Odd Logic
For some reason twice in the past week I’ve run across people attacking Planned Parenthood for the fact that the first public leader they had after merging from several different organizations happened to be Margaret Sanger.
Was Sanger the nicest person in the world, probably not. She was racist, and forget all this just against the African American communities crap that sites like this will try to make you believe. She was full-blown, “Anyone who isn’t white is a lower being.” She also had a thing for eugenics, thinking that it would create an improved society.
Now the people who have a problem with reproductive rights aka the socially conservative drool over these little factoids like a honey ham. In their skewed logic this serves as some type of proof that Planned Parenthood, as it currently stands is an evil organization which is obviously providing abortions and birth control services to serve a genocidal plan. To which they triumphantly claim that all abortions are evil of course.
There are just a few itsy bitsy problems though. First the woman was born in 1879. Can anyone name anyone born in 1879 who wasn’t a freaking racist? Here, if anyone reads this they are free to take me up on the challenge. Here is a list of famous people born in 1879, if anyone can prove to me that any of them, without a shadow of a doubt, didn’t have any racist tendencies, I will literally send you cookies.
“But, but…” I can here the little objections. “She wasn’t just a racist, she was into eugenics!” Which for some reason is considered less acceptable than racism. Feel free to torture a race but as soon as you mention neutering someone you’ve gone too far. Unfortunately the idea of eugenics wasn’t considered the horror it is today. Many people thought that controlling the population and preventing the breeding of “lower beings” was perfectly acceptable. Alexander Graham Bell was a proponent of eugenics. Wait, what? The guy who invented the telephone? Yup, while working with and teaching deaf children he realized that deaf children were very likely to have deaf parents and suggested that deaf people, especially two deaf people should not try to conceive children.
Other people who thought eugenics was pretty cool. Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States; W.E.B DuBois, academic, civil rights activist; Marcus Garvey, journalist, civil rights activist. Wait! What! Yes those are too black civil rights activists who thought eugenics wasn’t a bad idea. Of course they didn’t like the idea of sterilizing minorities of course, but they thought it was important to perserve the black race.
“I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.”
- W.E.B. DuBois
“Like the most racist white eugenicists, Garvey put a premium on maintaining racial purity. Garvey often stated that the integrationist mission of the NAACP and other biracial groups represented a “dangerous race destroying doctrine” that led him to proclaim that his group, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) “believes in and teaches the pride and purity of race. We believe that the white race should uphold its racial pride and perpetuate itself, and that the black race should do likewise.””
- Gregory Michael Dorr, Ph.D
Fighting Fire with Fire: African Americans and Hereditarian Thinking, 1900-1942
See it doesn’t matter what side of the race coin you are on, you too can be a eugenics freak. Margaret Sanger was quite normal for her time, that doesn’t make it right, but that’s the way it was.
To add to the quagmire. DuBois endorsed Sanger’s birth control clinic when it was opened.
The real kicker the real good kicker, and I’m just going to bask in this for a second…Sanger did not advocate abortion, under her direction Planned Parenthood never performed abortions nor lobbied the government to enact legislation for abortions. Better yet, she was pro-life, she thought that an abortion was taking a life.
In her own words:
“To each group we explained what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun.”
- Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 217.
Margaret Sanger the pro-life, racist, eugenics lover. Hmm, probably doesn’t have the same ring to it for the psychotic anti-abortion activists. I have to admit I feel a little guilty now; I removed everyone’s favourite scapegoat. They’ll have to find some other reason to bash Planned Parenthood.
By the way, just on a private note I would like to mention that Sanger was a woman who stood up at a time when women had no rights whatsoever and demanded that people should have sovereignty over their own bodies, man or woman. She fought for the right to simply put a condom over a penis and for that alone she should be lauded.
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