The Racist Roots of Planned Parenthood
Racist Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger Didn’t Think Black Lives Matter Read More HERE
Planned Parenthood’s dirty little secret is that it was founded in the United States in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, a proponent of the Eugenics movement, who wanted to purify the human race through birth control, sterilization and abortion.
Sanger’s targets for birth control and forced sterilization included the poor, blind, deaf, mute, epileptics, “feeble-minded” and alcoholics.
"Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes"
(Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger, “Pivot of Civilization,” p. 274).
In writings and lectures, Sanger dehumanized the poor and disabled as “human weeds,” “parasites,” “defectives,” “mistakes” and “a dead weight of human waste.”
Margaret Sanger’s Bio
Born Margaret Louise Higgins in 1879 in Corning, New York, she was the sixth of eleven children. Educated at Claverack College in Hudson, New York, Sanger became a teacher and moved to New Jersey. She returned home to take care of her mother, who died from tuberculosis when Sanger was just 19.
Sanger blamed her mother’s death on having too many children, which led her into the field of nursing and work with the poor on the lower east side of New York City. She joined the Socialist Party and wrote articles for the Socialist Party newspaper, The Call.
She married William Sanger in 1902. They had three children – two sons, Stuart and Grant and a daughter, Peggy, who died at age four. Margaret left William Sanger in 1913, but kept his name even after she remarried.
Sanger made a name for herself as an author and activist who coined the term “birth control.” She was arrested in New York in 1915 for sending “diaphragms” through the mail. To avoid trial and a possible 30 year prison sentence, she left her children behind with her estranged husband and fled to Europe. Before she left, she distributed 100,000 flyers on “Limiting Families,” through the use of "Lysol douches" and "herbal abortifacients."
In Europe, Sanger was influenced by radical sexologist Havelock Ellis, and adopted his beliefs for advocated sterilization of the poor in exchange for public assistance. Sanger herself believed in forced sterilization and thought parents should be required to submit an application to the government in order to have a child.
Sanger’s zeal for birth control was partially due to her sexually promiscuous lifestyle. She had numerous affairs, including one with Ellis, who along with his wife was a proponent of “open marriage.”
Sanger returned to the U.S. in 1916 and opened an illegal birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York with her sister, Ethel Byrne. The clinic was located in a neighborhood of newly-immigrated Slavs, Italians and Jews, in keeping with Sanger’s Nazi-like beliefs of contracepting these populations out of existence. Sanger and her sisters were both were arrested and spent a month in jail.
Lecturing throughout the world on contraception, limiting families and population control, Sanger founded a publication, The Birth Control Reviewwhich had as it’s cover story in December of 1921: “Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.” Sanger’s The Birth Control Review was well-known for Nazi propaganda and articles by Nazi officials. She later organized the first World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927.
In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League. A year later, she married wealthy oil magnate J. Noah H. Slee in 1922, who financed many of her projects, such as the “Birth Control Research Bureau,” which she founded in 1923.
Sanger was forced out of the American Birth Control League in 1928 because of her radical politics. The American Birth Control League later merged with Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau but in order to distance itself from the horrors of eugenics revealed by Nazi Germany, the organization changed its name in 1942 to “Planned Parenthood.” Sanger later helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952.
One of Sanger’s final missions was to push for the development of oral contraceptives by convincing wealthy heiress Katherine McCormick to fund the research of geneticist, Gregory Goodwin Pincus. Pincus introduced “The Pill” in 1959.
The year before Sanger died, 1965, the Supreme Court legitimized birth control as a privacy right in the case, Griswold vs. Connecticut. Estelle Griswold was the Executive Director of Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut.
Sanger died in 1966 at a nursing home in Tucson, Arizona. She was buried in Fishkill, NY next to second husband Noah Slee.
Margaret Sanger Quotes
The philosophy of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in her own words:
“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infants is to kill it.”
– Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 1920
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, 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 defectives.”
– Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 1920
“(Eugenics) shows that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
– Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, 1922, p.187
"No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective."
– Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 1920, p.89
For more quotes and info on Margaret Sanger, visit the website of Angela Franks, author of “Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility” (McFarland, 2005): www.angelafranks.com
Planned Parenthood disputes the idea that Margaret Sanger was a racist. However, Angela Franks, author of “Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility” (McFarland, 2005), maintains Sanger’s desire to prevent the “unfit” from reproducing, included large numbers of minorities of her time, who were poor, sick and illiterate.
Today, Planned Parenthood remains true to its roots and Sanger’s mission.
• Planned Parenthood identifies “women of color” as on of their core clients.
• 70 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are located in or Hispanic neighborhoods.
• Planned Parenthood’s research affiliate, the Alan Guttmacher Institute found black women’s abortion rates are nearly triple those of white women.
In the abortion industry overall:
• African Americans make up 13% of the population but account for 37% of all abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
• Minorities are 6.1% of Iowa's population and reportedly receive 19.1% of the abortions in Iowa.
Planned Parenthood Honors Margaret Sanger
Planned Parenthood still honors its founder with its annual “Maggie Awards” that awards Planned Parenthood supporters in the fields of television, radio, newspaper, music, magazine, book, new media, theater, film and video, and advertising.
Recent “Maggies” have gone to:
NBC-TV for Boston Legal and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
ABC-TV forThe George Lopez Show
CBS-TV for Cold Case
Seventeen Magazine
Glamour Magazine
Cosmopolitan Magazine
Kinsey (20th Century Fox)
Vera Drake (Warner Brothers)
Information Source: Iowa Right to Life
Sanger’s targets for birth control and forced sterilization included the poor, blind, deaf, mute, epileptics, “feeble-minded” and alcoholics.
"Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes"
(Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger, “Pivot of Civilization,” p. 274).
In writings and lectures, Sanger dehumanized the poor and disabled as “human weeds,” “parasites,” “defectives,” “mistakes” and “a dead weight of human waste.”
Margaret Sanger’s Bio
Born Margaret Louise Higgins in 1879 in Corning, New York, she was the sixth of eleven children. Educated at Claverack College in Hudson, New York, Sanger became a teacher and moved to New Jersey. She returned home to take care of her mother, who died from tuberculosis when Sanger was just 19.
Sanger blamed her mother’s death on having too many children, which led her into the field of nursing and work with the poor on the lower east side of New York City. She joined the Socialist Party and wrote articles for the Socialist Party newspaper, The Call.
She married William Sanger in 1902. They had three children – two sons, Stuart and Grant and a daughter, Peggy, who died at age four. Margaret left William Sanger in 1913, but kept his name even after she remarried.
Sanger made a name for herself as an author and activist who coined the term “birth control.” She was arrested in New York in 1915 for sending “diaphragms” through the mail. To avoid trial and a possible 30 year prison sentence, she left her children behind with her estranged husband and fled to Europe. Before she left, she distributed 100,000 flyers on “Limiting Families,” through the use of "Lysol douches" and "herbal abortifacients."
In Europe, Sanger was influenced by radical sexologist Havelock Ellis, and adopted his beliefs for advocated sterilization of the poor in exchange for public assistance. Sanger herself believed in forced sterilization and thought parents should be required to submit an application to the government in order to have a child.
Sanger’s zeal for birth control was partially due to her sexually promiscuous lifestyle. She had numerous affairs, including one with Ellis, who along with his wife was a proponent of “open marriage.”
Sanger returned to the U.S. in 1916 and opened an illegal birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York with her sister, Ethel Byrne. The clinic was located in a neighborhood of newly-immigrated Slavs, Italians and Jews, in keeping with Sanger’s Nazi-like beliefs of contracepting these populations out of existence. Sanger and her sisters were both were arrested and spent a month in jail.
Lecturing throughout the world on contraception, limiting families and population control, Sanger founded a publication, The Birth Control Reviewwhich had as it’s cover story in December of 1921: “Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds.” Sanger’s The Birth Control Review was well-known for Nazi propaganda and articles by Nazi officials. She later organized the first World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927.
In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League. A year later, she married wealthy oil magnate J. Noah H. Slee in 1922, who financed many of her projects, such as the “Birth Control Research Bureau,” which she founded in 1923.
Sanger was forced out of the American Birth Control League in 1928 because of her radical politics. The American Birth Control League later merged with Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau but in order to distance itself from the horrors of eugenics revealed by Nazi Germany, the organization changed its name in 1942 to “Planned Parenthood.” Sanger later helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952.
One of Sanger’s final missions was to push for the development of oral contraceptives by convincing wealthy heiress Katherine McCormick to fund the research of geneticist, Gregory Goodwin Pincus. Pincus introduced “The Pill” in 1959.
The year before Sanger died, 1965, the Supreme Court legitimized birth control as a privacy right in the case, Griswold vs. Connecticut. Estelle Griswold was the Executive Director of Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut.
Sanger died in 1966 at a nursing home in Tucson, Arizona. She was buried in Fishkill, NY next to second husband Noah Slee.
Margaret Sanger Quotes
The philosophy of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in her own words:
“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infants is to kill it.”
– Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 1920
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, 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 defectives.”
– Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 1920
“(Eugenics) shows that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
– Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, 1922, p.187
"No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective."
– Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 1920, p.89
For more quotes and info on Margaret Sanger, visit the website of Angela Franks, author of “Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility” (McFarland, 2005): www.angelafranks.com
Planned Parenthood disputes the idea that Margaret Sanger was a racist. However, Angela Franks, author of “Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility” (McFarland, 2005), maintains Sanger’s desire to prevent the “unfit” from reproducing, included large numbers of minorities of her time, who were poor, sick and illiterate.
Today, Planned Parenthood remains true to its roots and Sanger’s mission.
• Planned Parenthood identifies “women of color” as on of their core clients.
• 70 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are located in or Hispanic neighborhoods.
• Planned Parenthood’s research affiliate, the Alan Guttmacher Institute found black women’s abortion rates are nearly triple those of white women.
In the abortion industry overall:
• African Americans make up 13% of the population but account for 37% of all abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
• Minorities are 6.1% of Iowa's population and reportedly receive 19.1% of the abortions in Iowa.
Planned Parenthood Honors Margaret Sanger
Planned Parenthood still honors its founder with its annual “Maggie Awards” that awards Planned Parenthood supporters in the fields of television, radio, newspaper, music, magazine, book, new media, theater, film and video, and advertising.
Recent “Maggies” have gone to:
NBC-TV for Boston Legal and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
ABC-TV forThe George Lopez Show
CBS-TV for Cold Case
Seventeen Magazine
Glamour Magazine
Cosmopolitan Magazine
Kinsey (20th Century Fox)
Vera Drake (Warner Brothers)
Information Source: Iowa Right to Life