This is what DMA was thinking of (from the Encyclopedia Britannica site, a review of a documentary):
"The American woman, in my estimation, is sound asleep," Sanger wrote in a fury. "Suffrage was won too easily and too early in this country."
Unable to sway the women's movement to her cause, Sanger turned to the most powerful advocacy group of her time the eugenicists. The documentary deals with this shift in strategy objectively, neither justifying nor condemning it. "Sanger was always looking for a vehicle to propel her cause forward," Alfred says. "Sanger had what we call the `PR know-how' to get her cause linked with bigger issues that would keep it in the public view."
Eugenic theory posited that the human race would be improved "by encouraging high reproductive rates in classes deemed socially desirable .... and by discouraging reproduction amongst the undesirables." Racists exploited these quasi-scientific theories for several decades, culminating in the eugenic rationale of the German fascist movement in the early 1930s. But even as early as the 1920s, the United States had passed forced sterilization laws in twenty states, eugenics was taught in universities, and many leading reformers and thinkers were advocates of eugenics.
Margaret Sanger promoted access to birth control for all women, regardless of class, arguing that women should be able to restrict their family size voluntarily. Eager to make use of the popularity of eugenics, she wrote The Pivot of Civilization in 1922, in which she espoused decreasing the birth rate of "mentally and physically defective" people. Linking birth control to eugenics shifted Sanger's movement from what David Kennedy, author of Birth Control in America, calls a "radical program of social disruption" to a "conservative program of social control."
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