Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics

[Jose Garcia]

Source: The New York Times

Planned Parenthood of Greater New York will remove the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” the group said on Tuesday.

Ms. Sanger, a public health nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn in 1916, has long been lauded as a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer.

But her legacy also includes supporting eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of color.

“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate’s board, said in a statement.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/nyregion/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger-eugenics.html

[Lulu KC]

2. Good for them

This is one thing my pro-life family members bring up all the time. Not that this will change their minds, but I'd been hoping PP would own it so at least I could say, "Hey, they owned it!"

[AllaN01Bear]

3. i thought this Eugenics was a star trek and other scifi thing.

after reading what happened in oregon on this Eugenics stuff . so much of our history is just buried and i think the published" mainstream" history is mainly false .
@ jose garcia. heart your avatar, screen nick. long time fan of the feline in the hat.

[catrose]

12. Someone posted the other day "Who knew that our history books were fan fiction?"

[ChazII]

4. K&R n/t

[catsudon]

5. so I guess they did a reseach on her

and found out it was true that she's into "reproductive harm within communities of color"?

[Igel]

6. They defended her for years.

They get cut no slack in this regard. Her publications were clear, forthright, and unmistakably "abortion is a good thing because it kills the inferior before they can breed," and she was unabashedly open at the time as to who the "inferior" were.

[musette_sf]

9. ??????

Ms Sanger opposed abortion.

And there is nothing in her publications that denigrates ANY race.

Educate yourself:
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/

[catsudon]

13. from your link

https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=306641.xml

"Birth Control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practised. It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks--those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization."

She does not mention anything about race, just human weeds

[CatLady78]

15. I disagree with the attacks on Sanger

Last edited Wed Jul 22, 2020, 09:46 AM - Edit history (3)

Anti-abortion groups have been attacking her for a long time:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/margaret-sanger-weeds/

I get why PP has to do this. However, I disagree with the attacks on Sanger. They lack perspective. If she was alive today I would imagine she would be staunchly opposed to racism. She was a progressive leader by the standards of her time. The attacks on her are mostly driven by actual racists. Where that is not the case, I just have a different view-point. Fifty years from now a lot of us will be condemned for our beliefs and ways today-especially the ignoring of environmental issues and our lack of concern for other species and for future generations.

[musette_sf]

29. I don't think PP has to do this at all.

In reading the entire collective works of Ms Sanger, it is obvious to me that she was in no way racist. The fact that she was admired and respected by ALL the Black leaders of her day amply provides testament to this fact. I believe this action was completely wrong of PP to take, and what it WILL do is to amplify the decades of lying false propaganda catapulted by fascist gestational slavery advocates. These anti-American enemies of the sacred civil, human and Constitutional rights of innocent female citizens will be emboldened, because they will believe that their lying hate speech against one of the greatest humanitarians of the 20th century is "legitimized" by this action.

PP SHOULD have been spending the last decade constantly and consistently making sure that Ms Sanger's historical work, mission, and message were honestly presented, and that all lying false propaganda about Ms Sanger had been promptly and visibly countered with the FACTS. Instead, they chose to delegitimize Ms Sanger.

I have expressed my opinion to PP of Greater New York, and will wait to see if I receive the courtesy of a response. In the meantime, I am working on determining alternative causes for reproductive justice that I can shift my monthly PP donations to, if the response is not satisfactory or if no response is received.

[CatLady78]

36. I am glad you contacted them and made these points

Thank you for doing that. I disagree very little with your points or with those by RobinA. I hope you prevail.

That said, I do still support PP for the simple reason that they are the most high profile organization that does the work they do. If they diluted their actual positions on birth control, abortion, gave a wider berth to religion/superstition/ anti science etc that would cause me real concern.

I simply do not know another org of that stature. They face constant smearing (as does Sanger) by religious zealots who are fairly tolerant of actual racists but suddenly become concerned about racism or the poor, when it is PP, Sanger, Paul Ehrlich, David Attenborough, Michael Moore...just about any feminist, environmentalist, scientist or liberal they can smear.
It is as hollow as Tucker Carlson's populism.

It is a cynical ploy and has little to do with concerns over the rights of the poor, racism etc.

[obamanut2012]

37. I am really curious how they reply to you

I agree with you. The fact that anti-choicers have been railing against Sanger for decades should make folks be more critical of negative comments about her.

Please PM me if you hear something!

[mahina]

7. Good.

Next.

They do good work and should put her in the past where she belongs.

[musette_sf]

8. I disagree with the decision that Planned Parenthood has made.

Margaret Sanger dedicated her life to helping women and children of ALL races, colors, creeds, and income levels to lead happier, healthier, longer lives. She was truly one of the leading humanitarians of the 20th century. She put herself at great personal risk to help ALL women and children. And she was respected and admired by ALL the Black leaders of her era.

Coretta Scott King accepted Planned Parenthood's first annual Margaret Sanger Award on Dr King's behalf. Her words before delivering his acceptance speech:

"I am proud tonight to say a word in behalf of your mentor, and the person who symbolizes the ideas of this organization, Margaret Sanger. Because of her dedication, her deep convictions, and for her suffering for what she believed in, I would like to say that I am proud to be a woman tonight."

From Dr King's acceptance speech:

"There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist - a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern."

[RobinA]

10. She Was Dedicated

to the notion that women should not be condemned to a life of one child after another until menopause or death. By their logic they should disband the entire organization has fruit from a poison tree.

I guess I will have to disavow them. There are other pro-choice organizations who could use my money.

[denem]

11. The morality of racism of eugenics and racism are one and the same.

Yes she set up a birth control in the slums because it was her view that the poorest, most deprived people were a class of humans who should never have been born at all.

I can't quote to you her writing on eugenics. Today, OP of mine quoting Sanger verbatim was removed as a RW smear/talking point. It was for this reason, that some still defend her, that I posted the OP, and was silenced.

[RobinA]

19. She Had Some Views

that were distasteful. She was also very dedicated to improving women's lives and fought considerable odds to do so. On balance, In my opinion, she did more good than harm. If this keeps up we are going to have two versions of history. The scrubbed version and the actual version. We are also fostering intolerance by saying that only people who are pure are worthy of being remembered for what they did. And yes, some of her views should not be tolerated, but it is possible to laud a person for the good that they did without implying toleration for their worst. In fact, it's kind of a teachable moment. A world where only people with the currently approved opinions can be discussed and remembered is not a world I want to live in.

[CatLady78]

20. This is a great post

Thank you for expressing these ideas so well. If we have lost the ability to comprehend shades of grey as a species, that is net a win for rightist thinking.

[musette_sf]

26. I disagree with your assertion that

"it was her view that the poorest, most deprived people were a class of humans who should never have been born at all".

Actually, her views about limiting family size were rooted in her experience as the child of immigrants, whose mother had 11 live births and multiple miscarriages, and whose constant state of pregnancy in poverty contributed to her early death.

Nowhere in Ms Sanger's writings or speeches does she state that "deprived people" are a "class" of any kind.

[denem]

34. "Nowhere in Ms Sanger's writings or speeches does she state that "deprived people"

are a "class" of any kind. "

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.

https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=238946.xml

[CatLady78]

14. I am with you - she was a product of her times

Last edited Wed Jul 22, 2020, 09:39 AM - Edit history (2)

If she were alive today she would have progressed in her views (unlike those who attack her from the right). In her time, there was widespread support for eugenics-a huge error but the irony is that those who fake outrage over it from the right (think Fox News, the GOP etc) still think like that today. We have to learn to separate people who were imperfect or made errors from the irredeemably regressive.
Unlike many of those who attack her, she actually did a lot of good.

That said, PP is doing the right thing strategically for the simple reason that they face many attacks as is. Their work is very important-anything that lets the actual racists and sexists from the right smear them more easily is best dispensed with. Fortunately a lot of these smears also come from incredibly stupid people like James O'Keefe.

[catsudon]

17. I agree

we are so quick to attach racism to past american heroes when they are only a product of the times. there is a reasonable explanation why her belief is okay.

[denem]

18. "she was a product of her times"

Like Andrew Jackson, Robert E Lee or Woodrow Wilson were products of their times.

Eugenics, suppressing the birth of 'lower races' is every bit as offensive as militant racism. If Andrew Jackson's image came be replaced from the $20 bill, if confederate statues can be ripped from their stands, Margaret Sangers name can be rented from PP clinics.

[catsudon]

21. i did not know about

woodrow wilson until i read about it last night wow....

This is a great example of how we conceptualize our heroes.

There seems to be some basic desire to have our heroes be flawless in all dimensions. Which is completely unreasonable. Heroes, no matter how we memorialize them, are human. No human is entirely bad or entirely good. They are very often products of their time and upbringing.

Lately, its been fashionable to denounce historical figures who are flawed, and to demand that we eliminate their memorials, whether real or virtual. But they are all flawed, from the most narcissistic plutocrat down to the boy scout who helps old ladies cross the street.

Margaret Sanger did much that deserves the acclaim of history. She also had her flaws. Bill Gates was a rapacious capitalist, and then eventually matured into the worlds greatest philanthropist. Fritz Haber enthusiastically developed poison gases used during WW1 and the holocaust, yet also developed the chemical process for fixing nitrogen, which a vast proportion of our food supply depends on.

The list could go on for hundreds of entries.

I don't really care whether we either erect or tear down statues of these people, but I think we should consider very carefully what heroism really means in the context of history. The way we do that says as much about us as about them.

[CatLady78]

23. It is cultural borderline personality

A concept I saw an oped about (written by a shrink).
Everyone is either a hero or a villain. That only works for the worst people. It is rare to find people like Trump who have no plus points at all. I actually cannot think of one plus point he has.

But most people are complicated, including people who have done very positive things with their lives like Sanger and who lived in a different time. It should not be brushed under the carpet but people like Sanger should also not be unduly demonized.

[musette_sf]

27. Ms Sanger never made any reference to "lower races".

Attempting to attribute words that Ms Sanger did not write or speak, to her by putting them in quotation marks, seems disingenuous to me.

Ms Sanger's tireless work to help women and children of ALL races, colors, creeds, and income levels live happier, healthier, longer lives was based in her own background as the child of immigrants, whose mother endured 11 live births and multiple miscarriages - all of which contributed to her early demise.

[kelly97]

16. Crazy time

Is it still possible for me to be surprised??

[Calista241]

22. It's like we're purging the past, and I think we're going too far, IMO.

Confederate statues being the exception, because they were built decades after the civil war and were designed to oppress the black populations of America. That being said, we competed the WW2 memorial in Washington DC in 2004, some 70 years after winning the war. I'm not sure time frame is a good measure of this, but the oppression designed into confederate memorials just feels wrong to me.

But only in the last 100 years or so have we more or less purged slavery in modern societies. Literally every civilization before 1900 had slaves, oppressed some population, or waged war on someone to conquer land. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, literally country that ever existed. Julius Caesar, the Prophet Muhammad, King David, George Washington, Pharaoh Ptolemy, Toussaint Louverture, every Chinese and Japanese Emperor, and almost anyone that you've ever read about in history books personally owned slaves at some point.

Should we support tearing down the Pyramids because they were built with slave labor? The White House, the Smithsonian, The Parthenon, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, The Colosseum, Angkor Wat, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, others?

[denem]

24. Let me quote Margaret Sanger herself.

"the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics"

https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=238946.xml

Margaret Sanger was an opponent of abortion, and an advocate of eugenics. PP were right to take her name off their NY clinic.

[Calista241]

28. Abortion at the turn of the 20th century was a brutal, unperfected, slap-dash process

performed by pseudo-doctors that preyed upon vulnerable women. I'm not going to hold her position on abortion against her when it was such a vile procedure with a 30% death rate back then.

If she was alive today, I believe that her ideals would conform with most if not all of what we believe in today.

[musette_sf]

30. Agreed, and thank you for your post.

[denem]

32. Sanger, by her own account, regarded abortion as barbaric

and bracketed it with infanticide.

"[to our opponents] birth control does not mean what it does to me. To them it has meant the most barbaric methods. It has meant the killing of babies, infanticide, abortion, in one crude way or another, for women from time immemorial have tried to avoid unwanted motherhood."

https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=128002.xml

[Yeehah]

25. All they did was take her name off a building

I don't think they're claiming Sanger was a bad person; just one who was bad enough to not have a building named after her.

[musette_sf]

31. Except she wasn't "bad".

[denem]

33. Was eugenics bad?

"the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics"

https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=238946.xml

[Yeehah]

35. She was a good person mixed with some bad

like every human that ever lived.