THE
REPACKAGING OF
MARGARET
SANGER
Wall Street Journal,
by Steven W.
Mosher
I was personally offended
when Planned Parenthood recently announced plans to give its Margaret Sanger
Award to the BBC documentary “The Dying Rooms.”
Don’t get me wrong: The
documentary is a wonderful and courageous piece of work. An undercover camera
crew managed to gain entry to
It was the award, named
after Planned Parenthood’s founder, to which I objected. For Sanger had little
but contempt for the “Asiatic races,” as she and her eugenicist friends called them. During her lifetime, she proposed that their numbers
be drastically reduced. But Sanger’s preferences went beyond race. In her 1922
book “Pivot of Civilization” she unabashedly called for the extirpation of
“weeds … overrunning the human garden”; for the segregation of “morons,
misfits, and the maladjusted”; and for the sterilization of “genetically
inferior races.” It was later that she singled out the Chinese, writing in her
autobiography about “the incessant fertility of [the Chinese] millions spread
like a plague.”
There can be no doubt that
Sanger would have been wildly enthusiastic over China’s one-child policy, for
her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934, decreed that
“no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit … no permit
shall be valid for more than one child.” As for
Indeed, Sanger likely would
have turned the award on its head, choosing to praise publicly rather than
implicitly criticize
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 call “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.”
War with
Following Sanger’s death in
1966, Planned Parenthood felt so confident that it had safely buried
her past that it began boasting about “the legacy of Margaret Sanger.” And it
began handing out cutely named Maggie Awards to innocents who often had no
inkling of her real views. The first recipient was Martin Luther King – who
clearly had no idea that Sanger had inaugurated a project to set his people
free from their progeny. “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,”
Sanger wrote Gamble. Had Dr. King known why he may have been chosen to receive
the award, he would have recoiled in horror.
The good news is that
Sanger’s – and Planned Parenthood’s – patina of respectability has worn thin in
recent years. Last year Congress came within a few votes of cutting a huge
chunk of the organization’s federal funding. The 1995-96 Planned Parenthood
annual report notes that it has closed up shop in
Perhaps the next time the
Maggie Award is offered to someone of character and integrity – and more than a
passing knowledge of Sanger’s bigotry – he will raise an indignant cry of
refusal. He will have ample grounds.
Mr. Mosher, author of “A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s
Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy,” is vice president for international
affairs of Human Life International in Front Royal, Va. Michael W. Bird, a
writer living in Minneapolis, helped with the research for this article.