No birthday cake for Margaret Sanger

It’s hard to work up a “Happy Birthday” for someone who wanted so few of them. But Saturday (September 14) will be the anniversary of the 1879 birthday of eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

The InfluenceWatch profile of Sanger begins with this overview:

Margaret Sanger was a prominent advocate for contraception, eugenics, population control, and abortion best known for founding the American Birth Control League, the immediate predecessor of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA).

Sanger popularized the term “birth control” as central to her larger philosophy of Birth Control (later called “planned parenthood”), which hinged upon control of women’s reproduction and countering problems of global overpopulation. As an early advocate of Birth Control philosophy, she aligned herself closely with the cause of eugenicists in establishing “racial betterment” policies meant to improve the welfare of women and stop reproduction of people she deemed “unfit” to have children. Sanger published much of her views of sexuality and birth control in Woman Rebel, a magazine she formed in 1914.

A political radical, she was a member of the Socialist Party, which advocated for a government takeover of private property and the U.S. economy.

The profile also explains how she came to name her movement:

She conceived the term “birth control” (later “planned parenthood”) in January 1914 after considering suggestions by European population control advocates involving “limitation” and “family control,” which she rejected. “We tried population control, race control, and birth rate control,” she later wrote. “Then someone suggested ‘Drop the rate.’ Birth control was the answer; we knew we had it.”

In tandem with her desire to liberate women’s sexuality from reproduction, Sanger also expected her population control plans to improve the human species by reducing the creation of individuals she found undesirable. The InfluenceWatch profile quotes Sanger as saying her aim was that “civilization may hope to protect itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of imbecility, defect and delinquency.”

The profile also provides this longer quote from Sanger, in which she predicted a “terrestrial paradise” would ensue from weeding out the “delinquent classes” from the species:

Let us conceive for the moment at least, a world not burdened by the weight of dependent and delinquent classes, a total population of mature, intelligent, critical and expressive men and women. Instead of the inert, exploitable, mentally passive class which now forms the barren substratum of our civilization, try to imagine a population active, resistant, passing individual and social lives of the most contented and healthy sort. Would such men and women, liberated from our endless, unceasing struggle against mass prejudice and inertia, be deprived in any way of the stimulating zest of life? Would they sink into a slough of complacency and fatuity?

No! Life for them would be enriched, intensified and ennobled in a fashion it is difficult for us in our spiritual and physical squalor even to imagine. There would be a new renaissance of the arts and sciences. Awakened at last to the proximity of the treasures of life lying all about them, the children of that age would be inspired by a spirit of adventure and romance that would indeed produce a terrestrial paradise.

The profile also covers the ongoing controversies over Sanger’s history:

In 2015, a group of black pastors and the pro-life group ForAmerica called for a bust of Sanger to be removed from the National Portrait Gallery, a public museum in Washington, D.C., on the grounds that Sanger should not be honored since she advocated for eugenics and sterilization of “inferior” people. In a letter to the Gallery, the group wrote, “Perhaps your institution is a victim of propaganda advanced by those who support abortion. Nevertheless, a prestigious institution like the National Portrait Gallery should have higher standards and subject its honorees to higher scrutiny.”

The pastors and activists were supported by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who called the bust “an affront both to basic human decency and the very meaning of justice” in a publicly circulated letter to other members of Congress. The Gallery ultimately refused to remove Sanger’s bust, with a spokeswoman saying the exhibit didn’t ignore “the less-than-admirable aspects of [Sanger’s] career.”

Other Capital Research Center and InfluenceWatch reports on Sanger and Planned Parenthood (many written by former CRC researcher Hayden Ludwig) include the following:

• The InfluenceWatch profile of Planned Parenthood.
• At least three extensive reports on the history of Sanger’s movement:

The Legacy of Margaret Sanger

Birth of the Abortion Industrial Complex 

Going Green for White Supremacy: Review of Defending the Master Race

• And several short essays covering Sanger controversies, such as:

Planned Parenthood: the Biggest Bastion of Eugenics and White Supremacy in America

Margaret Sanger Is a Hero to the Left. Here’s Her History of Ugly Views.