Margaret—bless her heart—was completely color blind. Hers was a labor of love to improve the human race and usher in an age of world peace. Her terms were the terms used by all Christians at that time. Political correctness had yet to come. The ‘Christian Nation’ spoke of reducing the number of “morons, mental defectives, and epileptics”. So did Margaret. But unlike them, she understood the value of birth control in creating a healthier population. Of course, all the Christians understand this now. And 90% of them (the intelligent ones) use birth control to improve families.
Sanger makes it crystal clear that improving the family (and thus humanity) must “COME FROM WITHIN”. It must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without."
If you continue not to get this, it is because you are determined against all good sense to wave the flag of Bigotry.
Eugenics is a theory of improving hereditary qualities by socially controlling human reproduction.
Eugenicists, including the Nazis, were opposed to the use of contraception or abortion by healthy and “fit” women (Grossmann, 1995). In fact, Sanger’s books were among the very first burned by the Nazis in their campaign against family planning (“Sanger on Exhibit,” 1999/2000). (Sanger helped several Jewish women and men and others escape the Nazi regime in Germany (“Margaret Sanger and the ‘Refugee Department’,” 1993).)
Sanger, however, clearly identified with the broader issues of health and fitness that concerned the early 20th-century eugenics movement, which was enormously popular and well-respected during the1920s and '30s — decades in which treatments for many hereditary and disabling conditions were unknown. But Sanger always believed that reproductive decisions should be made on an individual and not a social or cultural basis, and she consistently and firmly repudiated any racial application of eugenics principles. For example, Sanger vocally opposed the racial stereotyping that effected passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, on the grounds that intelligence and other inherited traits vary by individual and not by group (Chesler, 1992). Though she tried for years, Sanger was unable to convince the leaders of the eugenics movement to accept her credo that “No woman can be free who does not own and control her body (Sanger, 1920).”
Her on-going disagreement with the eugenicists of her day is clear from her remarks in The Birth Control Review of February 1919: Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother. … Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment (Sanger, 1919a).
Although Sanger uniformly repudiated the racist exploitation of eugenics principles, she agreed with the "progressives" of her day who favored:
• incentives for the voluntary hospitalization and/or sterilization of people with untreatable, disabling, hereditary conditions
• the adoption and enforcement of stringent regulations to prevent the immigration of the
diseased and "feebleminded" into the U.S.
• placing so-called illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, and dope-fiends on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America finds these views objectionable and outmoded.
Nevertheless, anti-family planning activists continue to attack Sanger, who has been dead for nearly 40 years, because she is an easier target than the unassailable reputation of PPFA and the contemporary family planning movement. However, attempts to discredit the family planning movement because its early 20th-century founder was not a perfect model of early 21st-century values is like disavowing the Declaration of Independence because its author, Thomas Jefferson, bought and sold slaves.
"Well, this was the situation when I came upon the scene very much later. But Comstock had been rather a laughing stock because he was so puritan that he arrested a whole crowd of people looking in a window at a beautiful picture of a little girl bathing in a brook with the sun shining through the trees about her lovely body, about eight or ten years old. And people were so entranced with this beautiful picture that he arrested all of them for looking in the window. Well, fortunately, our reporters have a sense of humour and a sense of justice, and they played this up pretty vigorously to the amusement of the population and the people. And, of course, the people were freed and so was the man, the bookseller, who had this picture in the window.
Now, this pointed a finger toward Comstock and the other things that he was doing with the laws. Congress gave to him the sole right of opening any letter, or any box of any parcel that came from abroad which he might think had any so-called obscenity or blasphemy within, and that was the situation when I, as one working in the nursing field in the lower part of New York, dealing with people, with women mostly, obstetrical cases, came upon the scene.
"It was pretty difficult to be happy with yourself when you saw the things that happened in those homes -- children unwanted, children beaten, cuffed, pushed around, clubbed, tied down, pushed out into the streets, no place for them; mothers nervous, anxious, breathing a sigh of relief and thank-God when a baby was born dead; men frantic, cross irritable; babies increasing, increasing, increasing year after year; women with the only thing they could do was to have an abortion or to interrupt a pregnancy, and if they couldn’t get a quack doctor to do it, they attempted to do it themselves, and day after day I saw these women taken off to hospitals, many of them never to come back. " Margaret Sanger You saw all of these miseries, these wretched miseries, unnecessary miseries in a great country like we felt that we were. It was recorded in the year 1912 and 13 that there were 250,000 mothers, or women, who died mainly form the causes of pregnancy, and it was estimated that there were approximately two million abortions but, of course, there was no record of them, but from the results and from the drugs and so forth that they could find they said it ran about that.
I tried to tell or to see what could be done but really, I practically knew nothing much myself and when you asked the doctors they said, “Don’t touch that, you’ll go to jail or to a penitentiary if you touch that subject.” And when a woman would ask a doctor what to do so she wouldn’t have another abortion and she wouldn’t go through this great strain again, he’d shrug his shoulders and say, “Tell Jake to sleep on the roof”. That was the answer that these desperate mothers received from their best friend, the family physician. Now, it wasn’t because the physician didn’t feel this, but here were these laws which kept them in ignorance, in utter ignorance, in that country.
So when I came upon the scene, I decided after all this that I didn’t want to live and do this work unless I could do something constructive and something about this horrible question, the waste of women’s lives; pregnancy year after year; the waste of motherhood, the waste of womanhood, the waste of childhood and family life. And I felt that I simply would not live and be happy to live unless something was done. So I decided to give the whole thing up and start in to do something about it, and of course fools go where angels fear to tread. Someone said, when I started a little papers called THE WOMAN REBEL that it was the first unveiled head, woman’s head, raised in America, and someone else facetiously said, “Margaret Sanger came upon the scene with three children in her arms and a wild look in her eye”, and I am sure I had the wild look, and which makes me think just a moment about the three children.
The other day, a very charming young reporter was asking questions. I was telling him something about the work, and he said, “May I ask you a very delicate question?” And I said, “Yes, yes, you’re going to ask me how old I am.” “No, I’m going to ask you if you’ve ever had any children”, and I said, “Yes, I’ve had three”, and he said, “Were you married?” So I was married, and I had three children, and then I began to confront these Comstock laws which had terrorised most of our thinking people. |
