"But such attainment is unthinkable if we continue to breed from the present race stock that yields us our largest amount of progeny. Some method must be devised to eliminate the degenerate and the defective; for these act constantly to impede progress and ever increasingly drag down the human race."
"When we consider that the mentally deficient reproduce more rapidly than those of normal intelligence, we may well look into the future with dismay. Unless a halt is called, and that speedily, our race is doomed to inevitable deterioration."
Again, when she says race she means "human race". And she's arguing for perfectly reasonable outcomes. Adjust for the fact that the language is 100 years old and context changes over time.
Her argument is that people should have access to birth control. People, in the current era, now have access to birth control. The world is a better place for it. That is one of the best parts of eugenics - people should be able to plan their families.
And you call that "perfectly reasonable outcomes"? Holy shit.
You think, in 1923, someone would feel a need to dance around the bush if they wanted to say nasty things about other races? The civil rights movement didn't even start until the 50s. Political correctness wasn't even a phrase before the 70s. If she meant black/Italian/Scottish/whoever she'd have said it.
She is probably talking about things like Down syndrome and people who are stupid. You don't have to like it, she may indeed be badly wrong on some points, but the problem with that is when governments start implementing forceful eugenics policies (a la the Nazis) and not the ideas themselves (and note she specifically argues against eugenics by statute). It seems likely that people will be choosing to genetically engineer their kids regardless if the option is available - how many parents would purposefully let their children have congenital issues if it could be avoided?
She is arguing for birth control - an issue which most people are very glad she and people like her won on. She makes a number of good points, and a couple of questionable but reasonable ones.
I want to see you defend this.
In a letter to Clarence Gable in 1939, Sanger wrote: "We do not want 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" (Margaret Sanger commenting on the 'Negro Project' in a letter to Gamble, Dec. 10, 1939).
I wouldn't be surprised if Sanger didn't like black people, but based on the evidence you're throwing out in dribs and drabs she expected them to stop having children because that would make them better off.
Let me ask you straight up: are you arguing that black people shouldn't have access to contraception and abortion? Because Sanger is basically arguing that black people (and indeed, all people) should have voluntary access to contraception and abortion, and that black doctors should be trained to provide them as services. Even if you doubt her motives, it is a struggle for me to see what the complaint is. Would that my enemies were so dedicated to giving me options.
Also, note that she is very direct and willing to use phrases like 'colored people' and 'negro population' when she is talking about black people. No dog whistles.
Planned Parenthood is doing it's best to create as much distance between itself and Sanger, yet you're here defending her. Why?
You're out-of-context quoting someone who has been dead for no less than the better part of a century, and based on the evidence that you've drawn my attention to she was a tireless advocate of sensible family planning. I think that deserves some defence.
You said PP distanced from her because of her racist views. Ok, fair enough, everyone in history was basically a racist so that seems like a fair call. But her work as a 'eugenicist' seems to be commendable and most of what you have been bringing up today has ranged from commendable to reasonable in context. From what I've seen here it seems to me that this woman lived a life well spent. I'm not seeing anything that doesn't look like a reasonable option in the modern era - it is still the case that educated and wealthy families generally go with fewer children and are more likely to plan out their family for example. I support free and easy access to abortions.
> "maybe she meant something else"
I'm happy to be a bit stronger than that. She obviously meant something else. Voluntary access to family planning tools and training black ministers has to be one of the worst schemes to eradicate out the black community that I've ever encountered. It strains credulity, in fact.
Congrats, I guess?
Apparently you see nothing wrong with a woman Planned Parenthood is trying desperately to distance themselves from.
I will note that while the language is far from politically correct by today's standards, it's actually an incredibly common idea that "People shouldn't have kids if they can't afford them." This isn't as simple as eugenics.
People who can access birth control -- in part because people like Sanger fought for the right to such access -- have hope of escaping poverty. Teen moms tend to have bleak financial futures. If they can put off pregnancy until they are older and better educated, they can stop being poor and do better by their kids.
I have a genetic disorder. When I used to participate on email support lists for it, the morality around the question of whether or not you should have more kids once you have a child with the condition was a huge hot button topic in such communities.
It's a condition that most people "wouldn't wish on their worst enemy," much less their own child. It's homozygous recessive, so it's pretty common for people learn they are carriers by being told their child has the condition.
If two carriers have a child together with this condition, the odds are one in two that the child will also be a carrier, one in four that the child will not carry the defective gene and one in four that the child will have the condition. It's a terrible psychological burden to contemplate playing that kind of Russian Roulette with the health and welfare of your own child.
I was diagnosed in my mid thirties and this led to the diagnosis of one of my two sons. I ended up filing for divorce not hugely long after.
It's a predominantly Caucasian condition. My romantic involvements tended to be non-white during my divorce because it was a quick and dirty genetics test that was completely free.
The idea of having another child with the condition gave me the heebie jeebies. The idea of having a really hard conversation with some white man I barely knew and explaining the whole thing seemed like too much to bear while I was very ill, getting divorced, etc.
I could sweep all that under the rug if I so chose. I'm now post-menopausal and no longer care what ethnicity a man is because I don't expect to be able to get pregnant.
I am reluctant to condemn the woman. I am much more inclined to apply a phrase to here that one of my favorite professor's taught me: "I am the primitive of my way."
We can sit in judgment of her and count ourselves superior because she succeeded in her goals to make birth control more available. But there is a saying: "You need to be middle class to afford middle class morality" and having more kids than you can support because you have no access to birth control is a known means to guarantee that the "peasants" are prisoners of their station and have zero hope of escaping it.
I can't know what was actually in her mind or heart. Sometimes people with political ambition say what they know will sell the idea. Sometimes their actual internal framing is one they know that other people will never believe.
If she had believed that giving access to birth control to poor people would empower them to further education and rise from poverty, it may have been political suicide to try to sell people on that idea. They may have found it either unbelievable or unpalatable.
It is true to this day that the Catholic Church is against birth control (or was the last time I read up on such things -- I'm not Catholic). That was a much more widespread idea in Sanger's time -- that use of birth control was sinful and immoral.
Semmelweis was a physician who was locked up in an insane asylum and died two weeks later as the consequence of a beating by the guards. He was locked up basically because of his "crazy" idea that doctors needed to sterilize their hands. He died in 1865.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
According to this article: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicin...
Lister was introduced to Pasteur's Germ Theory in 1864, but it was the 1890s before it achieved widespread acceptance.
Today, Germ Theory is common knowledge. No one gets treated like they are crazy for saying that washing hands can prevent serious health issues, especially in medical situations (Semmelweis was in charge of two obstetrics clinics -- he was advocating sterilizing hands before delivering babies to bring down mortality rates).
We don't know what ideas would be deemed acceptable today if Sanger had not succeeded. I think it's dangerous to be too judgey of people in a way that ignores the context of their lives.
She was taking a dangerous stand on a controversial subject. She was repeatedly arrested for her work.
I leave you with the following two excerpts from her Wikipedia page:
1.
During her work among working-class immigrant women, Sanger met women who underwent frequent childbirth, miscarriages and self-induced abortions for lack of information on how to avoid unwanted pregnancy. Access to contraceptive information was prohibited on grounds of obscenity by the 1873 federal Comstock law and a host of state laws. Seeking to help these women, Sanger visited public libraries, but was unable to find information on contraception.[21] These problems were epitomized in a story that Sanger would later recount in her speeches: while Sanger was working as a nurse, she was called to the apartment of a woman, "Sadie Sachs", who had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Afterward, Sadie begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again, to which the doctor simply advised her to remain abstinent. His exact words and actions, apparently, were to laugh and say "You want your cake while you eat it too, do you? Well it can't be done. I'll tell you the only sure thing to do .... Tell Jake to sleep on the roof."[22] A few months later, Sanger was called back to Sadie's apartment—only this time, Sadie died shortly after Sanger arrived. She had attempted yet another self-induced abortion.[23][24][25] Sanger would sometimes end the story by saying, "I threw my nursing bag in the corner and announced ... that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth"; biographer Ellen Chesler attempted unsuccessfully to find corroboration of this story. There is the strong possibility Sanger might have deliberately fabricated the whole story as a propaganda technique.[19]:63
This story—along with Sanger's 1904 rescue of her unwanted niece Olive Byrne from the snowbank in which she had been left—marks the beginning of Sanger's commitment to spare women from the pursuit of dangerous and illegal abortions.[25][26][27] Sanger opposed abortion, but primarily as a societal ill and public health danger which would disappear if women were able to prevent unwanted pregnancy.[28]
Given the connection between contraception and working-class empowerment, Sanger came to believe that only by liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would fundamental social change take place. She launched a campaign to challenge governmental censorship of contraceptive information through confrontational actions.
2.
Sanger was convicted; the trial judge held that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception." Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised to not break the law again, but she replied: "I cannot respect the law as it exists today." For this, she was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents...