By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of this seven-part article on The Birth Control Review with footnotes, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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When confronted with some of the more offensive racist, eugenicist, and anti-religious material in The Birth Control Review, pro-abortionists — particularly Planned Parenthood employees — tend to respond with three standard objections.
Objection #1. The most common objection is: “The material is taken out of context.”
The Birth Control Review enjoyed a 24-year run, from 1917 and 1940, and accounted for 5,631 pages and 4.3 million words of text, a large volume of information by any standard. If this material included two, three, or even a dozen or so questionable or offensive quotes, Planned Parenthood defenders would have a point if they stated that “the material was taken out of context.”
However, the pages of The Birth Control Review are saturated with noxious ideas and statements — eugenic, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and so on. The “out of context” defense is completely unpersuasive because the many repugnant ideas in Margaret Sanger’s journal are the context!
Pro-abortionists have a habit of smearing pro-life organizations with labels such as “anti-Semitic” and “racist,” often using a single quote by a spokesperson that is decades old. So why the loud protest from the champions of “choice,” who think they can get people to ignore the hundreds of bizarre and extreme quotes written by the founder of Planned Parenthood and her fellow writers?
Objection #2. The second objection is: “Most of the material in The Birth Control Review was not written by Margaret Sanger.” This is certainly true, but irrelevant. Sanger wrote a relatively small portion of the total volume of information contained in her journal, yet she still managed to provide several dozen quotes that demand very close scrutiny. For example, she wrote frequently about negative eugenics, including her infamous “Plan for Peace.” She also edited The Birth Control Review from its founding to 1928, and was an officer of the American Birth Control League throughout its entire run, which means that she is responsible for its contents.
Consider this: If an American Nazi or well-known racist was allowed to print an article in a pro-life newsletter, the pro-abortionists would never let us forget it. They would not only smear the pro-life organization that published the offending article, they would relentlessly tar and feather the entire pro-life movement as “Nazis” and “racists.”
We are merely holding Planned Parenthood to the same standard. The Birth Control Review is larded with articles written by such “luminaries” as Lothrop Stoddard, American Birth Control League board member and author of the book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, and Ernst Rudin, Adolf Hitler’s director of Genetic Sterilization and founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene — the organization behind the master plan to exterminate Jews during World War II.
We can thus say with certainty that Planned Parenthood honors a person (Margaret Sanger) who not only supported actual Nazis and racists, but gave them a widespread platform from which to spread their poison.
Some of the more interesting characters who wrote for The Birth Control Review include the following people. Note the common twin threads of a seething hatred of the Catholic Church and a fundamental belief that non-white races are inferior. If Planned Parenthood has ever disavowed the statements or philosophies of any of these people, we don’t know about it.
Havelock Ellis, president of the Galton Institute, who once said: “The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.”
Norman Himes, who believed that Catholic “stock” was inferior to that of Unitarians, Universalists, and Freethinkers. Himes also believed that all rights (including the right to life) are bestowed by the state and can be revoked at any time.
Julian Sorell Huxley was president of the English Eugenics Society and founder of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). He was a hard-core racist who wrote: “The negro mind is as different from the white mind as the negro from the white body….You have only to go to a nigger camp-meeting to see the African mind in operation — the shrieks, the dancing and yelling and sweating, the surrender to the most violent emotion, the ecstatic blending of the soul of the Congo with the practice of the Salvation Army.”
Elmer Pendell, who wrote in his 1951 book Population on the Loose: “The Catholics are promulgating a breeding program to gain political control in the United States. In the poorer countries, they favor war as a method of keeping population and resources in balance. In these poor countries, the denser population is denser because the dumber Catholics and dumber others are having so many dumb children — so the major influence of the Catholic’s campaign against birth control is that they trade away their smart Catholics and get dumb ones.”
George Bernard Shaw, socialist economist and playwright, who wrote: “There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.”
He also supported the mass murder of people who did not “pull their weight” in society: “Are you pulling your weight in the social boat? Are you giving more trouble than you are worth? Have you earned the privilege of living in a civilized community? That is why the Russians were forced to set up an Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and ‘liquidate’ persons who could not answer them satisfactorily.”
Marie Carmichael Stopes, one of whose husbands described her as being “supersexed to a degree which was almost pathological.” She was president of the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Marie Stopes International, an organization founded in the 1970s by pornographers, is so bad it makes the Planned Parenthood Federation of America look like a bunch of do-gooders by comparison.
H.G. Wells, famous science fiction writer and avid anti-Catholic bigot, who raved that “Rome is the source and center of Fascism. . . . Why do we not bomb Rome? Why do we allow these open and declared antagonists of democratic freedom to entertain their Shinto allies and organize a pseudo-Catholic destruction of democratic freedom?”
Clear And Explicit
Objection #3. The final objection Planned Parenthood defenders usually present is that “The Birth Control Review does not reflect our current thinking.” They allege that Margaret Sanger lived a long time ago, and that her thoughts and writings are not representative of the philosophy of today’s “new, improved” Planned Parenthood. As former PPFA President Faye Wattleton so lamely asserted, “No one can really interpret what Sanger meant because she’s dead.”
Sorry, Faye. Sanger’s thinking was clear and explicit.
No Planned Parenthood spokesperson — at any level — has ever disavowed Margaret Sanger. In fact, Planned Parenthood gives its Margaret Sanger Award annually to the person that it perceives as most advancing the cause of “reproductive rights” during the previous year.
Without a doubt, Planned Parenthood still warmly embraces its founder.
Wattleton said that “I believe Margaret Sanger would have been proud of us today if she had seen the directions that we have most recently in this organization taken.”
She also said: “As we celebrate the 100th birthday of Margaret Sanger, our outrageous and our courageous leader, we should be very proud of what we are and what our mission is. It is a very grand mission . . . abortion is only the tip of the iceberg.”
Wattleton’s successor, Gloria Feldt, praised Sanger to the skies: “I can’t think of anyone who has made a greater contribution to the lives of women, children, and families — of all races — than Margaret Sanger. You have to look at [her] life to see she had a desire to help the poor and the downtrodden of any race.”
Margaret Sanger’s grandson, Alexander C. Sanger, was president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of New York City, the largest PPFA affiliate in the United States.
He said that “I intend to be out on the front lines of our issues. That is why I’m here. . . . Right now, we have three [abortion] clinics in this city and I want ten more. We currently have a small storefront office in central Harlem, and it is my first priority to see if we can transform that into [an abortion] clinic. . . . With all her success, my grandmother left some unfinished business, and I intend to finish it.”
In fact, Planned Parenthood adores Sanger so much it even had a “photo album” devoted to her life on its website until recently.
In conclusion, an organization does not honor a person with photo albums, fawning articles, and attempts at canonization unless it embraces that person’s philosophies: in Sanger’s case, eugenics, free love, and anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant bigotry.
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