The facts:
Abortion and forced Sterilization were actually things that Sanger wrote AGAINST! She did not endorse abortion. She only advocated birth control and education. If she endorsed abortion at any time, she would have been arrested, because abortion, was illegal until 1972, and advocacy of it was illegal until the 1950s.
The above quote sounds like Sanger is advocating the cleansing of "the race" of "defectives" and "mentally ill", and advocating a nazi-version of racial supremacy. When you put the paragraph in context, with it's surrounding paragraphs, Sanger is actually saying the opposite -- the paragraph is part of an intro where she CRITICIZES various remedies offered by government.
When The Pivot Of Civilization was written, in 1922, the USA, indeed the world, was getting over the ravages of the worst Influenza epidemic in history! Millions of Americans died -- we lost a whole generation of people between 1918 and 1920. The idea of "racial regenration" was not used in the context of "white racial regeneration". It literally meant "human" regeneration.
But that's just a sidenote. Let's see what the whole page says, and what the liars for Christ always leave out.
"At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity for Birth control education without a complete comprehension of the dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly summarized as follows:
* Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic.
* Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction, emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i. e. capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological chaos and human waste. I shall attempt to show that the Marxian doctrine is both too limited, too superficial and too fragmentary in its basic analysis of human nature and in its program of revolutionary reconstruction.
* Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility of the ``unfit'' and the feeble-minded establishing a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth-rate among the ``fit.'' But in its so-called ``constructive'' aspect, in seeking to reestablish the dominance of healthy strain over the unhealthy, by urging an increased birth-rate among the fit, the Eugenists really offer nothing more farsighted than a ``cradle competition'' between the fit and the unfit. They suggest in very truth, that all intelligent and respectable parents should take as their example in this grave matter of child-bearing the most irresponsible elements in the community. |
