On Tuesday in the House of Representatives, Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey of New York read an article in defense of Margaret Sanger, eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood.

Lowey began by praising Sanger for “her commitment to improving the health and lives of women” and stated that she was “proud to recognize Margaret Sanger for her tireless efforts on behalf of women and for fighting for those unable to fight for themselves.”

The article, entitled “Margaret Sanger – Setting the Record Straight” is by Dr. Ellen Chesler, a lecturer at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Chesler argues that Sanger’s reputation has been “savaged by opponents who deliberately misrepresent the history of birth control and circulate scurrilous, false accusations about her on the Internet.” Chesler excuses Sanger’s most vile comments as being “lifted out of context and tragically misquoted.”

Unfortunately for Dr. Chesler, this negative view of Sanger is rooted not in the Internet but in Sanger’s own books and actions. Sanger was an outspoken Social Darwinist who condemned charity because it supported a certain population that she termed “human waste.” In her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, Sanger devoted a full chapter to this viewpoint called “The Cruelty of Charity.” “Organized charity itself,” she wrote, “is a symptom of a malignant social disease… the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the ‘failure’ of philanthropy, but rather at its success.”

Sanger’s solution to her perceived problem? Mass coercive sterilization and segregation. She stated, “…we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.”* By supporting coercive sterilization, Sanger can hardly be called a liberator who wished for women to have “the ability to plan their pregnancies, and ultimately control their own destiny,” as Rep. Lowey asserts.

Dr. Chesler states that Sanger’s language had “no intended racial, ethnic or class content.” However, according to New York Times journalist Edwin Black, Sanger surrounded herself with some of the eugenics movement’s most outspoken racists and white supremacists, including Lothrop Stoddard and Leon Whitney. Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy was invited to join the board of directors of Sanger’s American Birth Control League, a position he retained for years.

Margaret Sanger herself wished for the League and other organizations such the Eugenics Research Association and American Eugenics Society to unite, seeing that the groups had much in common. Leon Whitney, the executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, reported to colleagues that Sanger “felt very strongly about eugenics and seemed to see the whole problem of birth control as a eugenical problem… Mrs. Sanger took very kindly to the idea [of the merger] and seemed to be as enthusiastic about it was I was.”*

This is the same Leon Whitney who commented on the Nazi gassing of 50,000 to 100,000 of those who were deemed unfit by saying, “While we were pussy-footing around … the Germans were calling a spade a spade.”

Dr. Chesler calls Sanger “actually an unusually advanced thinker on race for her day” and cites examples in which Margaret Sanger opened birth control clinics for rural black women in the south. Dr. Chesler seems to naively attribute these actions to a concern for blacks rather than a desire to control the black population, despite the evidence that Sanger’s views leaned toward the latter. In a letter to Clarence Gamble dated 1939, Sanger said, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Even after her organization changed its name to Planned Parenthood, Sanger still pushed a eugenics agenda. In fact, in reviewing the goals of International Planned Parenthood, Sanger replied to a colleague, “I appreciate that there is a difference of opinion as what a Planned Parenthood Federation should want or aim to do, but I do not see how we could leave out in its aims some of the eugenic principles that are basically sound in constructing a decent civilization.”*

Thanks to the efforts of those such as Margaret Sanger, some 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized and thousands were barred from marriage or forcibly segregated into “colonies.”

This is the woman whose name appears on the award recently given to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. This is the woman that Representative Lowey praises and recognizes “for her tireless efforts.”

Let Representative Lowey know the truth about Margaret Sanger by contacting her office at 202-225-6506.

*Quotations from War Against the Weak, by Edwin Black