In the main post here—it was long enough—lest anyone think I blithely dismissed Planned Parenthood’s defense of Margaret Sanger as ineffectual, I thought it worthwhile to give background analysis on that. For reference, please do read the full quotes at that main post.
Yes, I’d read Sanger’s defenders who say she was “misattributed” and wrongly “portrayed as a eugenicist and a racist.”
“In theory, the [eugenics] movement was not racist” and regarding Sanger’s editorship of Birth Control Review, “It would be more accurate to say that the Review covered a wide range of opinions and research; the eugenicists [sic] views were included because they conferred respectability.”
“In theory?” “Conferred respectability”??
With friends/reviewers like those…?
That publication had just defined “The basic concept of the eugenics movement in the 1920s and 1930s was that a better breed of humans would be created if the ‘fit’ had more children and the ‘unfit’ had fewer.”
Sure sounds like you’d be supporting “fit vs. unfit” eugenics if you published their shit in your newsletter. Hell, if you retweeted anything ever by Donald Trump, you’re branded for life, but “pay no attention to that old white lady behind the Socialist Curtain publishing racist, classist concepts advocating selective elimination of one race over another.” (must I add /sarc ?)
PubMed’s summary defends Sanger by weakly opining that “…there was little consensus on the definitions of fit and unfit.” Says the “More children from the fit, less from the unfit” quote should be attributed to the editors of American Medicine, with no screenshot, link or proof. I have yet to find any such proof. Anywhere.
But WikiQuote goes a bit further, saying that quote was from “Editors of American Medicine in a review of Sanger’s article ‘Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?’ published in Birth Control Review, May 1919.” According to The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Sanger’s article was first printed in American Medicine, Mar. 1919, pp. 164-167. Haven’t found that editors’ review though. Has it been white-washed from Google’s algorithms? Hmmm.
Screenshot, WikiQuote
Screenshot of https://m-sanger.org/items/show/1324
But didja get that? American Medicine editors reviewed what Sanger wrote, then summarized her gist in their quote! Maybe that’s why Sanger’s defenders don’t splash that source all over the Internet.
It actually gets worse (when you get to the Planned Parenthood defense article below).
“...the woman who has not yet lost her health, [without being] given such [birth control] information, she is plunged blindly into married life and a few years is likely to find her with a large family, herself diseased, damaged, an unfit breeder of the unfit, and still ignorant.”
“...the familiar overcrowding of tenements, the forcing of children into the street, the ensuing prostitution, alcoholism and almost universal physical and moral unfitness.”
“The effort toward racial progress that is being made to-day by the medical profession, by social workers, by the various charitable and philanthropic organizations and by state institutions for the physically and mentally unfit is practically wasted…[Agencies] will continue to mark time until the medical profession recognizes the fact that the ever-increasing tide of the unfit is overwhelming all these agencies are doing for society.”
Racial progress? An unfit breeder of the unfit? Physical, moral, mental unfitness?
She also mentions “working for the improvement of the race” and “the race.”
Was she was referring in March 1919 to “the entire human race”? Were most cities’ tenements then housing white European immigrants? I don’t know. The New York Times, in a 2021 article “Tenement Museum Makes Room for Black History,” noted there is a “nearly 400 years of African-American presence on the Lower East Side” and there were “1863 Civil War Draft Riots, during which white mobs attacked Black New Yorkers.” The 2017 Smithsonian article “The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything but Accidental,” said that segregated public housing became prevalent when, during The Great Depression starting in 1929, many lower/ middle and working-class families lost their homes.
WikiQuote also cites another wrongly-cited 1919 Birth Control Review quote that inserted the word “white” before “race” into her actual quote:
“Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenicists, for instance are seeking to assist the race toward elimination of the unfit.”
What race, then? She may have been careful not to say “white race” but I haven’t yet found a reference in her writings to the phrase “the human race.” If she was so gung-ho not-racist, wouldn’t she have repeatedly said “human race”?
Others who claim quotes were “misattributed” to her, go on and on, but without citing a single, unbiased, non-left-leaning-sourced footnote, link or detailed reference proving their claim. (I’m looking at you: TIME Magazine, Gloria Steinem, WikiQuote, et.al. Quoting Salon, Washington Post and Planned Parenthood itself? Circular logic without proof, much?)
Planned Parenthood’s “Defense”
Planned Parenthood took a shot at all this in this PDF document submitted to the Supreme Court sometime around October 2016, listing 7 supposed “misquoted/ distorted” quotes. The first 4 were misattributed, # 5 and #6 she did say, and #7 was distorted but her actual words may be even worse.
The first one cited is the “More children from the fit, less from the unfit” one above. Planned Parenthood wrote:
“…this statement was made by the editors of American Medicine in a review of an article by Sanger. The editorial from which this appeared, as well as Sanger’s article, “Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?” were reprinted side-by-side in the May 1919 Birth Control Review (Sanger, 1919b).”
So Sanger liked that editorial review summarizing her article—with that exact quote—soooo much, she reprinted it side-by-side with her own article in her own newsletter.
The second quote, “The mass of ignorant Ne****s still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Ne****s, 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.” was:
“written for the June 1932 issue of [Sanger’s] Birth Control Review by [Sanger’s friend and admirer] W. E. B. DuBois, founder of the NAACP…However, Dubois’ [sic] language…is racially insensitive.”
Yet Sanger published those words of NAACP’s Black co-founder. That gets the editor and writer condemned and Blacklisted as a racist, today. Unless you’re the founder of Planned Parenthood or NAACP, I guess.
Another reason PP claims that didn’t happen? They further exonerate Sanger by adding, in the next “misattributed” quote, that “Sanger ceased editing the Review in 1929.” It was still her baby, her foundling, wasn’t it, even if she didn’t physically pre-eyeball articles? If their exonerating logic prevails, liberals should have noooooo problem signing up for a Truth Social account, right?
The third quote I never even saw or heard before (and I’ve read a lot, for years); they’re reaching at straws there.
In the fourth, “to create a race of thoroughbreds,” PP says Sanger quoted Dr. Edward A. Kempf in her book The Pivot of Civilization and it was “cited out of context and with distorted meaning.” Did she, in her book, attribute the quote to Kempf? It doesn’t appear so in the PP document. And why exactly is “the raising of human thoroughbreds” (her actual words, per Planned Parenthood) her responsibility or business in the first place?
The fifth “misquote” is actually her words but alleged to be “taken out of context” and “ironic-- not prescriptive”:
“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
Some sense of “irony.” How would you take that blunt remark, in any context?
The sixth “misquote” is not misattributed at all. Sanger did write the “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the N***o population, etc.” quote, to Clarence J. Gamble, M.D., “a champion of the birth control movement.” Even Angela Davis objected to that.
The seventh and last “misquote” is the only place Planned Parenthood brings up the “human weeds” quote. It has been twisted, but even PolitiFact in 2022 confirmed she did say the phrase in two different quotes, a year apart:
“How are we to breed a race of human thoroughbreds unless we follow the same plan? We must make this country into a garden of children instead of a disorderly back lot overrun with human weeds.”
She earlier spoke of birth control as meaning “the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks--those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”
“The better racial elements?” We ain’t talking about the human race, here, or she’d have said “the better human elements.”
“Defective stocks?” “Breed a race of human thoroughbreds?”
My skin crawls just reading all this. No wonder Planned Parenthood has tried to fade Sanger into the woodwork.
WikiQuote gives additional misattributed quotes that were actually said by eugenicist Ernst Rudin (published in Sanger-founded Birth Control Review in 1933) and Alice Groff in an undated publication called The Woman Rebel (edited by Sanger). I’d never heard or quoted those quotes, myself. But as others, they sure passed muster with Sanger’s “sensibilities.”
Do check all the links provided, for yourselves. Then get the eye-bleach.
Think a shower is in order now also, to get the stink of this woman’s words and those of her cronies, as far away from me as possible.
