Abortion: The Ultimate Weapon in the War against Female Fertility.(Interview)

Editor's note. In the April issue of NRL News, Education Director Dr. Randall K. O'Bannon reviewed Angela Franks's new book, Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy. In this issue, Dr. O'Bannon conducts a follow-up Q&A with Ms. Franks.

Q: Can you briefly define what you mean by "the ideology of control" and explain how this guided Margaret Sanger and her allies?

I use the term "ideology of control" to describe the worldview animating Sanger, which brought together the three elements of her program: eugenics, birth control, and population control. She believed that female fertility was a dangerous and frequently oppressive force, bad both for women and for society as a whole. It had to be controlled so that society could control who would be born ("quality, not quantity," as one slogan said).

Q: Sure, a lot of people, including Margaret Sanger, were into eugenics in the early to mid-20th century. But didn't that fad die down after people saw the terrible fruits of eugenics in Nazi Germany-?

This is a common misconception. We want to believe that eugenics died out with the Nazis. It gets us off the hook. Now, eugenics did fall out of favor with the public after the revelation of the Nazi horrors. But Sanger, as part of a self-anointed elite, was crucial in repackaging eugenics as population control after the war. There are important distinctions to be kept in mind. Nazism is a subset of eugenics, but not all eugenicists were (or are) Nazis. Eugenics is also not necessarily the same as racism or anti-semitism.

Eugenicists view human beings not as persons with an innate dignity and worth that cannot be quantified but as little more than a collection of genes. People are first and foremost either "fit" or "unfit." For some eugenicists, being of a certain race marked one as "unfit." But for Sanger and the most "effective" forms of eugenic ideology today, it is not race per se that marks one as "unfit." The targets are those with a supposedly inferior "quality of life" the poor, persons with mental disabilities, those suffering certain diseases. It is no accident that Planned Parenthood clinics are disproportionately located in impoverished communities.

The short answer to the question is: many people in fact are still eugenicists, because they believe that poverty, disability, and other problems can be eliminated through preventing the birth of those who might suffer from those problems. In fact, today, eugenics has become much more respectable, to such a degree that scientists have been hailing a "new eugenics" since the 1970s.