Margaret Sanger Vs the Historic Revisionists
This week, Justice Clarence Thomas, in giving his judgement upholding Indiana’s anti-abortion laws, has brought up a popular myth among the anti women’s rights reactionary crowd on the right — that Family Planning and Abortion rights in America is linked at its roots to eugenics and genocide, and that this connection lies in the work of women’s rights pioneer and life long activist, Margaret Sanger. It is a theses that is also focused on by serial hysteric Dinesh D’Souza, in his recent book “The Big Lie” (the title is accurate, every word after is codswallop) — where he claims that abortion is genocide and Democrats were the original Nazis — the mental gymnastics are on par with the writing of David Icke.
So this is just the sort of historic revisionism that I feel needs to be seriously redressed.
Margaret Sanger was a life long activist for birth control and female autonomy — she campaigned for, and got her self arrested in order to enable the sale of birth control products and information, and was instrumental in developing the first female contraceptive pill. She was also reportedly one of the inspirations for Wonder Woman!
She also was the founder of Planned Parenthood in the USA, but she was, for most of her activist period, anti-abortion (more on this later).
Much hay is made of the fact that she seems to be a proponent of eugenics in a couple of publications she penned by 1922.
The first thing to say is that while eugenics is discredited now, it was largely accepted truth in 1922. At the time Sanger was ignored and ostracized by the medical establishment for being a proponent of birth control, but when she framed it with Eugenics, the top medical professionals of the day took her more seriously — so on one hand she was using it to get wider acceptance for birth control, the title of one of the contentious texts viewed in this historical context can be seen as an appeal to the medical establishment; “The Eugenics value of Birth Control”— secondly, while eugenics is often automatically associated with classist and racist population control, this is not how Sanger writes of it — she frames it in terms of people with intellectual disability rendering them incapable of rational decision making or being responsible for a child, the criminally insane, and those who serially commit violent crimes being prevented from having children. While not condoning this view, it was a moderate position at the time.
She felt that much of the issues of malnutrition, birth defects, and crime rates in poor and immigrant communities could all be reduced with better access to birth control methods and better sex education. She worked closely with a range of immigrant communities, and later worked with African American civil rights pioneer W. E. B. Du Bois, to help bring better family planning to African American communities.
From 1907 to the 1960’s up to 32 US states maintained eugenicists laws on their books that legislated for mandatory sterilisation for psychiatric hospital inmates and criminals, resulting in the forced sterilisation of over 60,000 Americans, mostly women, and mostly against their will. This was legislated by and conducted under both Republican and Democrat lawmakers, and continued long after Sanger herself had changed her position on such policy in light of the German Nazi government showing where such policy can lead — Sanger wrote on a number of occasions about her concerns and opposition to rise of Nazism in Germany, and joined the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda, even while most American commentators were oblivious to what it represented. So while Sanger’s earlier acceptance of eugenics is obviously problematic, it is entirely hypocritical and a-historical for her current critics to use it as evidence of the immorality of the Planned Parenthood Clinics.
On abortion, Sanger was, for the majority of her activist period, anti-abortion. Early in her career, working as a nurse in poor working class areas in New York, she witnessed first hand the death and injuries inflicted on young women through botched back yard or self inflicted abortions. She saw abortions as a cruel brutality visited on women out of desperation, and that access to other methods of birth control and sex education could prevent such harm. Family Planning clinics didn’t offer the administration of abortions until some years after her death in 1966. Yet her early belief in eugenics, and some out of context quotes of hers are used to try and link abortion with genocide by disingenuous anti women’s rights campaigners and legislators.
There are also claims that she was motivated by racism, and that her “Negro Project” was established to prevent African Americans from having babies, to reduce their population. It is clear from her writing and her lifetimes work that she is motivated by enabling female autonomy, that she saw the high birth rate in poor communities as the result of a lack of available resources and access to birth control, that this then led to issues of malnutrition, entrenched poverty, reduced social mobility for women in particular, high infant mortality and the premature deaths of mothers. She knew all this from her own childhood — her mother died after her last of 18 pregnancies at the age of 48. Her first clinics were established in poor immigrant communities in New York, with pamphlets printed in a number of languages. She made a point of employing nurses from the communities her clinics were established in. Her work with the African American communities in the South seem characteristically no different from her earlier, illegal clinics in New York. As mentioned earlier, she was working with prominent Civil Rights advocate Du Bois — again she employed only African Americans at her clinics in those neighbourhoods, and would tolerate no racism from her other staff — she worked with local African American ministries to get her message out, and was later applauded for her work by Rev. Martin Luther King Jnr. To say she was motivated by a White Supremacist drive to exterminate African Americans is an abhorrent inversion of the truth.
So why the obsession with Sanger in particular? To start with she is a popular target of the right not just because of her radicalism or because she was the founder of Planned Parenthood, but because Liberals are often reticent to defend her, because of her writings on eugenics, but also due to her socialism and anti-religious positions. But mostly she represents everything that the anti women’s rights conservative reactionaries that are currently trying to initiate a challenge to Roe Vs Wade find abhorrent. She campaigned for birth control to be in the hands of women specifically because she saw this as fundamental to women’s autonomy — the challenge to current abortion laws are entirely about attacking female autonomy. She campaigned for the recognition and acceptance that women enjoy recreational sex for fun and should be able to do so — the attacks on current abortion laws don’t care about fertilised frozen embryos because it is all about punishing promiscuous women. She railed against the religious and political establishments for legally imposing their stuffy morality on to the bodies of women. She was a radical, a socialist and an activist, who saw injustice in the world, devoted herself to doing something about it and managed to change America. She is their worst nightmare.
