Maggie (Part 2)

What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is missing cannot be supplied.  Ecclesiastes 1:15

The prior post on Margaret Sanger explored briefly some of the events and people that helped form her world view and fuel her frenetic efforts to fill the hole in her soul.  Three themes emerged as she came to maturity, and they informed and drove her behavior, writings and passions: unquenchable desires for sexual experience of all kinds and obsession to sever natural human fertility from sexual activity were two. The third was eugenics – promoting the concept that elite illuminati should determine who lives and who doesn’t, who breeds and who doesn’t.

Under threat of arrest in New York for flaunting the law while catechizing a gospel of crude birth control, she fled for a while to Great Britain.  This sojourn congealed her radicalism.  Freed from “the smothering restrictions of marital fidelity,” her unleashed promiscuity took to her bed some of the luminaries of the socialist intelligentsia there, including (among quite a few others) George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells.  She advocated ever more stridently that we must strive to disassociate human sexuality from the natural benefits of human bonding, intimacy and parenthood.

Her connections with Ellis and Shaw deepened her commitment to the eugenics movement, and their money funded her American Birth Control League and its propaganda instrument, the Birth Control Review.  One of the articles in the 1920 editions was a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard’s Fascist book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.  Three years later a Review editorial advocated restricting immigration based on race.  In 1932 Margaret penned for the Review her “Plan for Peace,” which endorsed coerced sterilizations, mandatory segregation and “rehabilitative” concentration camps for all “dysgenic stocks,” including the handicapped, ethnic minorities and the mentally “defective.”  She routinely inveighed against the “inferior races” that were “human weeds,” a “menace to civilization”; she insisted the “sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility” be controlled.

In 1933 the Review published “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need” by Margaret’s close friend, Ernst Rudin.  Rudin was at the time Adolf Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization, having been one of the founders of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene.  Later in 1933, she ran a piece by Leon Whitney, “Selective Sterilization,” which lauded the Nazi pre-holocaust race purification programs.  Margaret’s birth control advocacy was inextricable from her desire to maintain the purity of the human race with her and those most like her as the select survivors.  Like her fellow true believers in the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis and the Eugenics Society, for Margaret, pulling the weeds in the human garden took the highest priority.

In 1939, Margaret devised the “Negro Project” at the request of “southern state public health officials” in which she stated that the “mass of Negroes ….particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”  Her plan foreshadowed the goings-on of her current organization.  She suggested that they start with three or four “colored ministers preferably with social service backgrounds, and engaging personalities” to propagandize for birth control.  Her longer quote is enlightening.  “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.”   Margaret was a militant atheist, but not above manipulating the unsuspecting through their faith.

Nazi atrocities put a knot in Margaret’s plans as the world first recoiled in horror and then destroyed the Third Reich.  The inconvenience of bad public relations for its support of the Nazi agenda made the American Birth Control League and Birth Control Journal untenable as an ongoing enterprise.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.  Ecclesiastes 1:9

Margaret, undeterred, started up its successor, Planned Parenthood and the Planned Parenthood Review.  Planned Parenthood has expended great efforts to sanitize the beliefs of their founder, indeed portraying her as a modern day saint who pioneered freedom for women and a savior of their health.  True to course, however, their activities uphold her dreams.  The early offices of the international Planned Parenthood organization were in the offices of the Eugenics Society. Seventy percent of their “woman’s health clinics” are located in poor and minority neighborhoods.  While black Americans comprise 12.6% of the total population, 35.4% of abortions are inflicted on black babies.   For every 1,000 live births, there are 138 abortions in the white population; for black children the rate is 501 dead for every 1,000 born.   Planned Parenthood is self adulatory about their efforts on behalf of feminine health, but they do no mammograms – for those they refer their clients to others.  They say they do them, but they don’t.  What they don’t refer are the big profit items – over 300,000 abortions a year, which bring the “health organization” almost a third of its nearly billion dollar annual income.  The larger PP clinics have assigned abortion “quotas.”[1]