Margaret Sanger

Late this April, while speaking before the U. S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on taxpayer funded abortion, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made reference to how she saw her admiration of Thomas Jefferson in the same light as her admiration of Margaret Sanger. Now I know most people thought nothing of this, just as they probably no very little of Margaret Sanger, but I think it important to look at Sanger and to know who she was and what she stood for.

Secretary Clinton maintains that her admiration for Sanger comes from Mrs. Sanger’s efforts in the field of expanding the rights of women. To a degree, she has a point. Mrs. Sanger was an ardent supporter of the women’s suffrage movement and an advocate of legalized abortion; however, if you look at the whole of her beliefs, I think most of us would be hard-pressed to look at Mrs. Sanger with anything more than distaste.

Ms. Sanger was an ardent pro-abortion supporter (although she believed in privately funded apportion), socialist, racist, and a staunch believer in the “science” of Eugenics. I am sure most folks know what socialism and racism is, but what about Eugenics. According to Webster’s Dictionary, Eugenics is the science that deals with the improvement (as a means of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed. Sound familiar – yes, that is the same “science” the Third Reich used in establishing their “Final Solution.”

In her book “Pivot of Civilization,” Sanger argued the three points of her Eugenic beliefs.
First, she called for the elimination of “human weeds,” examples of those being immigrants of Slavic, Italian, Jewish, black and catholic heritages.
Second, she called for the segregation of “morons, misfits, and maladjusted.”
Third, she called for the sterilization of “genetically inferior races.”

In the same book she further made her point by saying that many of the people in these three groups were “an increasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” These were the same sort of claims and arguments she made in front of many organizations including the KKK.

In part due to Mrs. Sanger’s influence, several of the leading families during the early 1900’s used their own influence, and money, to help establish clinics that studied Eugenics. These studies and resulting “programs” attempted to show how the use of this “science” could help make the human race more genetically superior. These influential individuals also used their influence to help build programs outside the U.S. including the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Psychology and Eugenics that were later used for research and development by the Third Reich.

I am not sure why Secretary Clinton chose Margaret Sanger as a person worth her admiration. Maybe she didn’t know the entire history of Margaret Sanger. Maybe she was just going by the publicity used by Planned Parenthood in their awarding of the Margaret Sanger Award (of which Hillary Clinton was the 2009 recipient). Incidentally, I looked at the list of awardees from the past and it is the oddest assortment of bedfellows I have seen in a while.

Mrs. Clinton said she admired Sanger for her work to help women to gain the freedom to make choices of their own. Mrs. Clinton also elaborated that, like Thomas Jefferson, it is hard to judge historical figures because they are all flawed. I get it, Jefferson owned slaves, but how can you compare that flaw with Sanger’s who advocated the EXTERMINATION of the minority races here in America. Is that the judgment we want in our Secretary of State?

Gute Nacht,
Bill