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Margaret Sanger never advocated for or promoted abortion.

Lursa said:
In my 20s I dated a Catholic guy who was (also 20s) one of 14 kids. His mother was also dead.
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The average life expectancy of all women in the US in 1900; rich, poor, minority, white, immigrant, US citizen was 41.1 years old.
Women were desperate to stop the debilitating effect on themselves and the family of serial pregnancies. They wrote to Sanger thousands a year asking for help.

Well, my husband loves me and we both love children, but he is only a working man and I don’t think we should have any more children for I am not able to properly care for these, except as I know I am shortening my own life, by neglecting to have the care and attention I need. The doctor who was with me when my last baby was born said he would be sorry if I had any more, but that is all, he’d give no advice on how to prevent the same thing happening. My husband has prevented it since, but by continual continence. I know that is impossible if a couple lives together and loves each other.


If I do give birth to any more I will have to give them away, the poor things and who wants children, and if I keep them to mother them myself they will have to starve, where the world is so full. When my third baby was born I was wishing I were dead. But no, I had to live to be this way again, so I do not know what to do. If I take my life, what will become of my beloved ones I got already?


I am thirty-one years of age, have had six children. Married at the age of eighteen. My husband is twenty-eight, drinks habitually, don’t think women are for anything else only to cook, wash, work in the field and have children.

I have refused sexual relation, but this causes awful quarrels, grouches and everything else. If there is anything you can do to help me I would be glad to hear from you at once. My baby is four months old so I must get busy in time or I’ll be gone again without remedy. My family physician says I have fallen womb caused by lifting things too heavy. I wish I could see you face to face and tell you all I want to. I am in despair. Can you help me? Will you help me?


At the age of 17, I married a brakeman on the XX Railroad. He drank some and was very frail. After eleven months I had a little girl born to me. I did not want more children, but my mother in law said it was a terrible sin to do anything to keep from having children. In 11 months again I had another little puny girl. In 23 months I had a boy. In 10 months I had a premature baby that lived five hours. In 11 months I had another little girl. In 17 months another boy. In 9 months a 4 month miscarriage. In 12 months another girl and in 3.5 years another girl. After the birth of the last child my husband died.

excerpted from: Margaret Sanger, Motherhood in Bondage (New York: Brentano’s, 1928)
 

I was not in my 20s in 1900.
 
The human race was a common concept in Western civilization after the advent of the Darwinian evolutionary theory. Educated people used it. At the same time, the word "race" was used in the latter 1800s and pre-WWII 20th century in expressions such as the Chinese race, the Japanese race, the American race (for Native Americans), but also for the concepts of Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid races.

So the word "race" was ambiguous and needs to be understood in context.

In the latter 1800s and early 1900s, however, the concept of a new human race or future human race was common. You can find it in theatre/literature in, e.g., George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, where women are viewed as caring about producing supermen, for the future of the human race. This is clearly the context of the title of the work by Sanger mentioned here.
 
j brown's body said:
Our current president is a eugenicist.
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I am getting really tired of anti-abortion people trying to make all eugenics an evil thing because it isn't.

Eugenics as a word comes from "beautiful genes." If it meant an attempt to engineer scientifically an improved species against the will or without the full and free consent of the people on whom it was perpetrated, it would be a bad thing. But the truth is that men do not want to have sex with every woman they encounter, nor do women want to have sex with every man they encounter. Women may be, populationally, considerably more discriminatory than men.

It is widely known that, in various non-human species, males try to court females, who do not court males but evaluate them and decide whether to have sex with them or not. This is true of both avian females and chimpanzees. Contrary to earlier speculative theories, it was found that female chimpanzees in heat sometimes wandered from their troupes to widen their options, and that they did not always select alpha males.

My point is that females of various species evaluate males and may reject them based on their criteria - and that can have eugenic consequences. Males can also evaluate females and may not approach them at all, and that can have eugenic consequences. Human sexual preferences for symmetrical features, opposite sex partners who meet certain BMI limits, etc., are certainly preferences related to breeding. People usually don't want mates with whom hereditary diseases and disabilities are more likely to be replicated. That is, simply, a fact.

So when men and women date, they routinely use certain morphological and other characteristics, even if unconsciously, to serve eugenic aims. In some societies, e.g., traditional Japan and even the latter 20th century for many families, arranged marriage was preceded by a long period of seeking suitable candidates. Japanese parents would spend a lot of money on detectives to find out if there were any secret family history of mental illness or serious disability in the family of a serious candidate.

So political was this that people in the Imperial Army faction were horrified that Crown Prince Hirohito/Emperor Showa got engaged to to-be Empress Sadako, who had Imperial Navy relatives. That faction actually started a rumor in the press that this woman had hereditary male color-blindness in her family in the hopes of thwarting the match. It could have been a successful attempt had it been true.

No one has to be an "evil-purposed" eugenicist to use criteria for making genetically superior children, as this has been going on for thousands upon thousands of years.
 

I'm not sure that this has anything to do with eugenics, which argues that complex human behaviors are determined by single cell genes.
 
j brown's body said:
I'm not sure that this has anything to do with eugenics, which argues that complex human behaviors are determined by single cell genes.
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I don't agree. There can be a science of eugenics that makes such claims, but a general orientation toward eugenic ideals that don't. Frankly, if you have blue eyes and want your kids to have them, you'll have a way better chance of that if you have kids with someone with blue eyes. Nobody even has to know about the existence of genes, let alone more, to know that. People have used superficial criteria of beauty for mating purposes for probably longer than civilization, and it has been eugenic even if it hasn't been scientific.

The anti-Sanger notion that she was somehow a big supporter of eugenics as an evil science is a disgrace. You can bet that the people making the claim used superficial criteria in selecting their own mates.
 
Whatever Sanger's personal views were, the organization she founded would cease to exist if abortion were outlawed.
 
Atreus21 said:
Whatever Sanger's personal views were, the organization she founded would cease to exist if abortion were outlawed.
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Goes to show how popular abortions are.
 
Atreus21 said:
Whatever Sanger's personal views were, the organization she founded would cease to exist if abortion were outlawed.
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If abortions were outlawed, women would suffer. Much like they did during Sanger's time. We're seeing real world examples in states with restrictive abortion laws.
 
Gordy327 said:
If abortions were outlawed, women would suffer. Much like they did during Sanger's time. We're seeing real world examples in states with restrictive abortion laws.
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Not the point. The point is that Sanger cannot be so easily distanced from abortion given how the organization she founded stays in business.
 
Atreus21 said:
Not the point. The point is that Sanger cannot be so easily distanced from abortion given how the organization she founded stays in business.
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That's quite a stretch.

It's a little like arguing that Roger Baldwin and Crystal Eastman supported abortion because they founded the ACLU.
 
Atreus21 said:
Not the point. The point is that Sanger cannot be so easily distanced from abortion given how the organization she founded stays in business.
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Irrelevant. PP remains because people choose to utilize its services. It's that simple.
 
j brown's body said:
That's quite a stretch.

It's a little like arguing that Roger Baldwin and Crystal Eastman supported abortion because they founded the ACLU.
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I'm sorry but arguing that the founder had nothing whatsoever to do with abortion when she founded an organization whose raison d'être is abortion is a stretch too far.
 
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23 years ago, one well trained, very professional PP employee help my wife decide not to have an abortion, when a catholic pro-life clinic's brazen propaganda approach two weeks before, just pissed her off. It was the lack of an agenda, a compassionate but clinical approach that helped heal a family and make it a little larger.
 
Atreus21 said:
I'm sorry but arguing that the founder had nothing whatsoever to do with abortion when she founded an organization whose raison d'être is abortion is a stretch to far.
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I fail to see what difference it makes? Especially since Ms. Sanger has been dead for nearly 60 years.
 

That very much contradicts my own experience, but a PP employee advocating for life is welcome. Congratulations on the addition to your family, however long ago it was.
 
Atreus21 said:
Whatever Sanger's personal views were, the organization she founded would cease to exist if abortion were outlawed.
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Only 4% of their services are for abortion. They offer many many other women's health services.

From PP's annual budget report (% are rounded off)
About 45% of their revenue comes from federal government contracts and grants to serve the reproductive services to Medicaid women
About 30% of their revenue comes from private gifts contributions and bequests.
About 20% of their revenue comes from payment for private services and non-government contracted services Abortion is a part of this class of revenue.
About 5 % of their revenue comes from miscellaneous and other services.

You can see these 2022-2023 budget numbers and the services provided at

This is the PP web site. The numbers come from the detailed report they must submit to the federal government each year. I believe that PP is required by law to submit a much more detailed yearly report than any other non-profit agency or organization but I do not have a link to that statement.
 
Atreus21 said:
That very much contradicts my own experience, but a PP employee advocating for life is welcome. Congratulations on the addition to your family, however long ago it was.
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The employee didnt advocate. That's the point. She described a clinical procedure and the process of acquiring one. The only opinion my ex wife heard, was the one inside herself.
 
Atreus21 said:
Not the point. The point is that Sanger cannot be so easily distanced from abortion given how the organization she founded stays in business.
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Pretty sure ~90% of those going to PP have no idea who Sanger is. And so her association means nothing to them and their needs for reproductive counseling, subsidized or free birth control, pre-natal exams, pre-natal vitamins, dietary counseling for pregnancy, resources to find SNAP, subsidized daycare, and other benefits for families, etc.

The point here is that it doesnt matter if her name is associated with it at all.
 
btthegreat said:
The employee didnt advocate. That's the point. She described a clinical procedure and the process of acquiring one. The only opinion my ex wife heard, was the one inside herself.
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Abortion clinics must by federal law to describe in detail the abortion procedure. They are also required by law to tell patients all the options including the local pregnancy centers and give out their contact information. Abortions clinics are, again by federal law, required to tell a patient all the bad outcomes that may happen after an abortion. Catholic and evangelical pregnancy centers do not have to give any of that kind of information. Abortion clinics are registered, evaluted, inspected and require registered professionals to provided services. Pregnancy centers are legally exempt for all of that.

Planned Parent policy states that if a patient seems hesitant, confused, coerced or abused about the abortion PP will not perform one.
 
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Not sure when said statute was applicable, but all of the above happened, except about 'all the options including...' probably because I told planned parenthood they were the second stop in a process of visiting and discussing those same options, before they had a chance tell us. I made that very clear. It was probably all covered one of the pamplets we were given including the phone number of various help agencies. The woman was asked about a set timeline, and she refused to provide one probably because Holly was clearly heisitant.
 
Thanks for the corroboration. It's appreciated.
 
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