Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement

By Rebecca R. Messall 

On a Sunday dedicated to honoring motherhood, May 11, 2010, the Denver Post chose to celebrate everything glaringly responsible for preventing or terminating motherhood. And, to someone like me who is slightly older than the "Pill" and who was 18 at the time of Roe v. Wade, the appearance of the Post's Mother's Day article was curious because there is much more that people should know about the threesome of Margaret Sanger, the "Pill" and Planned Parenthood, the nations' largest abortion provider.

Margaret Sanger belonged to an organization called the American Eugenics Society, organized in the early 1900's. Members from the American Eugenics Society actually formed Sanger's original group whose name was changed to Planned Parenthood, but even the latter's first three presidents were officers or members in the AES, including Alan Guttmacher. Sanger is listed as a member in 1956 under her then-married name, Mrs. Noah Slee.

Later called social biology, genetics, and population control, eugenics was a "scientific" endeavor born from evolutionary biology. It was never confined to state-sponsorship under Communists and Socialist dictators. Eugenics operated quite openly in the United States, England and around the world. The efforts of the American Eugenics Society resulted in many states passing laws to sterilize more than 63,000 Americans. Several states passed official apologies in the 1990's. The eugenics movement, particularly Margaret Sanger, ranted against the Catholic Church for opposing eugenic legislation and ideology.

Leaders of the American eugenics movement were later troubled that Hitler tarnished the word "eugenics;" however, they did not abandon the quest for a thoroughbred stock of humans, such as Margaret Sanger herself touted. They simply chose new words to describe eugenics. As recently as 1968, one of the leading evolutionary biologists and an officer in the American Eugenics Society, Theodosius Dobzhansky, said that the word "genetics" meant the same thing as "eugenics" and commended the goals of eugenics. The control of reproduction remained the primary goal of eugenics in order to improve the human gene pool. Throughout its existence Planned Parenthood has been a key tool to reduce or eliminate births among blacks, other minorities and the disabled.

The Post's Mother's Day article typifies the popular narrative, which was really a sophisticated marketing campaign so good that no one questions it. Almost never, anyway. It sought to convince women to become customers of a then-unpopular product by convincing them that, prior to the commercial launch of the Pill in the 1960's, our mothers and grandmothers were veritable slaves to their wombs, their husbands and the very concept of marriage.

Coincidentally, of course, legal abortion also covered up the "Pill's" failure rate. In the new movie, "Blood Money," former abortionist Carol Everett says her abortion facility intentionally passed out low dose birth control pills to increase the likelihood of customer pregnancies and those money-making back-up abortions.

In the 70's, one of the messages was that women had a singular duty not to add another child to a polluted, war-torn mad, mad world which would be blown up at any minute by nuclear war. However, the other sub-text, the one where evil should have been blatantly denounced if media, politicians, academia and the rest of us had not been so - to put it charitably - timid, was the pronouncement that disabled and minority children were particularly "unwanted" and specially targeted for elimination through abortion and the parallel development of genetic tests for destructive uses.

Now, nearly all Downs Syndrome babies are terminated before they are born, as part of a public policy by the U.S. Supreme Court laid down in Roe and reiterated again and again. Pro-life leader Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. writes, "Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness."

Largely, the eugenics/population control movement has been powered by huge trusts with billions of dollars in global assets. As investment vehicles, they likely receive income from corporations engaged in a global distribution of birth control pills, IUDs, patches, injections and so forth. If so, their capital holdings, dividends and bonuses are gilded by U.S. taxpayer funding for the system of product distribution, funding appropriated as a quid pro quo from politicians grateful for the campaign donations. Money talks. Blood money.

Rebecca R. Messall is a practicing attorney in Denver. She is the author of the article, "The Long Road of Eugenics: From Rockefeller to Roe v. Wade," Fall 2004 Human Life Review (New York). 

Source