"Bottom line: Nowhere in any of Sanger's writings does she use the phrase "Human weeds", and the original context of the cited passage clearly shows that "the choking human undergrowth" is not referring to any racial group, or group of racial groups, but rather "overpopulation" in general." "the allegations that Sanger was racist and was a eugenicist, are a fabrication designed solely for the purpose of slander. One telling fact is that this allegation (that Sanger was a racist Eugenicist) originated only after her death. He books and writings completely refute the notion that she was a racist who wanted to "use abortion to control non-whites and other minorities". There are collections of her writings on the web, and most interesting is that the people who accuse her of being racist almost never have quotes from her at all. All they do is look at brief associations with other people -- associations which she even wrote about, and which refute the ideas of collusion. I will attempt to cover all the allegations made by critics, and back it up with the actual text that can be found if you actually look it up."
"...The most egregious example of how dishonestly and malignantly Christian Fundamantalists in America lie and engage in hypocritical deceit is how they have demonized Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and one of the people responsible for the creation of the birth control pill.
There is a series of claims made about Sanger, on hundreds of websites, and in a couple of widely-promoted books, which makes Sanger out to be a monster on the level of Adolph Hitler, with possibly a dash of Dracula and a little Caligula thrown in for good measure. According to the usual littany of claims, Sanger allegedly believed the following:
* She wanted to exterminate blacks
* She believed in white supremacy
* She thought that we should exterminate the poor
* She believed we should forceably sterilize people with undesired genetic traits
* She believed that the poor were weeds that needed to be pulled from society.
* She wanted to use abortion and forced sterilization to eliminate undesired races.
This is quite a contrast to the idea of Sanger as a champion of women's rights, promoter of birth control, and medical pioneer.
In fact, the Christian lies about Sanger are so pervasive that many people who are not even involved with the Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist movement believe them. This is because of a very-well financed campaign by Evangelical Fundamentalist groups to spread these lies about Sanger, through the promotion of books, websites, and other media. All of these lies stem from a series of books written by anti-abortion activist George Grant. Grant wrote several books about Sanger and Planned parenthood that are full of invented facts, misquotes from books, articles, and letters by Sanger, and falseley-attributed quotes. The books are literally a collection of clever lies that have numerous footnotes, to make them appear to be legitimate.
As with the creationist movement, footnotes are often put into their books with the two beliefs that (a) nobody will ever bother to follow up on them, and (b) people are impressed by lots of footnotes, and if you provide enough of them, nobody will question what you assert when you use them.
What I have here is a collection of a series of conversations I had with online Evangelicals about Margaret Sanger. They entered into the conversations excessively confident that they had all the answers, and not expecting me to actually check their facts. In the course of these dialogs, I ended up reading several books by Sanger, and came away with a much better impression of her than I previously had. I read one book by George Grant, and fortunately, his footnotes are very well done, and if you look up just one of them, and find the source of it, you can instantly uncover his deception -- which people almost never do themselves.
This all started with a message thread I was part of on the Brother Jed message board. Brother Jed is a traveling street-preacher, who goes around the country screaming fire and brimstone on College Campuses.
"Just like the alleged "homosexual agenda" propaganda that extreme-hate organizations produce, which alleges that homosexuals are attempting to "invade schools" and "turn kids gay", and "rape our children", the allegations that Sanger was racist and was a eugenicist, are a fabrication designed solely for the purpose of slander. One telling fact is that this allegation (that Sanger was a racist Eugenicist) originated only after her death. He books and writings completely refute the notion that she was a racist who wanted to "use abortion to control non-whites and other minorities". There are collections of her writings on the web, and most interesting is that the people who accuse her of being racist almost never have quotes from her at all. All they do is look at brief associations with other people -- associations which she even wrote about, and which refute the ideas of collusion. I will attempt to cover all the allegations made by critics, and back it up with the actual text that can be found if you actually look it up.
(1) The Claim: "Margaret Sanger called the poor, blacks, Jews and Catholics "human weeds" and referred to blacks and hispanics as the "mud races". She set up her "clinics" in inner city neighborhoods for the express purpose of significantly reducing or even eliminating the black race in particular." -- Evangelist Bruce Evan Murch
The alleged proof: Sanger's book "The Pivot Of Civilization"
The facts:
Very clearly the "human weeds" reference was an outgrowth (pun intended) of Sanger calling these people "human undergrowth" on page 265 of the ORIGINAL Brentano's (New York, NY) publication of Pivot of Civilization. It seems clear that some speaker, using the original language added to it something like, "meaning human weeds" and people took that to be in the original language.
Why don't we just look at the paragraph in question:
"At the present time, civilized nations are penalizing talent and genius, the bearers of the torch of civilization, to coddle and perpetuate the choking human undergrowth, which, as all authorities tell us, is escaping control and threatens to overrun the whole garden of humanity. Yet men continue to drug themselves with the opiate of optimism, or sink back upon the cushions of Christian resignation, their intellectual powers anaesthetized by cheerful platitudes. Or else, even those, who are fully cognizant of the chaos and conflict, seek an escape in those pretentious but fundamentally fallacious social philosophies which place the blame for contemporary world misery upon anybody or anything except the indomitable but uncontrolled instincts of living organisms. These men fight with shadows and forget the realities of existence. Too many centuries have we sought to hide from the inevitable, which confronts us at every step throughout life.
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?" -- CHAPTER 12
So as we see here, from the original book, She was using a metaphor. Essentially, if you can read English, you should see that Sanger was saying that governments and charities ignore the real problems of overpopulation. She was concerned that in overpopulated regions, the poorest people are the ones who suffer the most from overpopulation problems, they are the least educated, and most crime-prone.
Governments focus on hand-outs and creating dependant social programs, instead of educating the masses, and actively trying to help them help themselves. Governments encourage huge families, which hurts the poor even more. When you read this whole chapter, you see what Sanger is really concerned about -- that children suffer from high mortality rates in overpopulated, poverty ridden places. Her solution was not abortion or sterilization -- but birth control and education.
Sanger clearly states that she wanted to educate people on the use of birth control, to keep families from getting too large for poor parents to feed, and to make sure that overpopulation didn't outgrow the avalable resources. She was trying to PRESERVE LIFE by controlling growth, and not once did she mention anything about racial inferiority.
If you read the entire book as I have, it is impossible to reconcile what it says with the outrageous assertions of tose who lie for Christ.
The phrase "human weed" does not appear anywhere in the book at all -- in fact, the word "weed" only appears in the following parts:
"Reports on child labor published by the National Child Labor Committee only incidentally reveal the correlation of this evil with that of large families. Yet this is evident throughout. The investigators are more bent upon regarding child labor as a cause of illiteracy.
But it is no less a consequence of irresponsibility in breeding. A sinister aspect of this is revealed by Theresa Wolfson's study of child-labor in the beet-fields of Michigan.[2] As one weeder put it: ``Poor man make no money, make plenty children--plenty children good for sugar-beet business.' Further illuminating details are given by Miss Wolfson" -- CHAPTER III: ``Children Troop Down From Heaven....'
"But so long as Bishops and well meaning philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage `the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little hope of minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined weaklings.' (quoting J. O. P. Bland on the plight of Chinese)" -- CHAPTER V: The Cruelty of Charity
As you can see, from these two, and only appearances of the word "weed" in her book, Sanger speaks out AGAINST CHILD LABOR, CHILD MARRIAGE, and missionaries encouraging people to have more children without increasing their food supply to make up for the new mouths to feed.
Bottom line: Nowhere in any of Sanger's writings does she use the phrase "Human weeds", and the original context of the cited passage clearly shows that "the choking human undergrowth" is not referring to any racial group, or group of racial groups, but rather "overpopulation" in general.
As is usually the case with the EXTREME RIGHT, a few myths and rumors form an urban legend. The Legend becomes Gospel, and the Gospel against Margaret Sanger, just like the Gospel against "the homosexual agenda", gains it's strength not from actual facts, but by being repeated by so many activists (who never bother to question the validity of the claims), that it becomes accepted as truth, merely because it is shouted loud and frequently. When you actually look to the sources cited by the extremist antiabortion crowd, you see, as usual and predictable, that they are not above lying to promote their cause. In the minds of many Christian Fundamentalist Evangelicals, what is important is WHAT YOU BELIEVE, not what the facts are..."
Message 30220868 |
