Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in 1916 and, in 1921, founded the American Birth Control League (the forerunner of Planned Parenthood). Her name is widely associated with contraception and abortion, but she had another cause—eugenics. To avoid a public relations disaster, Sanger’s followers urged her to drop the topic, and she did, but not before going on record with some unsavoury statements. Here is one from her article, “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda.” It reveals the spiritual poverty of this cultural icon and helps explain her willingness to declare war on innocent life. It is ironic that Sanger’s greatest admirers style themselves as champions of the poor, for she counted “the poverty stricken classes” a threat to society.

Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems . . . As an advocate of Birth Control,1 I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit,” admittedly the greatest present menace to the human race, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between the two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble minded, the mentally defective, the poverty stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well to do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over fertility of the mentally and physically defective . . . Birth Control is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.2
Footnotes:
1

See Kairos Journal articles, “The Morning After the Morning-After Pill” and “Chemical Warfare: RU-486.”
2

Margaret Sanger, “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” Birth Control Review 5, no. 10 (October 1921): 5.

article adapted from Kairos Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located at 4800 West Pulaski Hwy., Perryville, MD