Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy.(Book Review)

Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy (MSEL) is a scholarly, yet readable analysis of the starkly eugenic ideology that drove Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and those who shared her ideas. Angela Franks accomplishes a great deal in her book but perhaps nothing more important than helping the reader grasp why the movement slid so quickly and so easily into forced sterilization, abortion, and infanticide.

According to Franks (a Ph.D. candidate in theology), despite the organization's popular image, the primary agenda driving Planned Parenthood and like-minded "family planning" organizations/ population control agencies has never been women's health or their liberation, but control of their fertility for eugenic purposes.

Franks presents extensive research (nearly a thousand different reports, articles, books, speeches, interviews, and news accounts) on "the continuing life of these ideas in the organizations she [Sanger] founded by drawing on institutional documents and publications in order to show how her legacy - - the control of female fertility - - still inflicts suffering on women."

One of the book's chief aims is "highlighting the continuity between the eugenicists and the population controllers." Built into the movement's DNA was the desire to build a "better race," which required reducing the fertility, by coercion, if necessary, of those they considered "inferior."

In the eugenics parlance, Sanger was a fervent believer in "negative" eugenics - - improving the human race by preventing the "lesser breeds" from reproducing. Eugenicists thought of people as if they were plants and were confident Mendel's laws could be applied to breed "better" human beings.

Too many researchers, Franks contends, have failed to take Sanger's eugenic commitment seriously. They prefer to see it as a fad she dabbled in but abandoned as her clinics took off. The facts say otherwise.

At least 23 of the 50 members of the National Council of Sanger's American Birth Control League (founded in 1921), the precursor to today's Planned Parenthood, were also members of the American Eugenics Society or public supporters of the eugenics agenda. Eugenicists believed that many of the world's economic and social ills were a result of "overbreeding" of the poor or "feebleminded."