Kudos to National Review editor Jonah Goldberg for his chapter on Margaret Sanger in his new book Liberal Fascism. The excerpt was posted on the National Review website earlier this week.
Margaret Sanger, “Raceologist”
Sanger and the nefarious origins of Planned Parenthood are not a hard target to hit and hit hard, and that’s exactly what Goldberg does in the course of highlighting many of Sanger’s own words and key details about her life, some of which even we were not aware of heretofore.
Goldberg notes that “one of [Sanger’s] children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four … [and that] she always acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a ‘fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.'”
Goldberg also notes:
As editor of The Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racists we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, The Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, The Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled ‘Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,’ by Ernst Rüdin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.
Sanger and the Infamous “Negro Project”
Goldberg then goes on detail Sanger’s infamous “Negro Project”, the intent of which was to get black Americans to use birth control:
Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. ‘The mass of significant Negroes,’ read the project’s report, ‘still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes…is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.’ Sanger’s intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. ‘We do not want word to go out,’ she wrote to a colleague, ‘that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.’
The Fallout from the “Negro Project”
Goldberg then makes an important observation:
It is possible that Sanger didn’t really want to ‘exterminate’ the Negro population so much as merely limit its growth. Still, many in the black community saw it that way and remained rightly suspicious of the Progressives’ motives. It wasn’t difficult to see that middle-class whites who consistently spoke of ‘race suicide’ at the hands of dark, subhuman savages might not have the best interests of blacks in mind. This skepticism persisted within the black community for decades. Someone who saw the relationship between abortion and race from a less trusting perspective telegrammed Congress in 1977 to tell them that abortion amounted to ‘genocide against the black race.’ And he added, in block letters, ‘AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS.’ This was Jesse Jackson, who changed his position when he decided to seek the Democratic nomination.
Sanger: Abortionists Are “Bloodsucking Men with M.D. after Their Names”
Then, looking at the state of Planned Parenthood then vs. now, Goldberg comments:
After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in political movements such as feminism. Indeed, in a certain sense Planned Parenthood is today more eugenic than Sanger intended. Sanger, after all, despised abortion. She denounced it as ‘barbaric’ and called abortionists ‘bloodsucking men with M.D. after their names.’ Abortion resulted in ‘an outrageous slaughter’ and ‘the killing of babies,’ which even the degenerate offspring of the unfit did not deserve.
Stunning Admission on the Pill’s Ineffectiveness
One of the world’s leading so-called experts on contraception, Princeton professor James Trussell, made a stunning admission this week about the ineffectiveness of the birth control pill. (A previous stunning admission by Trussell about the morning-after pill was highlighted in a previous hotline.)
Trussell’s page on Princeton’s website notes that he is “a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute and a member of the board of directors of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, The Guttmacher Institute, the Society of Family Planning, and a member of the National Medical Committee of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”
Speaking at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service conference in London this week, the UK Telegraph quoted Trussell as saying, “The Pill is an outdated method because it does not work well enough. It is very difficult for ordinary women to take a pill every single day.”
The Telegraph also reports:
[Trussell] said studies have shown women miss three times as many pills as they say they do. Computerised pill packs have revealed that where as about half of women say they did not miss any pills, less than a third actually did. And where as between 10 per cent and 14 per cent admitted missing more than three pills in a month, actually between 30 per cent and 50 per cent missed that many.
So, What’s the Solution?
Trussell favors long-term hormonal contraceptives. In his words: “If you want to seriously reduce unintended pregnancies in the UK you can only do with implants and IUDs.”
Oh, really, Dr. Trussell? That’s the only way?
We all know, of course, that there is another way to reduce unintended pregnancies, but ideologues like Trussell will never admit it.
Pill Feeds the Demand for Abortion
Commenting at Pro-Life Blogs, Ruben Obregon makes a trenchant observation about Trussell’s comments on the ineffectiveness of the pill:
Planned Parenthood is well aware of the problems with the pill, yet over the past few decades it has provided it to minors – sans parental consent – using public funding. In the long run, a large population of sexually active teens and young adults [dependent] on the pill or other contraceptive methods to engage in sexual activity, sustains the demand for abortion. Planned Parenthood is well aware of this and has capitalized on it to grow their abortion practice – at the taxpayer’s expense.
Trussell’s admission should be a catalyst to re-evaluate both the public funding of contraception programs and cultural permissiveness towards premarital sexual activity, which is largely dependent on contraception. It should also bolster the call to eliminate – not simply to cut – funding for Planned Parenthood at all levels of government.
Well said, Ruben.
