female drivers.

Men are not any better at managing money than women are.  Sure, women spend money they do not have on crap they do not need like designer clothes, name brand hair, nails, jewelry.  Now, comedians and everyone else always joke about women's atrocious judgment with money handling.  Which is all true -- women rack up credit card debt on crap like jewelry, hair salon stuff, designer couture name brand clothes, designer shoes, Botox.

But men also are horrendous at managing money.  They rack up credit card debt on things like SUVs, Blu-ray players, DVD players, plasma flat-screen TVs, video game consoles, outdoor camping equipment, gambling, drinking.  Men spend money on electronics, toys, gadgets, video game consoles -- and that includes grown-ass men.

You think that because males play creepy, misogynistic video games wherein they dismember women and then r-- the individual severed limbs, this indicates that they are logical?  Not hardly.

Men start foolhardy business schemes of opening a bar or starting a band without doing the market research of what kind of businesses do best in a given location.  Or finding out how much work and money investment it takes to open a bar.

Men often claim that the only legitimate reason they have to communicate with others, especially with other men, is to exchange useful information.  This sounds reasonable enough until you take a close look at what they define as "information."  They often cite the fact that they keep astride of sports stats.

Hang on a minute.  Oh what, you think that because men quote sports figures and statistics, this means they are logical?  Why?  Because they like sports?  Guffaw.  Your beloved "sports" are nothing more than grown men hitting rubber balls with sticks and running around a playing field.  It is silly comical juvenile fantasy of batting balls around a court, perpetuated by peter pans that refuse to grow up.  It is an overgrown, outdated relic of childhood that is ruefully, wistfully rehashed by people that are legally adults that are trying to relive boyhood fantasies.

There is nothing wrong with liking sports.  Although you couldn't tell from my rant, I really do not think sports are a waste of time.  Sports are fun; I love watching the Olympics myself.

It is common knowledge that women enjoy sports as much as men do.  There might be a slight difference in population percentages, but any given woman sports fan will like sports as much as any given man sports fan.  It is not confined to only one gender, not by a long shot.

Source

But please have the balls to call it what it is -- entertainment.  It is not logical, it is not practical, it is not realistic.

It is entertainment.  It is laughable that anyone would think that exchanging meaningless drivel such as this has any profound meaning.  It is laughable that a grown-up, who supposedly possesses critical thinking abilities, would opine that looking at sports stats has any characteristics whatsoever rooted in "logic."

Now, I personally luurrrve entertainment.  I like movies, TV shows, music, etc.  But I am not laboring under any false pretenses that this crap is "logic."  I call it what it is -- entertainment.

Fine with me.  I like entertainment myself.  But be honest about it.  Either be actually logical, and give up the ghost in the shell, or admit to not being logical.

Now for the next phase.  Women are horrible communicators.  Men are certainly horrendous communicators, no argument there.

Men are bad communicators in that they refuse to communicate at all, and they never listen to what people say, even if the other person is saying stuff straightforwardly.

Women are bad communicators in that they dance around a subject, fudge about, beat around the bush, talk in circles, do anything and everything except come right out and say what they mean.  I am well aware that in pop culture, in pop psychology, and in discussions with friends, the common knowledge that is shared and agreed upon by everyone, is that women are great at communication and men are terrible at communication.  Females love to toot their own horn and declare that they are skilled communicators.

But the truth is, this is simply not the case.  Think about it for a minute.  Really rack through your brain and go back through your memory.  Try to remember conversations you have had with a wife or girlfriend or female friend.  Did she honestly and clearly come straight out and tell you what she was thinking?

Or did she try to tell you, "well why do I have to ask?"
Or, "why didn't you already know that?"
Or, "you should know me better than that.  if you know me so well, why couldn't you tell how I was feeling?"
Or, "why don't you already know what I want for my birthday?" or "our anniversary?" or any major event or holiday.

I read some crap on the internet written by a female, "why can't men just come right out and say what they feel?"

Huh?  Yeah, fekkin right.  As if women are honest and straightforward and come right out and say what they feel.  They don't even know themselves very well.  They cannot easily identify, explain, or even name their own motivations.

"Why can't he just come right out and talk about his feelings?"

Yeah, right.  "Just come right out," as in simply and easily come right out.  Oh yeah, sure, because that's just like SUCH an easy thing to do and women are SO good at expressing their thoughts and/or feelings.

Are you truly one hundred percent aware of your own feelings?

Yeah, right.  That is laughable and a bit sad that you are so hell-bent on getting this person to be in tune with his feelings -- when the whole truth is that YOU are not aware of or in tune with YOUR feelings.  Do you know the difference between love and lust (physical sexual attraction)?  Do you know the difference between love and infatuation?

Love is a decision.  It is something that must be handled delicately and carefully.  Otherwise we have the pandemic of _any_ sort of feeling, whether physical or psychosomatic, being mistaken for love.  It might be fascination, it might be infatuation, it might be a craving for attention.  But I cannot believe it is real, true, peaceful love.

Or from the flip side, I see that some females have a bit of elation at the acknowledgement that someone is finally paying them a bit of attention.  But you have to really truly ponder over it so that you can arrive at the truth.

You have to know the difference between emotions and physical feelings.  You must learn how to distinguish emotional feelings from physical feelings.

Consider for a minute the sheer number of females that are in crappy relationships.  They are in this situation because they are terrible at listening to people.  Some male tells them in no uncertain terms that he is not looking for any steady relationship, and she convinces herself that he will change his mind once he finds out what a stunning fascinating goddess she is.

Or if females, surprise, DO believe a male when he says he is not looking for marriage, then the sneaky manipulation begins.  She will try to seduce him, fool him.  She will try all sorts of underhanded, gutless, cowardly, passive-aggressive tactics to make him think he was the one that thought up the idea of half-baked pseudo-commitment.

They drop so-called "subtle hints" and expect you to be able to read their minds.  Then they get all mad and huffy and puffy that you could not infer their intentions from the psychic brain waves they were sending to you through the ether.

They also refuse to listen to what someone else is straightforwardly saying.  You see, being receptive to other people's communication is crucial to being a good communicator.  Listening and truly paying attention to other people are paramount in any two-way conversation.

Women are horrible at this.  This is why they are terrible at character judgment.  They make excuses for people's behavior.  They think, "oh they don't really mean that."  They think, "oh when they think about it for a while they'll change their mind."  Or, "I'm sure they're just going through a phase; this isn't really them; I'm sure they are a nice person who is considerate of others and cares about their feelings."

I've noticed that females are very easily manipulated.  A guy whispers some crap about love and the next thing you know, bam, her panties are off.  This is again because females believes what they want to believe, they hear what they want to hear.  Or, females assume______  Reverse psychology works excellently on them.  There was this one episode of "Scrubs" where a guest character was described as a "strong, independent woman."  And yet she was very easily manipulated into rebelling against some office-dating rule, and she thought the rebellion was her idea.


All that mess is just more wishful thinking.  That is ignoring someone's behavior that is plainly in front of your face.  Instead of seeing what is truly there, women make up excuses in their heads.  They add false interpretations that don't exist for someone's behavior.  They do a crappy job of interpreting people's behavior.  They believe what they want to believe.

Women need to *stop* trying to fill in the blanks that are not there... and actually start listening.