Margaret Sanger passed away in the year 1966, one week before her 87th birthday. Though she was an atheist, funeral services were held at the Episcopal Church in Tucson, Arizona where she was eulogized as a “good, fighting saint who experienced martyrdom.” The Reverend George Ferguson went on to say that “all the elements of sainthood were personified many times in her life.”
The made-for-television movie, Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story (1995) is a highly sanitized version of Sanger as a champion for women’s rights. New York Times television critic, John J. O’Connor, stated that the movie describes an “extraordinary woman whose contraception crusade eventually led to the founding of Planned Parenthood.” Upon accepting the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered high praise to the award’s namesake: “Now I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision . . . . I am really in awe of her.” The sentiments of admiration expressed by Clinton were shared by H.G. Wells: “The history of our generation when it is written will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.”
There is perhaps no other figure in American history about whom there is a wider discrepancy between her sanitized legend and her tarnished life than Margaret Sanger. Today there is hardly anything more politically incorrect than to offer legitimate criticism of either Planned Parenthood or its founder.
Margaret Sanger’s life and social activism is closely tied to “birth control.” In her autobiography she tells us how that label came about. She and some of her companions were proposing various phrases to capture the essence of their movement: “We tried population control, race control, and birth rate control. Then someone suggested, ‘Drop the rate.’ Birth control was the answer; we knew we had it – the baby was named.”
G. K. Chesterton had another and far less glamorous name for “birth control.” He saw it as an expedient “by which it is possible to filch the pleasure belonging to a natural process while violently and unnaturally thwarting the process itself.” Nevertheless, “birth control” was an effective euphemism and sounded marvelously progressive.
Had Sanger’s companions been in a slightly different mood, “race control,” could have just as easily been the name of their new baby. Indeed, The Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded and edited, carried the masthead that read, “Birth Control: To create a race of thoroughbreds.” Linda Gordon informs us on page 347 of her book, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1976) that Margaret Sanger praised Adolph Hitler for his racial politics of eugenics.
Planned Parenthood has gone to considerable lengths to dissociate it founder from any association with racism. Yet the historical facts as well as Margaret Sanger’s own words are irrefutable. In My Fight for Birth Control, Sanger admitted that she promoted birth control “to stop the multiplication of the unfit,” a crusade she described as “the most important and greatest step toward race betterment.”
Now revered as a feminist icon, Sanger opposed, in Darwinian terms, the “unfit,” but also any kindness or charity that might be directed toward them. In an article titled, “The Need for Birth Control in America” (1925), she wrote: “[I]t is a curious but neglected fact that the very types which in all kindness should be obliterated for the human stock, have been permitted to reproduce themselves and to perpetuate their group, succeed by the policy of indiscriminate charity or warm thoughts uncontrolled by cool heads. . . . hordes of people . . . who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race. . . . Such human weeds clog up the path, drain the energies and resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world, we must cultivate our garden.”
Sanger’s involvement with eugenics was anything but a momentary enthusiasm. Consider the titles of following articles she published in her Birth Control Review: “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920); “The Eugenic Conscience” (Feb. 1921); “The Purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924); “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925); “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928); and many others of the same ilk.
Yet racism was not her own flaw. One of her biographers, David M. Kennedy, averred that Sanger’s primary goal was to “increase the quantity and quality of sexual relationships.” Accordingly, Sanger maintained that the birth control movement freed the mind from “sexual prejudice and taboo, by demanding the frankest and most unflinching re-examination of sex in its relation to human nature and the basis of society.
Sanger had several husbands and innumerable lovers. She was, from all indications, unscrupulously promiscuous. Her dissolute attitude toward sex is perfectly exemplified in a letter she wrote to her 16-year-old granddaughter: “Kissing, petting, and even intercourse are alright as long as they are sincere. I have never given a kiss in my life that wasn’t sincere. As for intercourse, I’d say three times a day was about right.”
It is difficult to believe in Sanger’s unwavering sexual sincerity. In a letter to one of her lovers, she described her next husband as a “stodgy churchgoer,” but then added, “Yet, how often am I going to meet a man with nine million dollars?” Margaret’s affection for J. Noah H. Slee was for his money alone. After he died, Sanger boasted that she would spend all of the $5 million he left her on herself. She came very close to achieving this dubious goal.
Madeline Gray paints a pathetic picture of the elderly Sanger in her biography, Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control (1979). “I’m rich. I have brains. I shall do exactly as I please,” Sanger would say. Yet, her behavior was clearly destructive.
According to Gray’s account, Sanger would commence her day with daiquiris for breakfast. She would consume half a bottle of wine for lunch along with her usual Demerol. For most of the rest of the day, she slept. When she wakened, she was often incoherent. She would wander into the streets at night in her nightgown, obliging her son to return her to her bed. Finally, her son had her declared senile, became her legal guardian, and placed her in a rest home charmingly named, The House by the Side of the Road.
Desanitizing Margaret Sanger is like telling the story of Pygmalion in reverse, but with a more sinister ending. Whereas Eliza Doolittle becomes “My Fair Lady,” Margaret Sanger, upon unveiling, becomes more like “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” This is, indeed, a most inconvenient truth for Planned Parenthood to acknowledge. It is one that can be disillusioning for its supporters, but at the same time, enlightening.
Margaret Sanger, to be concise, was a false prophet. One need only consider her unshakable belief that contraception would end abortion and the fact that roughly a million abortions are performed each year in the United States despite the fact that America is inundated with contraception. Planned Parenthood has not led the way to a sexual utopia, but Margaret Sanger has bequeathed to it her moral myopia.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT, and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad and Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart are available through Amazon.com.
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