We are not so very far off from even the sacrifice of babies—if not to a crocodile, at least to a creed.
-- G. K. Chesterton1
Planned Parenthood officials have always tried to deflect any criticism of their founder’s radical and racist worldview. Though they have managed all manner of epistimological gymnastics and historical revisionism in a feeble attempt to deny it, hide it, and belie it, Margaret was undeniably mesmerized by the fashionable elitism of Malthusian Eugenics.2
Part of the attraction for her was obviously political: virtually all of her Socialist friends, lovers, and comrades were committed Eugenicists—from the followers of Lenin in Revolutionary Socialism like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Julius Hammer, to the followers of Hitler in National Socialism, like Ernest Rudin, Leon Whitney, and Harry Laughlin.
And part of the attraction for her was also personal: her mentor and lover, Havelock Ellis, was the beloved disciple of Francis Gabon, the brilliant cousin of Charles Darwin who first systemized and popularized Eugenic thought.
But it was not simply politics or sentiment that drew Margaret into the Eugenic fold. She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.” She really believed that “social regeneration” would only be possible as the “sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility” were repulsed. She had come to regard organized charity to ethnic minorities and the poor as a “symptom of a malignant social disease” because it encouraged the profligacy of those “defective, delinquents, and dependents” she so obviously abhorred. She yearned for the end of the Christian “reign of benevolence” that the Eugenic Socialists promised, when the “choking human undergrowth” of “morons and imbeciles” would be “segregated” and ultimately “sterilized.” Her greatest aspiration was “to create a race of thoroughbreds” by encouraging “more children from the fit, and less from the unfit.” And the only way to achieve that dystopic goal, she realized, was through the harsh and coercive tyranny of Malthusian Eugenics.3
In other words, she was a true believer, not simply someone who assimilated the jargon of the times—as Planned Parenthood officials would have us believe. She was a committed elitist bent on undermining the familial bonds of the poor and disenfranchised.4
Thus, as she began to build the work of the American Birth Control League, and ultimately, of planned Parenthood, Margaret relied heavily on the men, women, ideas, and resources of the Eugenics movement. Virtually all of the organization’s board members were Eugenicists. Financing for the early projects—from the opening of the first birth control clinics to the publishing of the revolutionary literature—came from Eugenicists. The speakers at the conferences, the authors of the propaganda, and the providers of the services were almost without exception avid Eugenicists. And as if that rather substantial evidence were not enough, the international work of Planned parenthood was originally housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society—while the organizations themselves are institutionally intertwined even to this day.
The Birth Control Review —Margaret’s magazine and the immediate predecessor to the Planned Parenthood Review —regularly and openly published the racist articles of Malthusian Eugenicists. In October of 1920, for instance, it published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard’s frightening book of Fascist diatribe, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. In September of 1923, the Review editorialized in favor of restricting immigration on a racial basis. In April of 1932, it outlined Margaret’s “Plan for peace,” which called for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and rehabilitative concentration camps for all “dysgenic stocks.” In April of 1933, the Review published a shocking article entitled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.” It was written by Margaret’s close friend and advisor, Ernst Rudin, who was then serving as Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and had earlier taken a prominent role in the establishment of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. Later, in June of that same year, it published an article by Leon Whitney entitled, “Selective Sterilization,” which adamantly praised and defended the Third Reich’s pre-holocaust “race purification” programs.
The bottom line is that Margaret self-consciously organized the Birth Control League -- and its progeny, Planned Parenthood—in part, to promote and enforce the scientifically elitist notions of White Supremacy. Like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, and the Mensheviks, Margaret’s enterprise was from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist. And this racist orientation was all too evident in its various programs and initiatives: government control over family decisions, non-medicinal health care experimentations, the rabid abortion crusade, and the coercive sterilization initiatives.
Margaret’s first wild stab at opening a birth control clinic, for example, was strategically aimed at the impoverished and densely populated Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The ramshackle two-room back alley hovel was a far cry from Margaret’s plush Greenwich Village haunts. But since the clientele she wished to attract, the “dysgenic immigrant Southern Europeans, Slavs, Latins, and Jews,” could only be lured into her snare there “in the coarser neighborhoods and tenements,” she was forced to venture out of her more familiar and comfortable confines.
As her organization grew in power and prestige, she began to target several other “ill-favored” and “dysgenic races, “including “Blacks, Hispanics, Amerinds, Fundamentalists, and Catholics."5 If was not long before she set up clinics in their respective communities as well. Margaret and the Malthusian Eugenicists she had gathered about her were not partial; every non-Aryan—red, yellow, black, or white— all were noxious in their sight. They sought to place new clinics wherever those “feeble-minded, syphilitic, irresponsible, and defective” stocks “bred unhindered.” Since by their estimation as much as 70 percent of the population fell into this “undesirable” category, Margaret and her cohorts really had their work cut out for them.
But they were more than up to the task.
In 1939, Margaret designed a “Negro Project” in response to requests from “southern state public health officials”—men not generally known for their racial equanimity.6 “The mass of Negroes,” her project proposal asserted, “particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” The proposal went on to say that “Public Health statistics merely hint at the primitive state of civilization in which most Negroes in the South live.”7
In order to remedy this “dysgenic horror story,” her project aimed to hire three or four “Colored Ministers, preferably with social service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities” to travel to various Black enclaves and propagandize for birth control. Her intention was as insidious as it was obvious:
The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.9
Of course, those Black ministers were to be carefully controlled—mere figureheads. “There is a great danger that we will fail,” one of the project directors wrote, “because the Negroes think it a plan for extermination. Hence, let’s appear to let the colored run it.” Another project director lamented:
I wonder if Southern Darkies can ever be entrusted with ... a clinic. Our experience causes us to doubt their ability to work except under White supervision.
The entire operation then was a ruse -- a manipulative attempt to get Blacks to cooperate in their own elimination.10
Sadly, the project was quite successful. Its genocidal intentions were carefully camouflaged beneath several layers of condescending social service rhetoric and organizational expertise. Like the citizens of Hamlin, lured into captivity by the sweet serenades of the Pied Piper, all too many Blacks across the country happily fell into step behind Margaret and the Eugenic racists she had placed on her Negro Advisory Council.
Soon clinics throughout the South were distributing contraceptives to Blacks and Margaret’s dream of discouraging “the defective and diseased elements of humanity” from their “reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning” was at last being fulfilled.
The strategy was of course racial and not geographical. The Southern states were picked simply because of the high proportion of Blacks in their populations. In later decades, expansion to the North and West occurred. But the basic guidelines remained: the proportion of minorities in a community was closely related to the density of birth control clinics.
The “champion of birth control” and the “patron saint of feminism” was no less horrific in her disdain for the helpless and the hapless than any of the other monsters of progressivism during the first half of the twentieth century—Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Mao. The only difference is that they have all been duly discredited, while she has not—at least, not yet.