Margaret Sanger’s Nation of ‘Morons’
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Although Planned Parenthood has tried desperately to shred the files of its founding mother, Margaret Sanger herself has left a detailed record of how she lived and how she thought. The most unimpeachable source of the former is her autobiography, written in 1938, and of the latter, her landmark book, “The Pivot of Civilization,” written in 1922.
“A religion without a name was spreading over the country,” Sanger enthuses about those heady days before World War I. “The converts were liberals, socialists, anarchists, revolutionists of all shades.” Then living in New York, Sanger wanted part of the action.
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Curiously, Sanger admits to having no great sense of compassion for the less fortunate, a seeming drawback for their would-be liberator. “I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor,” she writes, “and never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many noble women have found.”
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… the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.
Planned Parenthood is forever chastising pro-life advocates for quoting Margaret Sanger out of context, but “Pivot” is all context. Sanger posits two primary reasons why birth control is necessary. The first, the one that has endured in progressive mythology, is “the liberation of the spirit of woman and through woman of the child.” The second, the one that has been cleansed from the record, is “to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has drifted.”
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Traditional philanthropy, if anything, is crueler still. “Organized charity,” writes Sanger, “itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.” By keeping so many “defectives, delinquents and dependents” alive and breeding, charity at some point becomes an injustice for the self-supporting citizen and a “positive injury to the future of the race.” Indeed, students of Sanger could not have been surprised by the massive progressive indifference to the torture and death of Terri Schiavo. The seed of that indifference has been deeply planted.
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(Posted on June 29, 2005)