Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood: The Eugenics Connection.

Pro-lifers have frequently made the case that the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), the nation's largest abortion provider, has a tainted past, but it can be difficult to find the hard information to bolster these claims. Let's examine a little of PPFA's history and the current activities of this organization in order to arm ourselves for the fight against this force of the culture of death. In this article, we'll focus on its founder's fascination with eugenics and whether Margaret Sanger can be fairly labeled a racist.

Margaret Sanger and Eugenics

Planned Parenthood dates its founding from 1916. To understand Planned Parenthood, one must understand the ideology of Margaret Sanger.

While Planned Parenthood adamantly insists otherwise, it is clear that Sanger (1879-1966) was a eugenicist. She believed that birth control served a great eugenic purpose by stopping those she described as the genetically "unfit" from reproducing.

In her 1920 book, Woman and the New Race, Sanger explicitly called her work "nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or those who will become defectives." As she wrote in The Birth Control Review, "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective."

Sanger did not rule out coercion if the "wrong" people had children. She wrote, "Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism." "Choice," indeed.

Planned Parenthood's History of Eugenics