A Killer Idea

It is often pointed out that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion supplier in America. This is but one thing the organization doesn’t wish to promote. Planned Parenthood’s website presents a greatly edited version of their founder Margaret Sanger’s life. This carefully crafted version seeks to downplay any charges that she promoted racial ideas and insist that others are simply quoting her out of context. The truth is far different, as she and her colleagues’ quotes showed a tremendous affinity for the ideals espoused by Hitler’s Germany:

"While striving to limit the propagation of mental defectives and others grossly unfit, and guarding mothers from dangerous or excessive childbearing, we physicians would be grievously remiss if we failed to follow the recommendation of the most impressive of the birth control conferences, the one held in New York in 1925, that "persons whose progeny gives promise of being of decided value to the community should be encouraged to bear as large families as they feasibly can.""--Robert L. Dickinson. "On the Control of Conception." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 1 (January 1931), page 5.

In 1939 (October 19, 1939), Margaret Sanger wrote Clarence Gamble, instructing him to hire "three or four colored ministers with engaging personalities...we do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members". (Linda Gordon, Women's Body, Women's Right, A Social History of Birth Control in America p. 333). [TBC: Reading this quote in its original context does nothing to mitigate the force of her words]. And, as another commentator notes:

“Sanger frequently featured racists and eugenicists in her magazine, the “Birth Control Review.” Contributor Lothrop Stoddard, who also served on Sanger's board of directors, wrote in "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy" that "We must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally non-Asiatic regions inhabited by the really inferior races." Each issue of the Birth Control Review was packed with such ideas. But Sanger was not content merely to publish racist propaganda; the magazine also made concrete policy proposals, such as the creation of "moron communities," the forced production of children by the "fit," and the compulsory sterilization and even elimination of the "unfit."

Sanger's own racist views were scarcely less opprobrious. In 1939 she and Clarence Gamble made an infamous proposal called "Birth Control and the Negro," which asserted that "the poorer areas, particularly in the South ... are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations." Her "religion of birth control" would, she wrote, "ease the financial load of caring for with public funds ... children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation" (“The Repackaging of Margaret Sanger,” Steven W. Mosher, “The Wall Street Journal,” May 5, 1997).