Margaret Sanger

                I do not like to consider Margaret Sanger as a Very Important Person in the history of the United States; however, I feel it to be very important that Americans know about Margaret Sanger and her goal to stop children from being born, either by birth control or abortion and the main purpose of Planned Parenthood. 

                Margaret Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, to Michael Hennessey Higgins and Anne Purcell Higgins.  Michael was a Catholic “Irish-born stonemason and free-thinker” who   immigrated to the USA at age 14; at age 15 he was a drummer in the U.S. Army in the Civil War.  He studied medicine and phrenology after leaving the army but eventually became “a stonecutter, making stone angels, saints, and tombstones.”  He became “an atheist and an activist for women’s suffrage and free public education.”  Anne was “a hard-working Roman Catholic Irish-American,” who immigrated to Canada with her parents “due to the Potato Famine” [1845-1852].  She had 18 pregnancies with 11 live births in 22 years; she died at age 49 of tuberculosis.   

                Sanger was the “sixth of eleven children, and spent much of her youth assisting with household chores and caring for her younger siblings.”  She attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute with the help of two older sisters; she enrolled in White Plains Hospital as a nurse probationer in 1900.  She married William Sanger, a “dashing architect,” in 1902 and ended her formal education.  She suffered from “a recurring active tubercular condition.”  She was the mother of three children.   The family lived quietly in Westchester, New York.

                Sanger was still a teenager when her mother died, and she believed that her mother died because of having too many babies.  She spent the rest of her life in an attempt to stop babies from being born.  She was a birth control activist and sex educator as well as a nurse.  She “popularized the term birth control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.  Sanger’s efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States.  Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of birth control and has also been criticized for supporting eugenics, but remains an iconic figure in the American reproductive rights movement.”

                Margaret Sanger died at age 86 of congestive heart failure on September 6, 1966, in Tucson, Arizona.  Her body was interred in Fishkill, New York, next to her second husband, Noah Slee, and her sister, Nan Higgins.

                I believe the statements made by any person demonstrate the type of human being they are.  Here are some of the statements made by Margaret Sanger, compliments of Becky Yeh.  

                1. “It seems to me from my experience … that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts.

                “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities.  The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. 

                “We don’t want the 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.”  (In a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble on December 19, 1939)

                2. “I accepted an invitation to talk to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan … I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated cross … I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak … In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose.  A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.”  (On page 366 of An Autobiography)

                3. “They [immigrants and poor] are … `human weeds,’ `reckless breeders,’ `spawning … human beings who never should have been born.

                “Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease ...  Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks [of people] that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”  (In Pivot of Civilization)

                4. “Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral.  Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.

                “Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective.”  (In her writings from “Morality and Birth Control” and “Birth Control and the New Race”)

                5. “Our failure to segregate morons [minorities, sick, and disabled] who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism … [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste.

                “Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant … We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.

                “The main objects of the Populations Congress would be to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, ore whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring[;] to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”  (In “The Pivot of Civilization” and “A Plan for Peace”)

                6. “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world – that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically.  Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born.  That to me is the greatest sin – that people can – can commit.”  (In an 1957 interview with journalist Mike Wallace)

                7. “But for my view, I believe that there should be no more babies.”  (In a 1947 interview that surfaced via the British Pathe, Sanger described her desire for women in the developed world to cease completely from reproduction.  When asked by the reporter whether this would be impractical to ask women who desire children, but would no longer be able to conceive in 10 years, Sanger said, “I should think instead of being impractical, it is very practical and intelligent and humane.”)

                After listing the seven statements with explanations as needed, Ms. Yeh included the following statement by Dr. Alveda King on the abortion-on-demand corporate ideology of Planned Parenthood:  “The most obvious practitioner of racism in the United States today is Planned Parenthood, an organization founded by the eugenicist Margaret Sanger and recently documented as ready to accept money to eliminate black babies.”

                I consider Margaret Sanger to have either been insane or evil.  No one with the love of God in their hearts could kill unborn babies for any reason, much less for money!