Margaret Sanger, birth control, eugenics

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow on Margaret Sanger, from The Nation.

In March 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight-page monthly produced out of her apartment. At this stage she advocated contraception for feminist reasons but also as part of an anticapitalist agenda: Workers, in her view, were multiplying too fruitfully, thus cheapening their labor; birth control offered a weapon for the revolution. In the first issue she wrote, "Woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child-rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions"...

In October 1916 Sanger opened a clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, again testing the law. Hundreds of women, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants, flocked there to receive birth control information and instruction. In a newspaper interview, Sanger boasted, "You can hear them calling from house to house in the congested district, 'Oh, Mrs. Rosenbaum, you ought to see this; this is something fine!'" But after ten days, the police shut the clinic down and arrested Sanger and her colleagues. Sanger spent several weeks in prison, but the sacrifice paid off: The case resulted in a court decision that contraception could be prescribed by doctors in New York State for general health reasons, not just for the prevention of venereal disease. This court decision, and the tremendous national attention generated through Sanger's sensational tactics, were major victories. Sanger's radicalism advanced her cause at this stage, although as she shifted to a more moderate approach, she tried to distance herself from these roots....

Although Sanger's arguments centered on the rights of women to be emancipated from conscripted motherhood, broader social ideologies were always present as well. Initially anticapitalist, she later adopted eugenic reasoning; later still, during the Depression, she insisted that birth control for the poor would solve the economy's problems. The common thread was that fewer children were better than more--a reasonable opinion with problematic implications.

Her primary exposure was to the masses of women who desperately wanted to control their family size. She received a constant stream of letters thanking her and soliciting advice, and answered many of them personally and with care. "You must not look upon this relationship as if you were a bad girl," she wrote to one young woman distraught over the premarital loss of her virginity. But presumably Sanger never received letters from the "unfit" reporting the tragedies that resulted from eugenic policies of forced sterilization. Her own views on the "dysgenic" are chilling. In a speech called "My Way to Peace" (she considered birth control the antidote to war, to boot), she advocated "a stern and rigid policy of sterilization" in order to control the reproduction of "morons, mental defectives, epileptics."

She did not regard the poor as inherently "unfit"--after all, she herself came from a poor family. She believed access to birth control would enable the working classes to provide for and nurture their children; lower quantity would mean higher quality. And in a milieu where racism was common, she frowned on prejudice in her clients and won the admiration of W.E.B. Du Bois for her work with the black community. But she believed that certain traits, such as epilepsy, mental retardation and physical disabilities, should disqualify people from reproducing. In 1934, in response to a questionnaire for the Yale News, she wrote of the new Nazi sterilization laws for the "unfit" (which were based on the proposals of American eugenicists): "If by 'unfit' is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable gesture but if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter which I frankly deplore." (Sanger later helped a number of Jews escape from Europe by promising them work in the States.)

Sanger's concept of worthwhile life, then, was ruthlessly narrow, and she readily disregarded the rights of certain people. Also, she naïvely failed to see that oppression easily leaks beyond porous barriers. In Nazi Germany, the sterilization laws she admired--explicitly directed at the mentally retarded, schizophrenic and comparable classes--were, of course, soon turned against the Jews and other ethnic groups.

In the United States, involuntary sterilization was also scandalously widespread. In 1927 the practice received the blessing of the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, which upheld the compulsory sterilization of a poor young mother, Carrie Buck, who was deemed "feeble-minded." The laws technically applied to the "feeble-minded" and other pseudo-scientifically designated "dysgenic" sorts. But in practice, the victims of involuntary sterilization--and there were tens of thousands of them, over the course of decades--were simply poor women and girls, disproportionately black, Puerto Rican and Native American...

The conflation of eugenics and reproductive rights has resurfaced...in a different context. New genetic technologies herald the arrival of a "new eugenics," allowing the creation of "designer babies." The original eugenics was a misguided utopian scheme gone disastrously awry, all too typical of its time; the sequel, appropriately for ours, is about consumer choice. In both cases, threats lurk among the apparent promises: This time, unfettered use of enhancement technologies could lead to starkly deepened inequalities and disconcerting control over human evolution...

The conflation of eugenics and reproductive rights has resurfaced, however, in a different context. New genetic technologies herald the arrival of a "new eugenics," allowing the creation of "designer babies." The original eugenics was a misguided utopian scheme gone disastrously awry, all too typical of its time; the sequel, appropriately for ours, is about consumer choice. In both cases, threats lurk among the apparent promises: This time, unfettered use of enhancement technologies could lead to starkly deepened inequalities and disconcerting control over human evolution.