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Margaret Sanger quotes about race and eugenics

This post contains a sampling of documented quotes by Margaret Sanger on the topics of race and eugenics. I say “documented” because (unlike most other Web pages citing Sanger) in each case I provide a direct link to scanned pages from the original editions of books she wrote featuring these quotes, which have been put online by a politically neutral academic library whose impartiality is unimpeachable; furthermore, I provide photographs of each quote in situ from her various books, along with accurate transcriptions.

The reason for these extreme steps is that one must be very careful when researching online the intersection of Margaret Sanger, eugenics and race, because her modern defenders (that is, Planned Parenthood and other “pro-choice” advocates) do everything they can to suppress and deny Sanger’s racism, while on the other hand her detractors (“pro-life” advocates) often cite abbreviated quotes from her in order to make it look like she was only racist against blacks — when in fact she was also racist against immigrant groups, other minorities, and “defectives” of any skin color, all of whom threatened what Sanger saw as the “purity” of the educated white middle and upper classes.

The following quotes are all taken from two of Margaret Sanger’s books: The Pivot of Civilization, published in 1922; and Woman and the New Race, published in 1920. There are countless other Sanger quotes about race and eugenics, not just in these two books but in many of her other books as well, not to mention various letters and essays of hers which have been preserved. The quotes you see here, therefore, are not a thorough examination of her views on these topics, but rather just a few verified examples which researchers, pundits and advocates on either side can use, cite, republish, download or link to freely.


The Pivot of Civilization, by Margaret Sanger (1922)
Available online here in its original format at Open Library
or as searchable text at Project Gutenberg.

That Margaret Sanger was an enthusiastic eugenicist

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, and that her beliefs were essentially racist (and classist), is beyond dispute. Take for example this random quote from pages 175-6 of The Pivot of Civilization:

“[Eugenics] sees that the most responsible and most intelligent members of society are the less fertile; that the feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein lies the unbalance, the great biological menace to the future of civilization. Are we heading to biological destruction, toward the gradual but certain attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial health by the sinister forces of irresponsibility and imbecility? This is not such a remote danger as the optimistic Eugenist might suppose. The mating of a moron with a person of sound stock may, as Dr. Tredgold points out, gradually disseminate this trait far and wide until it undermines the vigor and efficiency of an entire nation and an entire race. This is no idle fancy.”


Sanger summarizes her guiding “Principles” on page 279, in which she declares that low-class children are “unwanted types” who “should never have been born”:

“Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be borne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born.”


Sanger founded Planned Parenthood to counteract the influence of the typical “maternity center” of the day, whose pro-life advice to lower-class pregnant women

“…encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”


The phrase “human waste” in the quote above was no fluke; in fact, Sanger made a habit of describing the lower classes (i.e. children of immigrants and minorities) as “human waste“:


Sanger’s reflexively low opinion of blacks can be seen on pages 131-2 of The Pivot of Civilization, where she first writes

“Evidence of racial and biological degeneracy are apparent to this observer”

and then goes on to approvingly quote another eugenicist who claims that factory work has degraded the intellect of the British lower classes to the level of (gasp!) “the African negro”:

“‘Compared with the African negro,’ he writes, “the British sub-man is in several respects markedly inferior.”

There’s no question that in this context “negro” is cited as the benchmark for racial inferiority, a degenerate state to which the white British man is unfortunately descending.


On pages 84-7 of Pivot, Sanger once again reveals her true opinions by using the example of a black family to illustrate how “feeble-minded” women contaminate society with their criminal offspring:

“Here is a typical case showing the astonishing ability to ‘increase and multiply,’ organically bound up with delinquency and defect of various types: ‘The parents of a feeble-minded girl, twenty years of age, who was committed to the Kansas State Industrial Farm on a vagrancy charge, lived in a thickly populated Negro district which was reported by the police to be the headquarters for the criminal element of the surrounding State….The mother married at fourteen, and her first child was born at fifteen. In rapid succession she gave birth to sixteen live-born children and had one miscarriage. …'”

The quote then goes on for several paragraphs to list how nearly all of the black woman’s children had become scourges on society:

“‘…The eighth, a boy who early in life began to exhibit criminal tendencies, was in prison for highway robbery and burglary. The ninth, a girl…had also been arrested several times for soliciting. The tenth, a boy, was involved in several deliquencies. … The twelfth, a boy, was at fifteen years of age implicated in a murder…'”

and so on for all sixteen black children. Sanger concludes,

“The notorious fecundity of feeble-minded women is emphasized in studies and investigations of the problem….Feeble-minded women constitute a permanent menace to the race….”

[Click on image to view full-size]


Woman and the New Race, by Margaret Sanger (1920)
Available online here in its original format at Open Library

In her 1920 tract Woman and the New Race, Sanger sometimes expressed the kind of deep racism typical of the era which was so thoroughly intertwined with her worldview that it usually didn’t even need to be mentioned because it was the starting point of the discussion.

For example, when talking about how large family sizes lead to illiteracy on page 38, Sanger casually describes white people as being of “pure stock” whereas the high rate of Negro illiteracy merits an “of course” which needs no further explanation:

“Moreover, there were in the United States in 1910, 5,516,163 illiterates. Of these 1,378,884 were of pure native white stock. In some states in the South as much as 29 per cent of the population is illiterate, many of these, of course, being Negroes.”


On page 31 of the same book, Sanger reveals a view of racial hierarchies which in modern terms would be deemed incredibly racist: At the bottom are “Negroes, Indians, Chinese,” all of whom count as “colored”; next comes not only anyone born outside the United States (mostly immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, as the text later reveals) but also their American-born children, all of whom still nonetheless count as “of foreign stock”; and at the top, needless to say, are Caucasians who have lived in the United States for multiple generations, who are “native white”:

Among our more than 100,000,000 population are Negroes, Indians, Chinese and other colored people to the number of 11,000,000. There are also 14,500,000 persons of foreign birth. Besides these there are 14,000,000 children of foreign-born parents and 6,500,000 persons whose fathers or mothers were born on foreign soil, making a total of 46,000,000 people of foreign stock. Fifty per cent of our population is of the native white strain.


The goal of birth control in Sanger’s view was to decrease the number of babies being born to “lower” types, while increasing the number of offspring produced by “the native white strain.” To this end, Sanger arranged to have one of her birth-control how-to manuals translated into Yiddish so that new Jewish immigrants could learn how to avoid pregnancy (and — the whole point — thereby limit Jewish population growth in the United States).


More quotes from Margaret Sanger expressing similar sentiments can be found throughout the two books cited above, as well as in one more of her books which is also available online:

The Case for Birth Control, available in its entirety here at Open Library


All images, quotes and text on this page are free to download and republish, with no restrictions.

This Week in Eugenics!

Wait — eugenics, did you say? Isn’t that a discredited pseudoscience from centuries past, like phrenology?

Well, yes, but eugenics never went away. Despite reaching its bloody culmination in the Nazi era, eugenics is still seductive as a concept to many people, and eugenics-based proposals still crop up in popular culture distressingly often, frequently by people who don’t even realize the historical implications of what they’re suggesting.

Over the last several days I’ve noticed an alarming upswing in eugenics-related incidents and current events, even though none of them were identified as such. And so, to rectify this oversight by the Meme Lords, I present — This Week in Eugenics!

(Note: For the purposes of this article, I’m using the most inclusive definition of the term “eugenics,” covering not just social programs designed to “improve genetic stock,” but also many notions closely related to and derived from eugenics, such as involuntary euthanasia, ethnic cleansing, suppressing birthrates among unwanted groups, mass rape, forced abortions, and killing your opponents en masse as a way of eradicating them from the gene pool.)

 


 

British liberal:Murdering substandard babies is highly recommended

Left-leaning British pundit Virginia Ironside stunned BBC viewers last Sunday when she said on air that she would enthusiastically suffocate any child who was “suffering.” The video really must be seen to be believed:

“If I were a mother of a suffering child — I mean a deeply suffering child — I would be the first to want to put a pillow over its face… If it was a child I really loved, who was in agony, I think any good mother would.”

(Make sure to pay close attention to the facial expressions of her shocked fellow guest, the young Reverend Joanna Jepson, who is literally rendered speechless by Ironside’s moral framework.)

Not included in this video clip are additional statements by Ironside earlier in the show which clarify what she means by “suffering”:

But she said there were millions of disabled and unwanted children around the world who were left suffering in institutions.
“To go ahead and have a baby, knowing that you can’t give it some kind of stable upbringing, seems to me to be cruel,” she said.

“If a baby’s going to be born severely disabled or totally unwanted, surely an abortion is the act of a loving mother.”

I don’t think I need to remind everyone that the Holocaust got its start as a program of “merciful” euthanasia for the disabled:

Forced sterilization in Germany was the forerunner of the systematic killing of the mentally ill and the handicapped. In October 1939, Hitler himself initiated a decree which empowered physicians to grant a “mercy death” to “patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health.”

Virginia Ironside is not alone in her thinking — her “progressive” views are commonplace in Europe and among certain sectors of the American populace. Are these people even aware of their not-so-subconscious dalliance with eugenics?

 


 

After 30 years of forced abortions, China breaks promise to end “one-child policy”

When China instituted its “one-child policy” exactly 30 years ago this month, they vowed that it was temporary and would end after 30 years. Now that the 30 years are up — surprise! — it looks like they won’t be ending it after all:

When China introduced its drastic population controls, officials promised that it would lift them after 30 years – an anniversary which falls this weekend. Aware of the resentment the policy would cause, the government said it was a temporary measure in response to China’s high unemployment and food scarcity.

“In 30 years, when our current extreme population growth eases, we can then adopt a different population policy,” read the announcement from the Communist Party Central Committee.

But today, the one-child policy remains firmly in place and government officials cannot shake the idea that it has played an important role in China’s economic miracle.

With only one child to care for, parents have been able to save more money, enabling banks to make the loans that have funded China’s huge investments in infrastructure.

Meanwhile, officials claim the policy has conserved food and energy and allowed each child better education and healthcare.

“We will continue the one-child policy until at least 2015,” said the National Family Planning Commission earlier this year.

Actually, that whole 2015 business is just a lie too. The government has no plans to ever end the policy:

China: One-child policy will stand

China will not drop its one-child policy, officials say, 30 years after Beijing decreed the population-control measure.

“I, on behalf of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, extend profound gratitude to all, the people in particular, for their support of the national course,” said Li Bin, who leads the commission.

So we will stick to the family-planning policy in the coming decades,” she said over the weekend, according to the state-run China Daily.

Who could have ever suspected that totalitarian “emergency measures” would last indefinitely?

Unprecedented!

 


 

John Holdren remains unashamed about hero-worship of eugenicist

Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is back in the news again. Over the last week, bloggers and pundits have continued trying to decipher Holdren’s latest euphemism for global warming, “global climate disruption”:

Global warming could be a thing of the past, thanks to the Barack Obama administration.

No, the White House has not single-handedly managed to stop the apparent rising temperature — but it does think the terminology oversimplifies the problem.

According to U.S. science adviser John Holdren, the public should start using the phrase ‘global climate disruption’ because it makes the situation sound more dangerous.

What’s that got to do with eugenics? Nothing directly. The connection comes from my shock that Holdren still walks around proudly declaiming his views, even after my essay from last year exposing Holdren’s close ideological connection to a notorious eugenicist:

John Holdren and Harrison Brown

Lifelong intellectual infatuation with eugenics-minded futurist casts shadow over Science Czar Holdren’s worldview

John Holdren, the Science Czar of the United States, has long expressed an intense admiration — one that bordered on hero-worship — of a man named Harrison Brown, a respected scientist from an earlier generation who spent his later years writing about overpopulation and ecological destruction. In fact, as Holdren has pointed out several times (including very recently), it was Harrison Brown’s most famous book, The Challenge of Man’s Future, which transformed the young Holdren’s personal philosophy and which inspired him to later embark on a career in science and population policy which in many ways mirrored that of his idol Brown.

Holdren’s regard for Brown was so high that in 1986 he edited and co-wrote an homage to Brown entitled Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown, in which Holdren showers Brown with accolades and unrestrained applause.

At first glance, there’s nothing remarkable or amiss with this picture: one respected scientist giving credit to and paying tribute to another. Happens all the time. Except in this case, something is amiss. Grievously amiss. Because Harrison Brown, whatever good qualities Holdren might have seen in him, was also an unapologetic eugenicist who made horrifying recommendations for “sterilizing the feeble-minded” and other “unfit” substandard humans whom he thought should be “pruned from society.”

You might think that these opinions would disqualify Brown as someone deserving praise in the modern world; but not to John Holdren, it seems — perhaps because Brown’s views (as Holdren himself has stated many times) were the basis of Holdren’s own worldview.

Skim the whole essay for the stomach-churning details. A sampling, with quotes from both Brown and Holdren:

“The feeble-minded, the morons, the dull and backward, and the lower-than-average persons in our society are outbreeding the superior ones at the present time. … Is there anything that can be done to prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock? Unfortunately, at the present time there is little, other than to prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature. Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs. … A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates.”
— Harrison Brown, in The Challenge of Man’s Future

“Harrison Brown’s most remarkable book, The Challenge of Man’s Future, was published more than three decades ago. By the time I read it as a high school student a few years later, the book had been widely acclaimed…. The Challenge of Man’s Future pulled these interests together for me in a way that transformed my thinking about the world and about the sort of career I wanted to pursue. I have always suspected that I am not the only member of my generation whose aspirations and subsequent career were changed by this book of Harrison Brown’s…. As a demonstration of the power of (and necessity for) an interdisciplinary approach to global problems, the book was a tour de force…. Thirty years after Harrison Brown elaborated these positions, it remains difficult to improve on them as a coherent depiction of the perils and challenges we face. Brown’s accomplishment in writing The Challenge of Man’s Future, of course, was not simply the construction of this sweeping schema for understanding the human predicament; more remarkable was (and is) the combination of logic, thoroughness, clarity, and force with which he marshalled data and argumentation on every element of the problem and on their interconnections. It is a book, in short, that should have reshaped permanently the perceptions of all serious analysts….”
— John Holdren, in Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown

This man remains the Science Czar of the United States, appointed by Obama. My previous exposés of Holdren (the whole “forced abortions and mass sterilization” thing) were so widely linked that they entered the mainstream consciousness; but to my mind this lesser-known eugenics-related scandal — the connection between Holdren and Harrison Brown — is even more shocking. And yet he blithely jets around the world as a representative of the United States, as if none of this had ever been revealed.

 


 

Michael Savage and Nicholas D. Kristof agree: Let’s do what we can to stop poor people from having babies

Politics makes strange bedfellows. And eugenics makes the strangest bedfellows of all. Two different pundits at opposite ends of the political and personality spectrum — hyper-conservative firebrand Michael Savage, and wishy-washy liberal Nicholas D. Kristof — both published essentially the same opinion this week: That we as a society should do whatever we can to stop poor people from over-breeding.

As you might expect, Savage phrased his recommendations in the bluntest possible terms, whereas Kristof danced around the issue and tried to doll it up:

Michael Savage:

[Savage] also wants to see Norplant, the embedded contraceptive, required for all women on welfare.

“That’s a revolutionary statement,” he admitted. “But should we permit women on welfare to keep knocking out babies to increase their benefits? Only an insane society would permit that.”

Nicholas D. Kristof:

Contraception research just hasn’t received the resources it deserves, so we have state-of-the-art digital cameras and decades-old family planning methods.

The situation is particularly dire in poor countries, where some 215 million women don’t want to get pregnant yet can’t get their hands on modern contraceptives, according to United Nations figures. One result is continued impoverishment and instability for these countries: it’s impossible to fight poverty effectively when birthrates are sky high.

Yet impressive new contraceptive technologies are in trials and should address this problem.

Another new contraceptive that could have far-reaching impact is the Sino-implant (II), a tiny pair of rods inserted just under the skin (typically in the arm) to release hormones. Other implants are widely used, but one great advantage of the Sino-implant is that it can last four or five years and costs $3 a year or less.

Family planning has long been a missing — and underfunded — link in the effort to overcome global poverty. Half a century after the pill, it’s time to make it a priority and treat it as a basic human right for men and women alike around the world.

Kristof isn’t foolish enough to get into Savage-level recommendations for linking contraception and financial aid, but the notion hovers in the background, unspoken. LifeSiteNews.com is, however, unafraid to drag Kristof over the coals for his population-control views.

Neither Savage nor Kristof were likely thinking of their proposals as having anything to do with eugenics — but beware of the law of unintended consequences (or perhaps intended in Savage’s case); once you start dictating to whole classes of people what you think their birthrates should be, it’s a slippery slope to more sinister uses of population control.

 


 

Great news! Blacks use a lot of condoms. No more black babies!

This week Indiana University released the results of the largest nationwide sex survey in nearly 20 years. While the report is chockful of juicy facts (as one might expect with a sex survey), each media outlet struggled to find the one key fact to highlight. Strangely, many of them focused on something unexpected: increased condom usage among ethnic minorities:

National Sex Study: Condom Usage Among Black and Hispanic Men Significantly Higher Than for White Men

…Rates of condom usage among black and Hispanic men were significantly higher than for whites, which might suggest that promoting condom usage and HIV awareness and prevention in black and brown communities is actually working. Now, that’s a pleasant surprise — a public service campaign that is actually working.

While black condom usage was hailed as great news in every MSM story on the subject, the specter of Margaret Sanger loomed, unseen, unacknowledged.

Why Margaret Sanger? Well, it was she who first successfully promoted mass-adoption of contraception in American society. And it was she who, controversially, also held eugenicist views which had a racial tinge, especially in a program she called “The Negro Project” that was designed to encourage blacks to use as much contraception as possible. Why? Well, here’s where the argument begins.

African-American Christian groups are absolutely positive that, as revealed in her writings, Sanger saw contraception as a way to depopulate or eliminate “negroes” from American society. Two quotes are widely cited, and remain, many decades later, the center of a furious controversy.

The first quote comes from a letter Sanger wrote seeking help for her “Negro Project,” a plan to open birth-control clinics in black neighborhoods. Here’s the full quote:

[We propose to] hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. And we do not want word to go out 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.

Critics read that and say Sanger’s words are clear enough; “we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population” speaks for itself. And you’ll find thousands of Web sites citing this passage as proof that Sanger had nefarious racist goals.

Her organization, Planned Parenthood, however, goes to great lengths to put its own spin on the passage, arguing that what Sanger meant to say was “we do not want [the false rumor] to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” and that this reading is clear from the context.

Adding to the controversy is the fact that Sanger once quoted, apparently with a stamp of approval, a mortifying sentence originally written by W.E.B. DuBois:

The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.
— W.E.B. DuBois, Birth Control Review, June 1932. Quoted by Sanger in her proposal for the “Negro Project.”

Is this eugenics-minded quote any less horrifying in that it came from the pen of a black (or at least self-identified black) man? And does Sanger’s clever citation of someone else‘s words to convey her opinion give her plausible deniability? Did she sufficiently distance herself from the racist attitudes implicit in DuBois’ quote?

So: is it good news that blacks are using a lot of condoms and as a result getting pregnant less often? Or is it part of a sinister decades-old eugenics plan, spearheaded by Margaret Sanger, to decrease the number of blacks in America?

Discuss.

 


 

No pressure — we’ll just wipe out everyone who disagrees with us

As already noted in my previous post, the British nonprofit group “10:10” released an ad this week which depicts the immediate and gory execution of anyone who disagrees with their “global warming” mantra. If you haven’t yet seen the video, it definitely merits a quick view:

After the ad was pulled due to public outrage, many commenters and pundits speculated on the underlying violent tendencies of environmental extremists. But not everyone was ready to discuss the video in genocidal terms; it’s not just that the fantasized executions were bloody and violent, and not just that the “greenies” seem willing to use threats to enforce their will on people. If one looks at fervent mass ideological movements throughout history, whenever they take power, they often do resort to mass killings not just as a way to enforce conformity, but to literally wipe out all dissenters, and by so doing extirpate their worldview from public discourse. Ideological eugenics, let’s call it.

Fantasies can become reality once power is attained. And once the blood starts to flow (or splatter, in this case), it’s hard to stop it.

 


 

Mass Rapes in the Congo

Recently there was another round of mass rapes in the Congo, as part of its interminable civil war.

While much of the media coverage about the incident focused on to what extent the United Nations was or was not to blame for the recent mass rapes, and whether this was an isolated incident or part of a years-long reign of terror, very little discussion has been given to the motivation of the mass-rapists.

Human rights campaigners have tried to drive home the point that mass-rapes are usually not just about sex or about hatred of women, but are rather a component of an ethnic cleansing program; the purpose of the rapes is to impregnate as many victims as possible with babies from outside their ethnic group or culture, and thereby dilute or “wash out” entire societies — a form of negative eugenics. For this reason mass rapes are considered a “crime against humanity,” not just a criminal act.

The recent Congolese mass rapes went mostly uncommented on in the Western world, so the motivation behind them is not clear. But my eugenics sensors detect something evil is afoot in the Congo, and so I include this incident in my list.

 


 

No apologies for call to “kill white babies”: it’s in retaliation for “alligator bait”!

King Shamir Shabazz, the New Black Panther Party madman involved in several race-related scandals, cropped up a few days ago in a new video in which he addresses the critics who decried his previous call for black Americans to “start killing white babies”:

Here’s the transcript of his fresh rant:

Now most of them media blood-suckers lies at Crucifox Jews wanna talk about me killing white babies.”

“Ummm.”

“Well, let me tell you stop jumping up and down like the devils you are, creating negative press to keep our people from joining something black and progressive. Yes, I said if you want freedom, you’re gonna have to deal with this enemy the way he brings it to us.

“Ummm.”

“You cannot tell a slave how to feel under the pressure of white supremacy.”

“That’s right!”

“I’m not a committer of reverse racism, I am a slave.”

“That’s right!”

“Born, brought stolen to the hells of North America. Let’s talk about the little black babies that YOU use as alligator bait.”

The “alligator bait” reference left most viewers scratching their heads in mystification, but it actually comes from any of several 1960s-era racist jokes about “Cajuns” using black babies as “alligator bait” while hunting in the bayou.

Of course, there’s no evidence that anyone ever, in reality, used a black baby as “alligator bait,” but that doesn’t stop King Shamir Shabazz from treating a joke from a Redd Foxx comedy routine as an authoritative source for reliable historical information. And so, in retaliation, he affirms his call to start killing white babies.

And what better place to wrap up This Week in Eugenics!