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Margaret Sanger (1879 - 1966) was the founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). As an activist in the birth-control and population-control movements, she was one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. Many questions have been raised concerning her real views on eugenics, race, and human rights, and it is hard to separate the facts from fiction. The information presented here is drawn directly from her writings, with references.
| Life and Organizations | Eugenics | Planned Parenthood's Connections to Eugenics | |
| Race | Misattributed Quotes | Planned Parenthood's Claims and the Truth | Recommended Sources |
Planned Parenthood's Connections to Eugenics
Planned Parenthood marks its founding from the establishment in 1916 of the nation's first birth-control clinic, even though the name "Planned Parenthood" was not given to the organization until 1942. The fact that Planned Parenthood owns up to having been in existence throughout Sanger's birth control career means that all of her eugenic statements, made as president of the American Birth Control League and of her other organizations, can be attributed to the president of an early form of PPFA. The organization has gone through many forms and name changes --the American Birth Control League, the Clinical Research Bureau, the National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control, the Birth Control Federation of America--but Sanger made eugenic statements when she was actively running each of them.
- The first office of the IPPF in London was given free of charge by the Eugenics Education Society, the foremost eugenics group in England.
- Dr. Alan Guttmacher, president of PPFA from 1962-1974, was a former vice-president of the American Eugenics Society. Most of the other major activists in PPFA had eugenic connections.
- Guttmacher once admitted, "As a physician in private practice I have done occasional sterilizations on adolescent females brought to me by their parents for sterilization because of serious mental retardation" (Eugenic Sterilization, Jonas Robitscher, editor [Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1973], p. 54).
- In 1933, a merger was attempted between Sanger's organization, the American Birth Control League, and the American Eugenics Society. It did not succeed due to organizational difficulties, but all the leaders agreed that all the groups had the same fundamental goals. (Black, op. cit., 141-42)
Race
| Eugenicists | Margaret Sanger | Negro Project | Harry Laughlin |
| Lothrop Stoddard | Guy Irving Burch | Clarence Gamble | Hans Harmsen |
Eugenicists were often racists, but not always; they discriminated on the basis of perceived "fitness," which was often but not always correlated to race. Criteria for "fitness" included intelligence, sanity, physical health, and wealth. Those who were designated "unfit" invariably included the poor, epileptics, syphilitics, alcoholics, the "feeble-minded," criminals, the physically and mentally disabled, and the insane. Insofar as racial minorities were often poor, sick, and illiterate, they came under attack, but usually indirectly.
Sanger's own views seem to be in accordance with such eugenics. Racist comments sometimes appeared in the Birth Control Review while it was under Sanger's editorship, but they were in articles not written by her. Little direct evidence has been uncovered to date that she herself specifically drew the distinction between the "fit" and the "unfit" along racial lines. She did believe in preventing the "unfit" from reproducing, and insofar as large portions of racial minorities fell into the categories of "unfitness," she believed that their reproducing should be limited, by force if necessary. It is correct, therefore, to call Sanger an "elitist bigot" in that she advocated the control of the alleged over-production of the "unfit," a population specified by categories that often included large portions of racial minorities. There is insufficient evidence to argue that she was an out-and-out racist.
- The Negro Project is the most questionable activity of Sanger regarding race. In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America initiated the project, which was to promote family planning among the black population of the South, using black ministers. A letter to Clarence Gamble says: "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." (Margaret Sanger to Clarence Gamble, October 19, 1939, Sanger Smith Collection, quoted in Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America, second edition [New York: Penguin Books, 1990,] 332-33)
- Some people believe that this letter reveals a sinister intent to exterminate the black population; others argue that it is simply expressing a possible misconception that blacks might have about the project and how to address that misconception Given the lack of further evidence, it is not clear how to interpret the letter. This is the only really questionable statement about blacks in Sanger's writings; elsewhere she claims to oppose "race prejudice."
- The fact that Sanger printed articles that contained racist statements points to the difference between what she said and what she is responsible for. What she said can be proved by her writings. What she is responsible for involves her effects on others. She certainly attracted to her cause racists and other bigots. Since she reprinted and legitimatized their opinions, she bears a huge measure of responsibility for perpetuating racism Let us look at some of the racists with whom Sanger worked.
- Harry Laughlin was the "Expert Eugenic Agent" for the House Committee on Immigration and
Naturalization in the 1920s. He almost single-handedly ensured that racial quotas would keep out what he called
the "dross in American's modern melting pot." He worked to prevent Jews seeking asylum in the United
States from receiving visas. In so doing, he was indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least tens of thousands
of Jews. (Sew Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
[New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003], 392-93.)
Laughlin said: "The logical conclusion is that the differences in institutional rations, by races and nativity groups...represents real differences in social values, which represent, in turn, real differences in the inborn values of the family stocks from which the particular inmates have sprung. These degeneracies and hereditary handicaps are inherent in the blood." (House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Statement of Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, 67th Congress, 3rd Session, November 21, 1922, 756, 725, quoted in Edwin Black, op. cit., 191)
In articles appearing in the Eugenical News, he promoted Nazism during the 1930s, approving of its racist laws.
- Lothrop Stoddard was a famous racist who wrote The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, which became a best-seller. The text contained such inflammatory statements as the following: "‘Finally perish!’ That is the exact alternative which confronts the white race.... Just as we isolate the bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat..." (Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926], 303, 306, quoted in Black, op. cit., 133)
- He worked with the American Birth Control League in the following capacities: he was on the National Council, the fifteen-member Board of Directors, and on the conference committee of the First American Birth Control Conference and by publishing eugenicist articles in the Birth Control Review (for example, in the December 1921 issue). (Black, op. cit., 133-34; www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/abcl.htm)
- Guy Irving Burch was a eugenicist and anti-immigration activist who worked for Sanger's National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control (NCFLBC) in the 1930s while running the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, DC.
- His interest in birth control was purely eugenic: on NCFLBC letterhead, he wrote that he had worked to prevent sound American stock from "being replaced by alien or negro stock, whether it be by immigration or by overly high birth rates among others in this country." (Quoted in Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992], 343)
- Clarence Gamble was elected president of the Pennsylvania Birth Control Federation (PBCF) in 1933 and served as the Pennsylvania representative on the board of the ABCL and then of the PPFA from 1933-46. He was also a member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America executive committee from 1939-42 and actively involved in the International Planned Parenthood Federation. He founded the Pathfinder Fund, a population-control organization. He was a personal friend of Margaret Sanger.
- Gamble was an ardent eugenicist and racist. He was actively involved in the eugenic sterilization group, the Human Betterment Association, and opened more than twenty sterilization clinics in the Midwest and the South.
- He wrote: "To date less [sic] than 2,000 insane and mentally defective North Carolinians have been sterilized under the existing law--a figure that represents less than one out of every 41 of the State's estimated mentally unfit. This means that for every one man or woman who has been sterilized, there are 40 others who can continue to pour defective genes into the State's blood stream to pollute and degrade future generation." (Clarence J. Gamble, "Better Human Beings Tomorrow, " Better Health, October 1947, 14, 15)
- Hans Harmsen, a German physician, was an important scientific and academic supporter of Nazi policies
in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the inhumane 1933 sterilization law that mandated coercion. As a bureaucrat in Nazi Germany,
he was responsible for approving eugenic sterilizations performed on the disabled. He "supported forced sterilizations
of the mentally handicapped and helped to carry them out in the Protestant Inner Mission institutions for which he was
responsible." (Report by Monika Simmel-Joachim and Elke Kiltz to the National Board of Pro Familia, May 16, 1984,
quoted and translated in Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950
[New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 211)
Harmsen became the president of Pro Familia, the German affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, in 1952. He continued to promote ostensibly "voluntary" eugenic sterilization and campaigned for a new law in the post-Nazi age. In 1980, after decades of leadership roles within Pro Familia, he was awarded an honorary presidency. Only in 1984 was he forced to resign (Grossmann, op. cit., 204-11).
Misattributed Quotes
The quote, "blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race," has been attributed to Sanger, but it appears to have been fabricated. The proposal of the Negro Project reads: "The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly." This quote has been attributed to Sanger; actually, it was originally written by W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and quoted in the proposal. The above quotes should never be attributed to Sanger. Other publications have argued that Sanger was a Nazi or an anti-Semite, with no evidence to substantiate those positions; she should not be given those labels.
Many people have in good faith reprinted citations or statements that have appeared in publication without realizing that the original author did not have his or her facts straight. In general, one should be careful about quotes attributed to Sanger: they should always be documented.
Planned Parenthood's Claims and the Truth
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) claims, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that "Margaret Sanger was not a ...eugenicist." Let us now examine their allegations and respond, point by point. (See the lengthy fact-sheet, "The Truth About Margaret Sanger," on the PPFA web-page, www.plannedparenthood.org/about/thisispp/sanger.html.)
- PPFA'S CLAIM: First the fact-sheet claims that eugenicists were "opposed to the use of abortion and
contraception by healthy and ‘fit’ women."
THE TRUTH: PPFA here confuses positive eugenics with all forms of eugenics. In fact, only some eugenicists (and probably a minority at that) held the view that PPFA described. - PPFA'S CLAIM: Next the web-page quotes the following from the February 1919 issue of the Birth Control Review (BCR):
"Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first
duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge
of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right,
regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall
bear if she chooses to become a mother" ("Birth Control and Racial Betterment," BIRTH CONTROL REVIEW, Feb.
1919, p. 11).
THE TRUTH: Sounds "pro-choice," right? Unfortunately, as many women have found out too late, the "choices" that Planned Parenthood tends to promote are "planned" (by them) but have little to do with parenthood. So too the only "choice" Sanger promoted was the one she determined best for you. The above quote comes in the context of an article on eugenics, the title of which ("Birth Control and Racial Betterment") PPFA neglects to mention, and the whole article makes clear that only the "fit" woman is deemed worthy of making reproductive decisions.
Sanger advocates forced sterilization for the unfit just a few paragraphs after the quote given above. The quote PPFA extracts is in the context of Sanger's critique of positive eugenicists encouraging "fit" women to bear more children (the sentences immediately before read: "The eugenist also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. We hold that the world is already over-populated" [Ibid.]), something which Sanger almost always repudiated. As far as "negative eugenics" (the elimination of reproduction of the "unfit") was concerned, she was an enthusiastic supporter. - PPFA'S CLAIM: in addition, PPFA says that the phrase "To create a race of thoroughbreds, " used as a banner
on the cover of the November 1921 issue of the Birth Control Review, was not used with a eugenic intent. PPFA
claims that the remark, originally attributed to Dr. Edward A. Kempf, was pulled by Sanger from a paragraph by Dr. Kempf
concerning the need for maternal and infant care clinics and "how environment may improve human excellence, " and
she used it with this in mind.
THE TRUTH: PPFA's interpretation gets points for originality but demerits for untruthfulness. Again they neglect the larger context of her writings. Sanger consistently used metaphors of plant and animal culture and applied them to humans; see for example, the first article and the following: "‘Nature eliminates the weeds, but we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce.’ Could any business maintain itself with the burden of such an ‘overhead’? Could any breeder of livestock conduct his enterprise on such a basis? I do not think so." ("Is Race Suicide Probable?" Collier's, vol. 76, 8/15/25, p. 25)
In addition, Sanger had an unpublished article entitled "We Must Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds" that advocated giving birth control to various categories of the "unfit," such as those with transmissible disease, the "feeble-minded," and so forth (Library of Congress, Margaret Sanger Papers, unpublished manuscript, 1929). Clearly, Sanger used this phrase with a eugenic intent. - PPFA'S CLAIM: Sanger's quote, "The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members
is to kill it" (Woman and the New Race [NY: Brentano's, 1920], p. 63) was "taken out of context, "
according to PPFA. "Sanger was making an ironic comment--not a prescriptive one--about the horrifying rate of
infant mortality among large families of early 20th-century urban America."
THE TRUTH: PPFA's interpretation is unlikely. While there may be no way to prove irony or the lack thereof, there is a decided absence of humor in all of Sanger's writings. Sanger elsewhere speaks of people "who never should have been born," and she also frequently refers to infanticide as a primitive form of birth control. "The earliest methods of primitive society have been infanticide...:the abandonment of babies; and feticide or abortion..." ("The Need of Birth Control in America," Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities, Adolf Meyer, editor [Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Company, 1925], p. 12).
Rather than decrying these methods, Sanger says that "all true aristocracies, whether of politics or of genius, are the products of such control" (ibid.). - PPFA'S CLAIM: The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy is the title of a book mistakenly attributed
to Sanger. PPFA claims that the book, written by noted racist Lothrop Stoddard, was reviewed by Havelock Ellis in the October 1920
issue of the Birth Control Review and criticized because it advocated "distinctions based on race or ethnicity alone."
THE TRUTH: As we have seen, the book was indeed not written by Sanger. Stoddard, however, was not such an unpopular person as PPFA would have you believe. See here. PPFA is correct that all of Stoddard's views (i.e., racism) cannot be assumed to be shared by Sanger, but he is one more tie that Sanger had to the eugenics movement, and she certainly expressed similar eugenical statements. - PPFA'S CLAIM: Lastly, PPFA maintains that we should not judge its early-20th-century foundress with our "late
20th-century values."
THE TRUTH: Many people, mostly those not part of the social and economic elite, challenged Sanger during her life-- thereby showing that our supposed "late 20th-century values" are actually enduring and eternal ones--and they still challenge PPFA today. Would PPFA suggest that we not judge the Nazi eugenicists (who borrowed their sterilization law from the "model law" written here in America) because their bigotry was popular and culturally conditioned?
Recommended Sources
Primary Sources
- Margaret Sanger. 1919. "Birth Control and Racial Betterment." Birth Control Review, February, pp. 11-12.
- ----------. 1920. Woman and the New Race. New York: Blue Ribbon Books.
- ----------. 1921. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda. " Birth Control
- Review, October, p. 5.
- ----------. 1922. The Pivot of Civilization. New York: Brentano's.
- ----------. 1925. "The Need of Birth Control in America," in Birth Control: Facts
- and Responsibilities, Adolf Meyer, editor, pp. 11-49. Baltimore: The
- Williams and Wilkins Co.
- ----------. 1926. "The Function of Sterilization." Birth Control Review, October, p.
- 299.
- See also The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928, Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, vol. 1, ed. Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Peter C. Engelman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2002). Three other volumes will eventually be published.
Some Secondary Sources
- Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)
- Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 2005)
- Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)
- Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control, second edition (San Fransico: Ignatius Press, 1999)
- Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997)
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