Coming Home

Above is a photocopy of Margaret Sanger’s Magazine, The Birth Control Review. Note the stated purpose of birth control below the date;

Birth Control: To create a race of thoroughbreds.

Sanger’s disciples would later deny attribution of that statement to her, but there it is. In previous posts we have seen repeatedly, and in context, the disdain Sanger had for the lower classes, from whom idiots, imbeciles, and morons arose (bear in mind those were the medical diagnostic terms of her day). Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. At the time, Brownsville was populated by Sanger’s favorite people: Slavs, Jews, southern Europeans, and those large Catholic families she had grown (through her own family experience) to disdain with a vengeance. Nine days after opening, her illegal clinic was raided and Sanger was sent to jail for 30 days.

Returning to Grant’s well-documented biography, Killer Angel, available in the link as a PDF:

“The Birth Control Review Margaret’s magazine and the immediate predecessor to the Planned Parenthood Review regularly and openly published the racist articles of Malthusian Eugenicists. In October of 1920, for instance, it published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard’s frightening book of Fascist diatribe, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. In September of 1923, the Review editorialized in favor of restricting immigration on a racial basis. In April of 1932, it outlined Margaret’s ‘Plan for peace,’ which called for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and rehabilitative concentration camps for all ‘dysgenic stocks.’ In April of 1933, the Review published a shocking article entitled ‘Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.’ It was written by Margaret’s close friend and advisor, Ernst Rudin, who was then serving as Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and had earlier taken a prominent role in the establishment of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. Later, in June of that same year, it published an article by Leon Whitney entitled, ‘Selective Sterilization,‘ which adamantly praised and defended the Third Reich’s pre-holocaust ‘race purification’ programs.

“The bottom line is that Margaret self-consciously organized the Birth Control League–and its progeny, Planned Parenthood—in part, to promote and enforce the scientifically elitist notions of White Supremacy. Like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, and the Mensheviks, Margaret’s enterprise was from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist. And this racist orientation was all too evident in its various programs and initiatives: government control over family decisions, non-medicinal health care experimentations, the rabid abortion crusade, and the coercive sterilization initiatives…

“As her organization grew in power and prestige, she began to target several other ‘ill-favored’ and ‘dysgenic races,’ including ‘Blacks, Hispnics, Amerinds, Fundamentalists, and Catholics.’

“In 1939, Margaret designed a ‘Negro Project’ in response to requests from ‘southern state public health officials’ not generally known for their racial equanimity. ‘The mass of Negroes,’ her project proposal asserted, ‘particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.’ The proposal went on to say that ‘Public Health statistics merely hint at the primitive state of civilization in which most Negroes in the South live.’

In order to remedy this ‘dysgenic horror story,’ her project aimed to hire three or four ‘Colored Ministers, preferably with social service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities’ to travel to various Black enclaves and propagandize for birth control. Her intention was as insidious as it was obvious: ‘The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.’

Of course, those Black ministers were to be carefully controlled—mere figureheads. ‘There is a great danger that we will fail,’ one of the project directors wrote, ‘because the Negroes think it a plan for extermination. Hence, let’s appear to let the colored run it.’

Another project director lamented: ‘I wonder if Southern Darkies can ever be entrusted with . . . a clinic. Our experience
causes us to doubt their ability to work except under White supervision.’ The entire operation then was a ruse-a manipulative attempt to get Blacks to cooperate in their own elimination.”

Of course, all of this invites the question, why did Sanger focus her efforts on the lower classes? Did the upper classes not have their share of developmentally disabled children? Sanger would go on to secure considerable grant money from such industrialists as Henry Ford, who was himself a rabid anti-Semite.

In Two Days, Sanger’s Ascendancy: The Political Leaders and Philanthropists Who Shared Her Views and Swallowed Her Lies.