The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger IV: Eugenics and Race

A Ku Klux Klan rally (1922) 
Margaret Sanger addressed a KKK group in 1926

In 1939 the Birth Control Federation of America launched a new initiative called the ‘Negro Project’ to spread the ideology and practice of birth control among African Americans.

One of Margaret Sanger’s chief allies was Clarence Gamble, of the Proctor & Gamble dynasty, who was an ardent eugenicist and advocate of forced sterilisation. In a letter to Gamble she wrote:   

“It seems to me from my experience where I have been in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts... The ministers [sic] work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man to straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

This has often been seen as evidence that Sanger wished to eliminate the black race through eugenic birth control. However the truth is probably more complicated. There is no compelling evidence that Sanger was necessarily motivated by racism. As we have seen in previous posts, it was the physically and mentally disabled that she most desired to eliminate through contraception, segregation and sterilisation.  However it is not surprising that her work was open to such interpretations as throughout her career she was happy to collaborate with white supremacists at home and Nazis abroad.

Sanger appointed Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy, as a member of the board of directors of the American Birth Control League. Stoddard believed that the growth of non-white populations was putting western civilisation at risk. The book was based in large part on the racial theories of Madison Grant, whose book The Passing of the Great Race, was described by Adolf Hitler as his ‘Bible.’ At the Nuremberg Trials a defence lawyer for Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and head of the Nazi euthanasia programme, used Grant’s book to help prove that the many of the ideas and practices implemented by the Nazis originated in the United States of America.

There were many connections between Sanger’s circle and the Nazi regime in Germany. Her friend Harry Laughlin drafted the model sterilisation law that was largely adopted by the Third Reich and he praised the Nazi regime during the 1930s. The Rockefeller Foundation supported both Sanger and Nazi eugenic programmes. Advocates of Nazi eugenics played a leading role in the international birth control movement, speaking at international conferences such as the 1927 Geneva conference which was organised by Sanger and was attended by future Nazis Edwin Baur and Eugen Fischer. Sanger's conference helped inspire the founding of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. The 1935 IUSSP conference was held in Berlin where American eugenicist Clarence G. Campbell toasted "that great leader, Adolf Hitler."

Hans Harmsen - worked with both Hitler and Sanger

The American Birth Control League changed its name to The Planned Parenthood Federation of America after the United States entered the Second World War in 1942 in order to hide from its former association with Nazi policies. However despite the change of name there were continuing links between Nazis and the modern eugenic and abortion movements. Hans Harmsen, a leading German eugenicist who took part in the implementation of the Nazi forced sterilisation programme in East Frisia, was head of the German affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation during Sanger’s presidency. In fact, he remained in the latter office as late as 1984.

Racist attitudes, or indifference to such attitudes, have always been commonplace within the abortion and birth control movement. Beatrice Blair, a leading abortion advocate, accepted money to build an abortion facility in a black area of Rochester, New York fully aware that ‘many people, in their minds, made the connection, well, we’re going to keep the blacks down.’[1] In Chicago Lonny Myers accepted the support of racist donors arguing ‘any cause has strange bedfellows.’[2] In a 2008 sting operation a Planned Parenthood clinic showed itself willing to accept donations specifically intended to be used to kill black infants and earlier this year abortionist Ashutosh Virmani spoke of killing ‘ugly black babies’ who nobody would want to adopt.[3] The eugenic nature of Britain’s abortion laws is seen by the distinction in law between disabled and non-disabled infants. The latter may be aborted up to 24 weeks but the former at any time up till birth. 90% of all those conceived with Down’s Syndrome are killed in their mother’s wombs. It is clear then that much of the movement is still motivated by eugenic principles. Hitler’s ‘Aryan race’, Stopes’ ‘irradiated race’ or Sanger’s ‘racial efficiency’ are all manifestations of the desire of the eugenicist to force the human race, no matter by what cruel or destructive means, to conform to their own ideal of perfection.

Earlier posts in this series:

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger Part I

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger II: From Marx to Malthus

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger III: Eugenics and Birth Control

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[1] Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility, p45

[2] Ibid

[3] See http://www.lifenews.com/2008/04/02/state-3078/

and http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/caught-on-video-abortionist-talks-of-the-ugly-black-babies-he-aborts

The Life and Crimes of Margaret Sanger III: Eugenics and Birth Control



A 1919 issue of the
 Birth Control Review  



Margaret Sanger established the first birth control clinic in the United States of America at Brownsville, New York in 1916. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League to advocate for the adoption of artificial birth control at the level both of public policy and of individual practice. She followed this in 1923 with the establishment of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau which was the first legal birth control clinic and a centre of research into contraceptive methods. In 1928 due to an internal conflict she resigned from the ABCL and took full control of the BCCRB.  In 1929 she founded the National Committee for Federal Legislation on Birth Control. The ABCL and the BCCRB were reunited in 1939 as the Birth Control Federation of America, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Sanger did not lead the merged organisation but she was responsible for the founding of the International Committee of Planned Parenthood in 1948 which became the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952. Sanger was its first President and held this position until 1959.

The above narrative alone demonstrates the extent of Sanger’s commitment to the ideology of birth control. In the first part of this series we saw that Sanger was an advocate of sexual ‘liberation’ and saw contraception as a means of allowing women to pursue a promiscuous ‘liberated’ lifestyle while attempting to avoid the natural consequence of their behaviour. We have also seen, in Part II, that she came to adopt the Malthusian position that birth control was the only solution to the problem of poverty.  However Sanger had a much wider agenda than merely reducing the birth rate. She believed that a ‘qualitative factor as opposed to a quantitative one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of humanity.’[1]  In other words she saw the primary end of birth control as improving the ‘quality’ of the population rather than population reduction. In 1921 she stated that ‘The campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.’ She continued ‘The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective... 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.’[2] She considered certain human beings to be ‘human weeds’ who ‘clog up the path, drain up the energies and resources of this little earth’.[3] On another occasion she regretted that while ‘nature eliminates the weeds... we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce.’[4] Such sentiments are not original. Sanger is here expressing opinions which were identical in substance to those of other prominent supporters of eugenics such as Francis Galton, H.G Wells and Marie Stopes.

An American billboard promoting Eugenics

Margaret Sanger was a long term member and supporter of the American Eugenics Society and encouraged cooperation between organisations advocating eugenics and those advocating birth control. A majority of the AES’s ‘Committee on Eugenics and Dysgenics of Birth Regulation’ were in fact formally associated with Sanger organisations. A main aim of the eugenics movement at this time was to introduce forced sterilisation for those deemed ‘defective.’ Sanger openly advocated that ‘defectives’ should be segregated or sterilised. She expressed her frustration that eugenic programmes were not being implemented more swiftly: ‘We know, without doubt, that certain groups should not reproduce themselves. Why not say so... We cannot improve the race until we first cut down production of its least desirable members.’[5] In her ‘Plan for Peace’ published in 1938 Sanger called for segregation, sterilisation, and what amounted to slavery and forced labour for the ‘unfit’:

d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.
f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.



More than 30 American states practised compulsory sterilisation during the period from 1907 to 1964 leaving behind more than 63,000 victims whose suffering has never been adequately recognised. Around 60% of these sterilisation were performed on women, yet many of Sanger’s feminist biographers have been willing to ignore her complicity in this system, lest it force themselves or their readers to challenge the notion that Sanger was a great ‘liberator’ of women.

An objective assessment of her published writings leaves no doubt that one of Sanger’s primary aims in advocating birth control was bring about the creation of a future purified race that conformed more closely to those ideas of perfection that prevailed among her own circle. The freedom that Sanger advocated was merely the freedom to indulge in promiscuous sexual acts while frustrating their natural outcome. The freedom to pursue a normal family life was not something that Sanger recognised. Indeed any woman who preferred raising a large family in the normal context of marriage was deemed for that very reason to be ‘irrational’ and unworthy of the vision of sexually liberated womanhood that Sanger had set before them. Her successors in the abortion industry today are still implementing a eugenic programme though they hide behind the rhetoric of ‘choice’.  Parents of children with disabilities are often put under enormous pressure to have their children killed in the womb with the result that, for example, 90% of children with Down’s Syndrome are eliminated before birth. In a society still dominated by the eugenic principles which have been propagated among us for more than a century what kind of ‘choice’ will most parents feel ‘free’ make?

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[1] Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

[2] Margaret Sanger ‘The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda’, The Birth Control Review, October 1921

[3] Margaret Sanger, ‘The Need for Birth Control in America’ Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities ed. Adolf Meyer, 1925

[4] Quoted in Angela Franks, Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy, p48

[5] Taken from a letter written to leading eugenicist Frederick Osborn in 1939 and quoted in Franks, Sanger, p11-12 

Sir Francis Galton: the father of Eugenics

Sir Francis Galton 1822 - 1911

The term ‘eugenics’, literally meaning ‘well-born’, was coined by Sir Francis Galton, who may be considered the ‘father of eugenics’ as he laid the intellectual foundations of the movement and placed his considerable prestige and influence behind practical efforts to further it. 

Francis Galton was born on the 16^th February 1822 in Birmingham. He has often been described as a ‘child progidy’, learning to read and memorise long portions of the classics at a young age. It was decided that he should study medicine and consequently in 1838, aged sixteen, he took up residence as an ‘indoor pupil’ at Birmingham Central Hospital. He then studied medicine for one year at King’s College, London. In 1840 he continued his studies by reading Mathematics at Cambridge. He does not seem to have held any recognisably Christian beliefs; in fact he was later to argue that the improvement of mankind by eugenics ‘must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion'. And he saw ‘no impossibility in eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind.’[1] Perhaps this idea of the perfectibility of man without God owes its origin to his membership of the Scientific Lodge of the Freemasons which he joined early in 1844, becoming a Master Mason on 13^th May the same year.[2] A central tenet of Freemasonry is a naturalism which pursues human ‘progress’ without any reference to God or supernatural grace and it would be very surprising if there were no connection between Galton’s ideas and his membership of the order. The year 1844 also saw the death of his father which left him an inheritance sufficiently large that he no longer needed to train for a profession. He spent the next few years travelling and on his return to Britain engaged in various scientific pursuits.

Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882

The publication of On the Origin of Species by his cousin Charles Darwin was one of the most important events of his scientific career. He wrote that it ‘made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally’ and that its effect was ‘to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities' whose teachings he thought were opposed to scientific facts.[3] However it is worth remembering that many of those things that Galton considered ‘facts’, such as the inferiority of the African races, have since been disputed or rejected all together. Galton began to apply Darwin’s theory to the study of variations among human beings and became convinced that mankind could and should be made the object of selective breeding, after the manner of animals, in order to increase the frequency of ‘superior’ qualities, such as intelligence.

There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed, who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.[4]

Galton spent the rest of his life pursuing ‘race improvement’. One of his suggestions was that the Chinese should be encouraged to migrate to Africa to ‘out-breed and finally displace’ the ‘inferior Negro race’. He argued that ‘average negroes possess too little intellect, self-reliance, and self-control to make it possible for them to sustain the burden of any respectable form of civilization’ whereas ‘the Chinaman is a being of another kind, who is endowed with a remarkable aptitude for a high material civilization.’ Essentially he saw the Chinese as an evolutionary ‘competitor’ to the indigineous Africans. The elimination of the latter by outbreeding was a ‘gain’ which ‘would be immense to the whole civilized world’.[5] It was a small step, made in a few generations, from justifying the slow elimination of a ‘lesser race’ by outbreeding to justifying the speedier process of extermination by genocide.

Sir Francis Galton was concerned not only with the elimination of inferior races but also with the perfecting of white Europeans. Like many of his contemporaries he was convinced that the population of Britain was ‘degenerating’.[6] He wrote to the Times in 1909 to complain that ‘the bulk of the community is deteriorating’.[7] He divided the nation into three categories; a minority of ‘desirables’, a larger number of ‘passables’, and another minority of ‘undesirables.’[8] He advocated awarding diplomas to men and women of exceptional intellectual and physical qualities and then encouraging them to intermarry. He recommended that the wealthy seek out promising young persons among the poor for their patronage, suggesting that ‘it might well become… as much an avowed object of honour, for noble families to gather the best specimens of humanity around them, as it is to maintain fine breeds of cattle and so forth’.[9]

Galton complained that ‘a considerable part of the huge stream of British charity furthers, by indirect and unsuspected ways, the production and the support of the Unfit.’ Rather than being wasted on ‘harmful forms of charity’ resources should instead be directed to the ‘production and well-being of the Fit.’ He argued that ‘undesirables’ should still be cared for but insisted that ‘by means of isolation, or some less drastic yet adequate measure, a stop should be put on the production of families of children likely to include degenerates.’[10] In his work Eugenics: Its definition, scope and aims he expressed his belief that if ‘unsuitable marriages from the eugenic point of view were banned socially, or even regarded with the unreasonable disfavor which some attach to cousin-marriages, very few would be made.’[11]  

Sir Francis Galton was the primary originator of the ‘science’ of Eugenics but the movement he started soon spread. One of the first results was that numerous attempts were made to sterilise those deemed ‘undesirable’. A private members bill that would have legalised voluntary sterilisation was defeated in the House of Commons in 1931 but in the United States compulsory sterilisation was legalised in many states and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927. In other US states laws were passed forbidding certain groups to marry. It is claimed that in Sweden between 30,000 – 62,000 ‘undesireables’ such as the mentally ill were sterilised under varying degrees of compulsion. The province of Alberta in Canada permitted the sterilisation of aboriginal girls in ‘native schools’ and eugenics has been seen as an important factor behind the policy of removing mixed race children from their aboriginal parents. In Australia it was thought that Aborigines would die out, if they were kept apart from whites, because of their evolutionary inferiority. Eugenic arguments were also deployed in Japan to promote forced sterilisation and then, in 1948, the legalisation of abortion.

The connection between eugenics and abortion is very clear. If one human being is considered of less worth than another, and if their existence is seen as a threat to the well-being of the race, then it follows logically that there will be those who wish to resolve the problem, often by more direct means that those advocated by Sir Francis Galton. Towards the end of his life Galton was praised by the Jewish Chronicle for his life spent ‘improving the fitness of the human race and striving to secure that children born into the world shall be well born in the sense that they shall not start life handicapped due to physical defects.’[12] The abortion industry, in its relentless war against unborn children with disabilities, has simply taken this position to its logical conclusion. 

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[1] Francis Galton, ‘Eugenics: Its definition, scope and aims’, The American Journal of Sociology 11, (1905)  

[2] Papers held by the Galton Laboratory, University College London and the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London.

[3] Francis Galton, Memories of my Life, (1908)

[4] Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius, (Preface to 1892 edition)

[5] Francis Galton, ‘Africa for the Chinese’, Letter published in the Times on 5^th June 1873.

[6] Francis Galton, ‘Our national physique--prospects of the British race--are we degenerating?’, Daily Chronicle, 29^th July 1903

[7] Francis Galton, 'Deterioration of the British Race', Letter published in the Times, 18^th June 1909

[8] Francis Galton, ‘Address on Eugenics’, Westminster Gazette 26, (1908)

[9] Francis Galton, ‘The possible improvement of the human breed under the existing conditions of law and sentiment’, Nature 64, (1901)

[10] Galton, ‘Address on Eugenics’

[11] Galton, ‘Eugenics: Its definition, scope and aims’

[12] Introduction to an interview with Francis Galton in the Jewish Chronicle on 20^th July 1910