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A study of Planned Parenthoods dishonesty about Margaret Sanger - Part one
By Valerie Jane | April 25, 2008
Planned Parenthoods website has a page dedicated to their founder, Margaret Sanger. It reads more like an explanation of her belief’s and an attempt to convince others of her greatness.
At the bottom is a section called “Published Statements that Distort or Misquote Margaret Sanger”. Here’s the problem: How can Planned 
Parenthood claim someone is distorting a statment when they do the same thing to prove this distortment. In my study of this I will provide proof that Planned Parenthoods attempts to justify their leader is pathetic.
From the Planned Parenthood website:
“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
This statement is taken out of context from Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race (Sanger, 1920). Sanger was making an ironic comment — not a prescriptive one — about the horrifying rate of infant mortality among large families of early 20th-century urban America. The statement, as grim as the conditions that prompted Sanger to make it, accompanied this chart, illustrating the infant death rate in 1920:Deaths During First Year
1st born children 23% 7th born children 31% 2nd born children 20% 8th born children 33% 3rd born children 21% 9th born children 35% 4th born children 23% 10th born children 41% 5th born children 26% 11th born children 51% 6th born children 31% 12th born children 60%
These statistics cannot be found in neither the CDC’s National Center for Health Statitics nor the United States Census. What Planned Parenthood neglects to tell you is that these numbers in her book are from the study of one man. She explains in this chapter where she got her stats from:
The direct relationship between the size of the wage-earner’s family and the death of children less than one year old has been revealed by a number of studies of the infant death rate. One of the clearest of these was that made by Arthur Geissler among miners and cited by Dr. Alfred Ploetz before the First International Eugenic Congress.
Dr. Alfred Ploetz was a Eugenicist who co-introduced the concept of Racial Hygene. Gee, I wonder why Planned Parenthood didn’t give us that information?
Why didn’t they prove that the statment alone can be misinterpreted by providing us the entire praragragh? That sentence comes from a Chapter entitled “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families”. Here are the first two sentences in that chapter:
THE MOST serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children.
Sanger saying to kill an infant family member when she thinks having too many children is an immoral evil is an ironic statement?
Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that the child who must struggle for health in competition with other members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted for.
What else does she say in that chapter?
Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a girl into prostitution usually has its source in a family too large to be properly cared for by the mother, if the girl is not actually subnormal because her mother bore too many children, and, therefore, the more likely to become a prostitute. Labor is oppressed because it is too plentiful; wages go up and conditions improve when labor is scarce. Large families make plentiful labor and they also provide the workers for the child-labor factories as well as the armies of unemployed. That population, swelled by overbreeding, is a basic cause of war, we shall see in a later chapter. Without the large family, not one of these evils could exist to any considerable extent, much less to the extent that they exist to-day.
The probability of a child handicapped by a weak constitution, an overcrowded home, inadequate food and care, and possibly a deficient mental equipment, winding up in prison or an almshouse, is too evident for comment. Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and institution for the feebleminded cries out against the evils of too prolific breeding among wage-workers.
The evidence is conclusive as regards the large family of the wage-worker. Social workers, physicians and reformers cry out to stop the breeding of these, who must exist in want until they become permanent members of the ranks of the unfit.
Excessive childbearing is harder on the woman who lacks care than on the one who does not, but both alike must give their bodies time to recover from the strain of childbearing. If the women in fortunate circumstances gave ear to the demand of masculine “race-suicide” fanatics they could within a few years be down to the condition of their sisters who lack time to cultivate their talents and intellects. A vigorous, intelligent, fruitfully cultured motherhood is all but impossible if no restriction is placed by that motherhood upon the number of children.
Large families among the rich are immoral not only because they invade the natural right of woman to the control of her own body, to self-development and to self-expression, but because they are oppressive to the poorer elements of society.
Physically and nervously, the woman of to-day is not fitted to bear children as frequently as was her mother and her mother’s mother. The high tension of modern life and the complicating of woman’s everyday existence have doubtless contributed to this result.
When it came to large families, Sanger believed no one should have a large family; The rich, the middle class nor the poor. I think the satement “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” was taken correctly and it is Planned Parenthood’s delusions that have taken it out of context.
Sanger’s vision of smaller families has become reality now. However, her vision of a different society hasn’t. Everything she said smaller families would cure is still here today.
Topics: Facts, Planned Parenthood |