© 2004 American Life League, Inc. phone: 540-659-4171 • e-mail: [email protected] • web: www.ALL.org
A M E R I C A N L I F E L E A G U E
Margaret Sanger was a prominent leader in the eugenics
and birth control movements that eventually led to the
decriminalization of contraception and abortion. As a chief
architect of the modern Culture of Death, Sanger’s legacy
now includes the deaths of more than 40 million innocent,
surgically aborted children in the United States alone.
Personal life
Margaret Louise Higgins was born in Corning, N.Y., on
September 14, 1879—the sixth of 11 children. Her
father was a vocal advocate of socialism and a critic of
the Catholic Church who, by Sanger’s own admission,
had a great impact on her education.1 Her mother was a
Catholic and Margaret was apparently baptized into the
Church, though she abandoned it later in life.
In 1900, she began training to be a nurse but discontinued
it soon after her 1902 marriage to architect William
Sanger. They had three children. Prior to her 1921
divorce, she had at least three extramarital affairs.2 In
1922, Sanger married the elderly J. Noah Slee, whose
Three-in-One Oil fortune gave Sanger financial independence
to pursue her birth control and eugenic goals.
Planned Parenthood founder
Planned Parenthood Federation of America traces its
beginning to 1916, when Sanger opened America’s first
birth control clinic in Brooklyn, N.Y. She was arrested
under a New York law that forbade the dissemination of
birth control information. Two years earlier, she was
indicted under a federal statute for sending birth control
information through the U.S. mail.
Eugenics and birth control
Sanger’s periodical, The Birth Control Review, passionately
promoted eugenics, the belief that the human race
could be improved if certain people did not reproduce.
Typical of this philosophy was an April 1924 article in
which Sanger likens eugenics to what a gardener or a
farmer does with plants and animals:
“How are we to breed a race of human thoroughbreds
unless we follow the same plan? We must
make this country into a garden for children
instead of a disorderly back lot overrun with
human weeds.”3
In her book, Woman and the New Race (Eugenics
Publishing Company, 1923) Sanger summed up the relationship
between eugenics and birth control:
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation
of natural law, is nothing more or less than
the facilitation of the process of weeding out the
unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of
those who will become defectives” (p. 229).
Sterilizations, segregation
In her 1932 Plan for Peace, Sanger wanted “to apply a
stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to
that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted,
or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits
may be transmitted to offspring.” She also wanted to
take an inventory of “illiterates, paupers, unemployables,
criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends” and “segregate
them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary
for the strengthening and development of moral
conduct.” 4 Similar types of eugenic thinking were found
in Nazi Germany.
Sanger’s talk to the Klan
In her 1938 autobiography, Margaret Sanger describes a
talk she gave to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan
at Silver Lake, N.J. She summed up how well she got
along with this KKK group:
“A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups
were proffered. The conversation went on and
on, and when we were finally through it was too
late to return to New York.” 5
The Negro Project
Among the many insidious initiatives associated with
Sanger was The Negro Project. Conceived by Dr.
Clarence Gamble, the main idea was to recruit charismatic
black ministers who would encourage black women to
who was
Margaret Sanger
This information is also available as a color brochure.
Shop online at www.ProLifeGear.com or call toll-free 866-LET-LIVE.
© 2004 American Life League, Inc.
P.O. Box 1350, Stafford, VA 22555 • 540-659-4171 • [email protected] • www.ALL.org
practice birth control, thereby reducing the number of
black babies being born. In a December 10, 1939, letter,
Sanger wrote to Dr. Gamble:
“We do not want the word to go out that we want
to exterminate the Negro population and the minister
is the man who can straighten that idea out
if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious
members.”6
Scientific racism
In 1985, Esther Katz of New York University’s history
department formed the Margaret Sanger Papers Project
to locate, arrange, edit, research and publish Sanger’s
papers. Here’s an excerpt from an article, “The Sanger-
Hitler Equation,” that appeared in the Winter 2002/3
Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter:
“Sanger did write to and share organizational
memberships and conference programs with any
number of eugenicists, including such champions
of scientific racism as Charles Davenport and
Harry Laughlin, who ran the genetics laboratory in
Cold Spring Harbor, New York; and Leon Whitney,
secretary of the American Eugenics Society. All of
them conflated physical and mental deficiencies
with racial ones. While Sanger publicly criticized
these most notable eugenicists for their opposition
or indifference to birth control, she never publicly
condemned their racial views.”
Sanger on large families
In her book, Woman and the New Race, Margaret Sanger
wrote:
“Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in
demonstrating the immorality of large families,
but since there is still an abundance of proof at
hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who
find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to
the facts. The most merciful thing that the large
family does to one of its infant members is to kill
it” (pp. 62-63).
Sanger and “The Pill”
As Sanger’s efforts to promote contraception gained
acceptance during the 1940s, she turned her attention to
creating a birth control pill. Sanger’s Planned Parenthood
gave steroid biologist Gregory Pincus grants totaling
$21,000 between 1949 and 1952 to help her reach her
goal. In 1952, Sanger also met with the wealthy Katherine
Dexter McCormick, who left $1 million for the pill project
in her will. Testing began in 1956, using poor women in
Puerto Rico as test subjects. By 1960 the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration approved the pill,7 setting the stage
for the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Sanger’s death and legacy
Sanger died in Tuscon, Ariz., on September 6, 1966, and
is buried in the Slee family plot in the Fishkill Rural
Cemetery in Dutchess County, N.Y. She lived to see the
Supreme Court endorse her life’s crusade in 1965 when,
in Griswold v. Connecticut, the justices defined a
Constitutional right to privacy and declared the law
against contraception unconstitutional. This case forms
the basis for the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion
as well as the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas that
stuck down the Texas sodomy law.
Today, Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is the United
States’s largest abortion provider, having reported performing
3,548,791 abortions from 1977 through 2003.
In 2004, PPFA claimed to be operating 849 clinics in all
but two states (North Dakota and Mississippi). From
1987 to 2004, the organization reported a total income
of more than $9.2 billion, with nearly $3.6 billion coming
from government grants and contracts.8 Planned
Parenthood still honors its founder, bestowing annual
Maggie Awards in her name.
1 Katz, Ester, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Vol. 1
(University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. xxiii-xxiv.
2 Ibid., pp. 14, 18, 272, 313.
3 Sanger, Margaret, “The Meaning of Radio Birth Control,” text
of a broadcast by Sanger on WFAB radio in Syracuse, N.Y.,
on February 29, 1924. Published in Birth Control Review, April
1924, pp. 110-111.
4 Sanger, Margaret, “A Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review,
April 1932, pp. 107-108.
5 Sanger, Margaret, Margaret Sanger An Autobiography, 1971
reprint by Dover Publications, Inc., of the 1938 original
published by W.W. Norton, pp. 366-367.
6 Donovan, Charles and Marshall, Robert, Blessed Are the Barren:
The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood, (Ignatius Press, 1991),
pp. 17-18.
7 Ibid., pp. 211-214
8 Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Service Reports 1987,
1994, Annual Reports 1987 – 2003/04.
A M E R I C A N L I F E L E A G U E
Margaret Sanger was a prominent leader in the eugenics
and birth control movements that eventually led to the
decriminalization of contraception and abortion. As a chief
architect of the modern Culture of Death, Sanger’s legacy
now includes the deaths of more than 40 million innocent,
surgically aborted children in the United States alone.
Personal life
Margaret Louise Higgins was born in Corning, N.Y., on
September 14, 1879—the sixth of 11 children. Her
father was a vocal advocate of socialism and a critic of
the Catholic Church who, by Sanger’s own admission,
had a great impact on her education.1 Her mother was a
Catholic and Margaret was apparently baptized into the
Church, though she abandoned it later in life.
In 1900, she began training to be a nurse but discontinued
it soon after her 1902 marriage to architect William
Sanger. They had three children. Prior to her 1921
divorce, she had at least three extramarital affairs.2 In
1922, Sanger married the elderly J. Noah Slee, whose
Three-in-One Oil fortune gave Sanger financial independence
to pursue her birth control and eugenic goals.
Planned Parenthood founder
Planned Parenthood Federation of America traces its
beginning to 1916, when Sanger opened America’s first
birth control clinic in Brooklyn, N.Y. She was arrested
under a New York law that forbade the dissemination of
birth control information. Two years earlier, she was
indicted under a federal statute for sending birth control
information through the U.S. mail.
Eugenics and birth control
Sanger’s periodical, The Birth Control Review, passionately
promoted eugenics, the belief that the human race
could be improved if certain people did not reproduce.
Typical of this philosophy was an April 1924 article in
which Sanger likens eugenics to what a gardener or a
farmer does with plants and animals:
“How are we to breed a race of human thoroughbreds
unless we follow the same plan? We must
make this country into a garden for children
instead of a disorderly back lot overrun with
human weeds.”3
In her book, Woman and the New Race (Eugenics
Publishing Company, 1923) Sanger summed up the relationship
between eugenics and birth control:
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation
of natural law, is nothing more or less than
the facilitation of the process of weeding out the
unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of
those who will become defectives” (p. 229).
Sterilizations, segregation
In her 1932 Plan for Peace, Sanger wanted “to apply a
stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to
that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted,
or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits
may be transmitted to offspring.” She also wanted to
take an inventory of “illiterates, paupers, unemployables,
criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends” and “segregate
them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary
for the strengthening and development of moral
conduct.” 4 Similar types of eugenic thinking were found
in Nazi Germany.
Sanger’s talk to the Klan
In her 1938 autobiography, Margaret Sanger describes a
talk she gave to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan
at Silver Lake, N.J. She summed up how well she got
along with this KKK group:
“A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups
were proffered. The conversation went on and
on, and when we were finally through it was too
late to return to New York.” 5
The Negro Project
Among the many insidious initiatives associated with
Sanger was The Negro Project. Conceived by Dr.
Clarence Gamble, the main idea was to recruit charismatic
black ministers who would encourage black women to
who was
Margaret Sanger
This information is also available as a color brochure.
Shop online at www.ProLifeGear.com or call toll-free 866-LET-LIVE.
© 2004 American Life League, Inc.
P.O. Box 1350, Stafford, VA 22555 • 540-659-4171 • [email protected] • www.ALL.org
practice birth control, thereby reducing the number of
black babies being born. In a December 10, 1939, letter,
Sanger wrote to Dr. Gamble:
“We do not want the word to go out that we want
to exterminate the Negro population and the minister
is the man who can straighten that idea out
if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious
members.”6
Scientific racism
In 1985, Esther Katz of New York University’s history
department formed the Margaret Sanger Papers Project
to locate, arrange, edit, research and publish Sanger’s
papers. Here’s an excerpt from an article, “The Sanger-
Hitler Equation,” that appeared in the Winter 2002/3
Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter:
“Sanger did write to and share organizational
memberships and conference programs with any
number of eugenicists, including such champions
of scientific racism as Charles Davenport and
Harry Laughlin, who ran the genetics laboratory in
Cold Spring Harbor, New York; and Leon Whitney,
secretary of the American Eugenics Society. All of
them conflated physical and mental deficiencies
with racial ones. While Sanger publicly criticized
these most notable eugenicists for their opposition
or indifference to birth control, she never publicly
condemned their racial views.”
Sanger on large families
In her book, Woman and the New Race, Margaret Sanger
wrote:
“Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in
demonstrating the immorality of large families,
but since there is still an abundance of proof at
hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who
find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to
the facts. The most merciful thing that the large
family does to one of its infant members is to kill
it” (pp. 62-63).
Sanger and “The Pill”
As Sanger’s efforts to promote contraception gained
acceptance during the 1940s, she turned her attention to
creating a birth control pill. Sanger’s Planned Parenthood
gave steroid biologist Gregory Pincus grants totaling
$21,000 between 1949 and 1952 to help her reach her
goal. In 1952, Sanger also met with the wealthy Katherine
Dexter McCormick, who left $1 million for the pill project
in her will. Testing began in 1956, using poor women in
Puerto Rico as test subjects. By 1960 the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration approved the pill,7 setting the stage
for the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Sanger’s death and legacy
Sanger died in Tuscon, Ariz., on September 6, 1966, and
is buried in the Slee family plot in the Fishkill Rural
Cemetery in Dutchess County, N.Y. She lived to see the
Supreme Court endorse her life’s crusade in 1965 when,
in Griswold v. Connecticut, the justices defined a
Constitutional right to privacy and declared the law
against contraception unconstitutional. This case forms
the basis for the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion
as well as the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas that
stuck down the Texas sodomy law.
Today, Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is the United
States’s largest abortion provider, having reported performing
3,548,791 abortions from 1977 through 2003.
In 2004, PPFA claimed to be operating 849 clinics in all
but two states (North Dakota and Mississippi). From
1987 to 2004, the organization reported a total income
of more than $9.2 billion, with nearly $3.6 billion coming
from government grants and contracts.8 Planned
Parenthood still honors its founder, bestowing annual
Maggie Awards in her name.
1 Katz, Ester, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Vol. 1
(University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. xxiii-xxiv.
2 Ibid., pp. 14, 18, 272, 313.
3 Sanger, Margaret, “The Meaning of Radio Birth Control,” text
of a broadcast by Sanger on WFAB radio in Syracuse, N.Y.,
on February 29, 1924. Published in Birth Control Review, April
1924, pp. 110-111.
4 Sanger, Margaret, “A Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review,
April 1932, pp. 107-108.
5 Sanger, Margaret, Margaret Sanger An Autobiography, 1971
reprint by Dover Publications, Inc., of the 1938 original
published by W.W. Norton, pp. 366-367.
6 Donovan, Charles and Marshall, Robert, Blessed Are the Barren:
The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood, (Ignatius Press, 1991),
pp. 17-18.
7 Ibid., pp. 211-214
8 Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Service Reports 1987,
1994, Annual Reports 1987 – 2003/04.