Free Sex, End Marriage, Purify the Gene Pool

For Margaret Sanger, mother of Planned Parenthood, contraception was only part of the plan.

Reed, Miriam, Ph.D. Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words. Fort Lee: Barricade Books, 2003.

In Facebook Memories, I just came across my 2004 review of Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words, which I published on my old Catholic Pundit Wannabe blog. I revised and republished it below.

I didn’t realize until I read her biography that Margaret Sanger, who spent her life promoting birth control, didn’t just merely want to make contraception available to everyone, She wanted to put an end to marriage. She wanted everyone to be free to have sex at any time with anyone. Sanger like the majority of intellectuals who bought into eugenicist ideas in that era wished also to purify the gene pool, so she wanted to control the reproduction of persons who were "unfit" or "feebleminded," or who would pass on mental disease or serious physical defects. And she advocated forced sterilization as you will see if you read further.

---

The photo on the cover of Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words shows her as an apparently loving, lovely mother holding a smiling baby who looks to be about seven months old. In the Introduction, we learn Margaret Sanger was a redhead, a "charismatic woman," daughter of a free-thinking father—a point which I think is very significant in the origins of her thinking about faith, marriage, and babies.

”When Sanger was a child, the sixth and middle child of a total of eleven children, her father read and discussed the ideas of the most progressive thinkers, the radicals, of his day, feeding his family large doses of, among others . . . William Ingersoll, the atheist and early advocate of artificial contraception and women's rights."

"'Hearing Margaret pray for 'our daily bread, her father hectored her, ‘Is God a baker?’” He was a talker and “an improvident provider” more fond of espousing his ideas than earning a living. He also kept his tubercular wife pregnant with a total of eighteen pregnancies and eleven live births. He kept on impregnating her; even though she was ill in bed for ten years, she kept getting pregnant throughout all her bedridden years.

Her mother’s yearly rate of conception leads me to guess that she wasn't breastfeeding, because breastfeeding usually naturally spaces births.

Margaret concluded that her mother's misery was due to a lack of access to birth control, but it seems to me that it was just as much due to her blowhard layabout father's lack of self-control.

“Very early in my childhood I associated large families with poverty, toil, drunkenness, cruelty to children, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails, and the Catholic Church.”—From Sanger's memoir Girlhood

From knowing the large families that worship with me at traditional Latin Masses, I associate large families with virtues such as being able to live happily with fewer luxuries (which puts fewer demands on the planet); mutual love between the children (the older children adore each new baby and vie to hold him or her); respect, affection, and closeness between the parents; better moral upbringing of well-behaved children who are eager learners—and happy obedience to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Sanger was a beauty, but she wanted to be appreciated for her brains. At least in this area, I have to agree and say, "Good for her." At the end of Sanger’s memoir quoted in her biography, she wrote that she turned her thoughts away from the stage because the application to drama school asked for the measurements of her calves! "I turned my desires to more serious studies where brains, not legs, were to count."

Sanger, an Independent Woman like Dorothy Day

Like Dorothy Day in her youth, born eighteen years after Sanger, Sanger started as a believer in socialism. Like Sanger, Day studied and practiced nursing and was friends with the playwright, Eugene O'Neil. Sanger was also friends with Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle, a book that strongly influenced Day in the development of her philosophy of how to help the poor.

When Sanger and her husband moved from the suburbs to NYC in 1911, and he stopped practicing architecture, she went to work as a nurse in the poverty-ridden Lower East Side. Sanger blamed the hellish conditions of life among the poor to lack of birth control, and also to capitalism. Sanger cared a lot about the rights, health, and happiness of poor women, but she spent her time hanging around with educated socialists and later with members of society’s upper crust, after she chose an oil-tycoon as her second husband, so her charity might be a kind of Lady Bountiful way of trying to fix people.

Sanger exhorted women to organize and to join the Socialist party, which alone was working for the following:

• Absolute equality between men and women

• Welfare (she didn't call it that) which would allow women to stay home with their children and thereby give the fathers some relief from having to support the family solely on the low wages that were available to them

• Support and education of children at least until they were 16

• The end of child labor

Even though Sanger was a habitual adulterer and often lied, the author refers to Sanger as having "a deep spiritual quality." The author also writes that Sanger’s demands for the benefit of women were specifically these:

"Let women decide for herself if and when she is to have children. Let the coming of the children be spaced so that the mother has physical health, emotional strength, and sufficient funds to care for the child. Let every child be wanted."

In a moral theology class I took once, the professor taught we should be able to summarize the main points of those who disagree with us. I would say the above statements are Sanger’s main points that helped sway the world and the world's churches away from prohibiting birth control towards fully advocating it, starting with the Anglicans in the 1930s. The Catholic Church is the only church that didn’t get swayed.

Sanger's book refers to "the absurd state and federal Comstock laws, which since 1873 had made contraception advice and devices illegal and straightforward language pertaining to sexual matters legally obscene. ... Rushed through Congress in 'hot haste' just before its close in 1873, the federal Comstock law made it a crime to manufacture, sell, or send through the U.S. mails any obscene article, including any article that was intended to prevent conception, or any printed matter that offered information on preventing conception."

Margaret Sanger's advocacy of birth control was part of her socialism. In "What Every Girl Should Know" Sanger wrote, "Until capitalism is swept away, there is no hope ... [that girls will live a beautiful life ... that women can live in the family relation and have children without sacrificing every vestige of individual development. . . .Soon . . . women [will] rise in one big sisterhood to fight this capitalist society which compels a woman to serve as an implement for man's use."

I agree that nobody should be anybody's tool, but I can’t agree with most aspects of the freedom Sanger campaigned for or with the way Sanger lived out that so-called freedom, as a woman pursuing sexual pleasure entirely for its own sake. The author of her biography records that Sanger taught her how to sexualize her entire body.

More About Her Philosophy

Sanger was a close friend and probably lover of sex researcher, Havelock Ellis, and she was promiscuous with many other partners. Like her, Ellis was also a proponent of sexuality for its own sake, divorced from reproduction. He had an “open marriage,” with a lesbian wife. (For more on Ellis’s relationship with Sanger see, “The King and I: Sanger Remembers Havelock Ellis.”)

Sanger wrote a book for parents to educate their children about sex in How Six Little Children Were Told the Truth. (You can read it at the Gutenberg project here.) In the book, you can see she wasn't thoroughly a woke thinker, at least about some things. She warns the children against tampering" with "the generative organs, "which would lead to 'darkness, dullness of intellect, stupidity, physical and mental weakness.'"

She described the development of marriage in prejudicial terms that are part of our current mythology, telling the children that in the early days of human life, women chose their mates freely, but when men developed tools that they wanted to insure went to their own children, they bought women from the chief, and women lost their freedom of choice. [She doesn’t say where she got her "facts" from, but probably from Ellis.]

Also like Dorothy Day, Sanger protested and was arrested for her beliefs An article in the New York Call, April 20, 1913, called "With the Girls in Hazelton Jail,” Sanger wrote about her arrest and jailing for walking in a picket line.

Besides Contraception, She Had Other Goals

I have to admit Sanger was a better writer than Day. In an unpublished article quoted in the book, Sanger uses such catchy phrases as "conscript motherhood" (for those forced to bear children they didn't want) and "their slavery, the bondage of unwilling maternity." She describes how for the first time in the world, her newspaper "The Woman Rebel" printed the words "birth control.” In her autobiography, she told how she and her associates came up with the term "birth control."

“We tried population control, race control, and birth rate control. Then someone suggested, ‘Drop the rate.’ Birth control was the answer; we knew we had it – the baby was named.”

Even though Sanger wrote later that her goal was single-minded: to make birth control available to women, the book says that The Woman Rebel had a broader aim, no less than the end to marriage. Here is how the paper's goals were expressed in its first issue:

“The fight was not only to be one against 'slavery through motherhood' and ignorance of the 'prevention of conception,' but with equal ferocity to attack prostitution, sexual prudery, marriage, middle-class morality, wage slavery—all things that enslaved women.

Sanger and Abortion

Here's another eerily modern-sounding quote from the June 1914 issue of Women Rebel. (The first sentence was echoed in the title of the 1971 book Our Bodies Our Selves, which went on to sell 4 million copies and be translated into thirty languages and became what some people blasphemously call the Bible of the Sexual Revolution. I remember one illustration of a baby in its mother’s womb with callouts that claimed the baby was part of the mother and that it was the mother’s right to dispose of the baby if she chose.)  

A woman's body belongs to herself alone. It is her body. It does not belong to the church. It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other government on the face of the earth. The first step toward getting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for any woman is her decision whether or not she shall become a mother. Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman's right to life and liberty.

This attitude is implicit in the paranoia-inducing The Handmaid’s Tale book by Margaret Atwood and the popular series based on the book. A lot of women are wearing red garments that are the costume of the Atwood’s handmaids when they protest restrictions against abortion, showing their belief that laws against abortion are a way to enforce motherhood.

Sanger was against abortion herself, in a qualified way. She spoke about abortion as vicious, as a “humiliating, repulsive, painful and too often gravely dangerous.” But she was sympathetic to women who aborted their babies because she believed they did it out of desperation. She promoted contraception because she believed that it would lower the number of unwanted children and the rate of abortion.

“Family limitation will always be practised as it is now being practised—either by Birth Control or by abortion. We know that. The one means health and happiness--a stronger, better race. The other means disease, suffering, death.” (MS, “Birth Control or Abortion?” Birth Control Review [Dec. 1918]: 3-4 [MSM S70:0809].)

At one point, Sanger self-published and mailed 100,000 copies of a pamphlet to addresses around the United States in which she described how to prevent pregnancy. She arranged to have the mailing go out after she was on a boat to Europe to flee the prosecution she would probably be facing for breaking the Comstock laws.

Sanger didn’t seem to object to early abortion. In the above-mentioned pamphlet, she described among other contraception methods, how to prevent a fertilized egg from "making its nest in the lining of the womb."

Myth Breaker #1: Abortion Skyrocketed After Contraception Was Normalized

Sanger was wrong that contraception reduces the rate of abortion. The fact is that abortions have skyrocketed since education about contraception was made widely available and abortion was legalized.

The natural outcome of intimacy between a man and a woman is conception. Fertility is built into a woman’s body. The measures we used to try to prevent conception are therefore unnatural. Our society treats the blessing of fertility as a disease.

Such efforts are an exact parallel to the Roman vomitoriums where people who gorged themselves at feasts could vomit food they had eaten for pleasure alone, without allowing the eating they had done to fulfill its accompanying natural function of nourishing their bodies.

We use barriers, hormones, sperm poisons, and mutilation (sterilization) to prevent pregnancy, instead of accepting any children God sends us.

A very large percentage of abortions are performed on women who are using contraception when the pregnancy occurs.

When a pregnancy results, which it often does, no matter what form of contraception is used, the conception of the child is seen as a failure. The woman who conceives is often blamed and abandoned, and the child who is conceived is often killed.

Planned Parenthood’s own statistics reveal that even when high-dose birth control pills, the most reliable form of birth control, are used faithfully, six out of a hundred women every year conceive. Because they are encouraged to believe in contraception’s reliability, most people are unaware of any potential failure, until it happens to them.

The woman who finds herself pregnant often blames herself or is blamed by the man. Planned Parenthood gladly offers the backup solution of abortion, allowing women to pay professional hit men and women to kill their children in their wombs.

Contraception Replaces God

Here’s a quote from Sanger's diary when she was in London "Women & men must be a god unto themselves." She often railed like this against the Catholic Church:

Women must recognize how "the stupid decrees of men; the church; a false tradition" have deliberately turned women into tools for the ends of patriarchal institutions. . . .. With marriage under its control, the church not only made the woman subject to her fertility, but it made her subject to her husband—or father or brother--along with subject to God and all the priests, more or less enforcing a sort of triple or quadruple jeopardy. Abundantly subjected, woman accepted her role as 'that of an incubator and little more.'"

The author of the biography also mentions several times how attracted Sanger was to Nietzschean philosophy, which, as described here, seems very similar to the modern moral theologian's attitude towards traditional morality:

Nietzschean philosophy . . . gloried in the courage to challenge the convictions of centuries and encouraged the individual to stick to one's convictions in the higher truth . . ..

Sanger started her own publication called The Women Rebel starting in March 1914, again like Dorothy Day, who started the Catholic Worker a few decades later, on May 1, 1933.  Sanger went on to split with "the radical community in the early 20s" and later downplayed her Socialist associations. Day repudiated her socialism also, but she took a better path, going on to encourage sacrificial solidarity with the poor among Catholics.

On January 26, 1932, The Nation published Sanger’s article, "My Answer to the Pope on Birth Control." On August 11, Margaret Sanger was "banned from Rome."

Her ideas made a lot of progress everywhere else. "By late 1915, public interest in birth control was no longer confined to liberals and lefties." In 1921, on November 10 Margaret Sanger organized ABCL, the American Birth Control League), which eventually became (on January 29, 1942) the "Planned Parenthood Federation of America."

Sanger is said to have wished for a magic pill to separate sex from reproduction. She was instrumental in bringing that magic pill into being. In 1951, Sanger met with Katherine McCormick (major funder of research specifically dedicated to developing the Pill), and Gregory Pincus who was McCormick's chosen researcher—with John Rock, a Catholic doctor who worked on the development of the Pill and later left the faith). She helped fund their work.

In 1955, Pincus announced the Pill. On May 11, 1960, six years before Sanger died, the FDA approved it.

Sanger got her wish.

---

This is my wish, my prayer.