THE ROOTS OF LEGALIZED ABORTION IN THE U.S.
One Woman’s Dream
The roots of legalized
abortion in the U.S. can be traced back to one woman, Margaret Sanger, the
founder of Planned Parenthood. That
organization is linked to its founder and carries on her dream today. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the second president of
the organization, has said, “We are merely walking down the path Mrs. Sanger carved
out for us”. Another president, Faye
Wattleton, has said she was proud to be walking in the footsteps of Margaret
Sanger. Pamela Maraldo, another
president says, “Today, Planned Parenthood proudly carries on the courageous
tradition of Margaret Sanger”. (Planned
Parenthood Federation of America Service Report, p. 3)
So, it is obvious that to
understand Planned Parenthood, we must discover the tradition of Margaret
Sanger. She was the sixth child of
Michael and Anne Higgins. Michael had
marched through the south under General Sherman, but his socialist ideas and
activities later in life caused the family to live a life described by Margaret
as “joyless and filled with drudgery and fear”.
(O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores, Atlantic
Monthly Press, 1991. Pg. 9). She left
home as quickly as possible and soon became involved in radical politics,
feminism, and promiscuity. She attended
college for less than a year and dropped out.
She tried teaching kindergarten, and nursing but didn’t stick with either. She met William Sanger, a young architect
with a promising career and they were married.
They had three children and moved into Manhattan. She joined the Socialist Party and helped
organize several strikes and labor protests.
She started writing for the Party newspaper. She began attending Mabel Dodge’s meetings
for radicals. When Margaret’s turn came
to share, free love and sensuality were her themes. Her lifestyle reflected her
rhetoric and William gave up on the marriage.
Margaret then spent her
energies publishing The Woman Rebel where
she denounced marriage as “a degenerated institution”, capitalism as “indecent
exploitation, modesty as “obscene prudery”.
(Logan & de Tilati. Morality
and the Village Elite, St. Regis, 1949,
p.63) Other articles promoted political assassinations. She was served with a subpoena indicting her
on three counts of breaking federal law.
She decided to flee to England.
She farmed out her children and in one last stick in the eye, she
published and distributed an article entitled “Family Limitations” which
promoted contraception using very dangerous techniques. (Gray, Margaret Sanger, Merek, 1979, p. 280)
Upon arriving in England, she
joined radical groups including eugenicists who believed that for survival of
civilization, the physically unfit, the poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially
inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to be eliminated. Her bed became the meeting place for the
Fabian upper-crust. (Chase, The Legacy of Malthus, Knopf, 1977, p.
81) She met Havelock Ellis, the grandfather of the Bohemian sexual revolution. For Margaret, the sexual revolution met
eugenics in Havelock Ellis. Ellis also
helped Margaret package her rhetoric and writings in a more acceptable
form. Her old line anarchism, socialism,
and pro-abortion stances were to give way to eugenics. She left England for the U.S. and immediately
began a campaign to defend her position and get the charges against her
dropped. She was successful. She held a tour promoting her eugenic ideals
and opened a clinic in New York City in an area populated with Slavs, Latins,
Italians, and Jews—which according to Sanger were all “dysgenic and diseased
races” that needed to have their “reckless breeding” curbed. The clinic was closed down in two weeks and
Margaret was in jail for thirty days.
Upon release, she started publishing The
Birth Control Review. Her time in
jail convinced her to change her approach.
She began by including articles by well known people like Pearl Buck and
H. G. Wells. Money poured in. Her name became a household word. Her fame was secure. She wrote The
Pivot of Civilization promoting eugenics.
She openly called for the elimination of “human weeds”, the elimination
of charity, the sterilization of “genetically inferior races” and for the
segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted”.(Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, Brentano’s,
1922, p.88)
At this time she met and
married J. Noah Slee, a lubricant millionaire.
She set out to spend his fortune on her career and cause. She campaigned successfully to win over the
medical community. She was given
millions by the Rockefellers, Fords, and Mellons. She had to spend considerable funds to purge
her reputation because of her eugenic connections with those who had put
together Nazi Germany’s race purification program. She had openly endorsed the euthanasia,
sterilization, abortion, and infanticide programs of the Third Reich. Articles in The Birth Control Review mirrored Hitler’s racist rhetoric. She even commissioned Dr. Ernst Rudin, the
director of the Nazi Medical Experimentation program, to write for the Review.
To restore her image, she
changed the name of her organization to “Planned Parenthood” and tried to cover
her real ideals in language that promoted “patriotism and family values”. (Ballard,
For God and Country, Blackpools,
1977, p.88) But under the slick labels is a diehard racist. She hated charity because, “it is the surest
sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating
constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents”. Her alternative to charity was to “eliminate
the stocks”. Her theme was, “More
children from the fit, less from the unfit”.
In 1939, she designed the “Negro Project”. Why?
She said, “The mass of Negroes, particularly in the south, still breed
carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes,
even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least
intelligent and fit”.(Gordan, Woman’s
Body, Woman’s Right, Penquin, 1974)
She even went so far as to hire black ministers to promote the project. The entire operation was a ruse to get blacks
to participate in their own elimination.
In 1934, she recommended that
the U.S. government launch a health-care reform plan that would include
“parenthood permits”. The permits would
only be issued to those couples “deemed eugenically fit by public officials”.
The permits would only be good for one
child. In China, Planned Parenthood
helped the government launch a brutal one-child-per-couple policy. There have been over one million forced
abortions, mandatory sterilizations, and infanticides since then. Planned Parenthood says it has been a model
of efficiency. (Mosher, Broken Earth, Free
Press, 1983) Did you know your tax dollars went to abort
Chinese children?
To this day, the thrust of
Planned Parenthood’s work is to devise new plans to penetrate Black, Hispanic,
and ethnic communities with its message of eugenic racism. Planned Parenthood’s crusade to eliminate all
those “dysgenic stocks” that Margaret Sanger believed were a “dead weight of
human waste” and a “menace to the race” has resulted in a wholesale slaughter. It is public knowledge that minority children
are being aborted at twice the proportional rate of the majority. Planned Parenthood is the recipient of
millions of dollars of tax money. You and I are paying for their racist
eugenics and “following in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger”. That will help you sleep better tonight.
