Below are some quotations by Margaret Sanger writing in the Birth Control Review, published over the period 1917-1940 by the American Birth Control League (ABCL), forerunner of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA). This organization, founded by Sanger, currently operates the largest chain of abortion clinics in the United States, and has performed more than five million abortions since 1970.
The quotes expose Sanger’s eugenic ideology.
Sanger was the founder of the International Planned Parenthood Federation to which New Zealand’s Family Planning Association is affiliated. Cecile Richards, the current president of Planned Parenthood, will be visiting New Zealand in October, 2013 for Family Planning’s Conference.
Sanger on eugenics:
“Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race…”
~ (Morality and Birth Control, Birth Control Review, Volume II, Numbers 2 and 3, February-March 1918, page 14)
“Eugenics aims to secure better babies.”
~ (Medical Journalists Advocate Birth Control, Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 10, October 1918, page 4)
“…we need not more of the fit, but fewer of the unfit… Is it not time to protect ourselves and our children and our children’s children? The propagation of the degenerate, the imbecile, the feeble-minded, should be prevented.”
~ (Birth Control Past, Present and Future, Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 8, August 1921, page 19)
“Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems… As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit”, admittedly the greatest present menace to the human race… the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over fertility of the mentally and physically defective… Birth Control is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated. 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.”
~ (The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda, Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 10, October 1921, page 5)
“Of course birth control itself is a eugenical measure. Birth control is no negative philosophy concerned solely with the number of children brought into this world. It is not merely a question of population. Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and of human development. Birth control for the individual, for the nation and for the world. We are fighting for the children, the women and the men of the next generation. We want a race of thoroughbreds.”
~ (Quotes from Margaret Sanger’s book Pivot of Civilization. Birth Control Review, Volume VI, Number 10, October 1922, page 253)
Sanger on sterilization:
“There is only one reply to a request for a higher birth rate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take off the burdens of the insane and feebleminded from your backs. Sterilization for these is the remedy.”
~ (The Function of Sterilization, Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 10, October 1926, page 299)
“…give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”
~ (The Function of Sterilization, Birth Control Review, Volume XVI, Number 4, April 1932, pages 107 and 108)
“The American public is taxed, heavily taxed, to maintain an increasing race of morons, which threatens the very foundations of our civilization. It now remains for the United States government to set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus… to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized … In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition. The number of the feebleminded would decrease and a heavy burden would be lifted from the shoulders of the fit. Such a bonus would be wise and profitable investment… It would be the salvation of American civilization.”
~ (The Function of Sterilization, Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 10, October 1926, page 299)
“It is already evident that … the defective, delinquent and dependent classes are multiplying with reckless irresponsibility… Any intelligent analyst must admit that today there are too many of the wrong kind of people in our world, and too few of the right kind… The first great need of modern society is the encouragement of Birth Control education among potential parents of those poorer strata of society… It goes without saying that … parenthood should be forbidden to the insane, the feeble-minded, the epileptic and to all those suffering from transmissible diseases. Modern methods of sterilization make this possible without the infliction of undue hardships or unhappiness..”
~ (The Need for Birth Control, Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 9, August 1928, page 228)