That's All She Sang

Baby, Baby, Baby, Oh!

Given the only policy issue the Democratic Party seemingly cares about nowadays is the right to kill the future generation of Americans through abortions, it’s only right we do a deep dive on the matriarch of Planned Parenthood: Margaret Sanger.

In her defense, Sanger was actually opposed to abortion, as she believed “while there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”

While her abortion stance would place her as a member of the “far right” in contemporary times, she was seen as the progressive of all progressives given her role in popularizing birth control.

Along with her sister Ethel Byrne and activist Fania Mindell, Sanger opened up the first birth control clinic in 1916 in Brooklyn, NY. The clinic didn’t last long, as after just nine days of existence, the trio was arrested and the clinic was shut down.

Five years later, Sanger & Co. popped back up and re-opened shop under a new alias: the American Birth Control League. This is the company that would eventually merge with other groups in 1942 to form Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

While I think her promotion of birth control has had massive negative effects on our society, where she really makes a name for herself is her role as one of the most popular eugenicists of all time.

In fact, her work on eugenics was so profound that the Nazis were inspired by her and called her “the greatest national socialist [Nazi] in America.” Adolf Hitler and his right hand man Joseph Goebbels were constantly drawing from her work and citing her as a source of useful information and perspectives. Her ties to the Nazi regime were direct, as her close friend and advisor, Ernst Rudin, was Hitler’s Director of Genetic Sterilization.

Another badge of honor she wears is being closely associated with the KKK. While it is hotly debated whether she was officially inducted into the women’s branch of the KKK, her speeches given to the group are well documented.

Fundamentally, her thesis was this: to purify society and create a utopia, people who were considered undesirables needed to be forcibly sterilized, even if it meant doing so without their knowledge or consent.

This ideology is one that proved to be influential, as other left-wing “legends” like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Hillary Clinton found her work to be of high esteem. Clinton proudly boasts “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously…her courage, her tenacity, her vision…I am really in awe of her.” RBG states “frankly, I had thought at that time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth, and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

It is fair to say that Sanger’s moral compass was questionable at best. When asked what the worst sin of all is, she asserts “I believe the greatest sin is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents that have no chance in the world to be a human being.” When pressed by the interviewer about mainstream transgressions like infidelity and whether it is wrong, she simply shrugs off the question and gives an answer analogous to “I don’t know bro, you tell me.”

The Ends Justify the Means

Analyzing her utopian vision further, she had three main initiatives, with the first being to forcibly sterilize everyone with a mental and/or physical disability and permanently ostracize them from rest of society.

The second consisted of a more nuanced approach: round up all of the “illiterates, paupers (very poor person), unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, and dope-fiends,” and classify them in special departments under government medical protection and segregate them on farms (AKA put them in concentration camps). While they also had to be forcibly sterilized, as long as they demonstrated good behavior, they could be permitted to join the rest of society.

The third item on the agenda was mandatory birth control training for mothers with serious diseases in an effort to convince them to forgo the most important reason for their existence, childrearing.

All of her work promoting eugenics as the solution to all of the world’s problems turned into a make or break situation in 1927, in which the upcoming Supreme Court case Buck v Bell was about to be heard and she made sure articulate why a pro-eugenics stance made the most sense.

The basic overview of the case is an 18 year old female was forcibly sterilized due to her feeble-mindedness (mental age of 8), immorality (pregnant as a teenager), and incorrigibility (disobedience). In an 8 to 1 majority, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared the sterilization statute and proceeding operation as constitutional on the ground that the state had “the right to protect itself against those who burdened it economically.”

After the case was decided, it was discovered that not only did Bell receive average grades while in school, but she also conceived her daughter Vivian after being raped by the nephew of her foster parents. She went on to have a relatively normal life, but deeply regretted that she couldn’t have more children.

Bell wasn’t the only one to have her life curtailed by this dangerous ideology; an estimated 70,000 people were forcibly sterilized under laws promoted by Sanger and her confidants. Additionally, more than 30 states eventually passed laws that authorized agencies to sterilize those considered unfit for childbearing, as these people were the usual suspects of the mentally disabled and prisoners.

While it is disingenuous to attribute all of this to Sanger, she undeniably played a large role and was able to spread her ideas through mainstream press and interviews.

In addition to her support for the Buck v Bell case, another notable venture she took on in 1939 was the Negro Project, in which she opened birth control clinics in numerous black communities (with the most notable being Harlem) and gained support from influential members of the black community like W.E.B. Du Bois.

While it seems as if she was just trying to extend her “revolutionary” services to the black population, it became pretty clear that it stemmed from her open disdain of the population growth seen among the black population.

She was adamantly in favor of convincing pastors to somehow persuade them of the merits of contraception and sterilization, as she didn’t “want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the [black] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

This pattern of targeting black communities is a trend that Planned Parenthood still follows today, as a majority of their clinics are in “black neighborhoods,” and of the 383,460 abortions committed in 2020 by Planned Parenthood, there were 5 times the amount of black babies aborted relative to white babies.

Obviously, there is more to the story here and the vast array of factors, with the most important being cultural patterns and behaviors, are not being taken into account.

Along the way of her extensive journey, Sanger obviously made a lot of enemies with the largest of them being the Catholic Church. The institution, it its infinite wisdom, was strictly opposed to the proliferation of birth control and saw Sanger as a tool to subvert the family values that the West was built on. As the progressives have marched forward since then, the Catholic Church has seen all of its previous allies fold and desert the position, as the Church remains the only major institution to oppose the practice.

There was no love lost on both sides, as she explains that “birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of Christian churches,” and that she looks “forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity, no less capitalism.”

This brings the list of people that Sanger would sterilize if she could to something approximating this: Christians, blacks, Jews, the mentally disabled, criminals, prostitutes, drug users, and any individual with a double digit IQ score. I’m definitely missing some categories, but you get the point.

With that being said, it’s clear that the left’s little angel isn’t so holy after all. While most historical figures have some type of vice associated with them using our modern lens, it’s the biased selection of who is “evil” and who isn’t that is quite interesting to observe.

The average New York Times journalist, with a serious face, will say that all of the great work from Thomas Jefferson is automatically nullified because he owned a few slaves, but Margaret Sanger is every female’s role model because she paved the way for the separation of sexual relations and childbearing (who cares she was a eugenicist!).

In other words, without Sanger, the world would be deprived of important institutions like OnlyFans.

Thank you for your contributions Maggie!

Thanks for reading and until next time.