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Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility

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TIME magazine called Margaret Sanger one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, saying that "her crusade to legalize birth control spurred the movement for women's liberation." While many remember her advocacy for birth control, few remember or give due consideration to the eugenic philosophy that drove Sanger and her allies in the birth control, and later population control or "family planning" movements. This book corrects that significant historical deficit.

In this book, Franks shows that any concern Sanger had for women's rights was secondary to her larger agenda -- helping to create a better race by controlling the fertility of those she saw as society's least "fit" members -- the poor, the disabled, the "feebleminded," the sickly, the epileptic, the alcoholic, etc. Where persuasion worked, that was fine, but as Franks points out, Sanger and her allies were prepared to use coercion when they felt it was necessary to achieve their eugenic aims.

Franks traces what she identifies as the "control movement" from its earliest days in the 1920s when sterilization programs began to spring up in Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, and later California to the 1990s when U.N. "family planning" money helped support forced sterilizations and abortions in China. Along the way, she identifies the key players, policies, and programs that helped to mainstream many of the ideas that the world once found so abhorrent in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

There are those in our modern PC culture that might be tempted to dismiss such charges, but this book is thorough and well documented, with over 1,200 footnotes and a bibliography featuring about a thousand books, articles, and interviews on Sanger, her associates, and the organizations they founded and led.

The tone is academic, but the language is generally accessible, so that both scholars and activists alike will benefit from the reading of it.

Despite Sanger's celebration as a liberator of women and the feminist hagiographies that have been written of Planned Parenthood's founder, Franks argues that Sanger's eugenic ideas are antithetical to freedom and to true feminism, aiming to suppress precisely what it is that makes women women.

Sanger certainly had enormous influence, but before deciding whether that influence was good or bad, one would be well advised to read this book.

This book exposes the fear that is at the heart of the modern reproductive rights movement: fear of female reproductive power. We need a women's movement that allows us to be ourselves, instead of a women's movement that demands that we chemically castrate ourselves. Angela Franks points the way to a new women's movement that is based on what is truly distinctive about women. We need to celebrate motherhood, not fear it. Angela Franks shows that Margaret Sanger and her movement were strongly eugenic, and feared too much reproduction by people they considered unfit. The women's movement has never recovered.

I can't say enough good things about this book. Angela Franks does a wonderful job exposing with thorough research how Margaret Sanger tainted the women's movement with an insidious agenda. Feminism should work to protect the vulnerable; instead feminists have joined forces with the population controllers to oppress low-income women in the U.S. and third world countries, all in the name of "reproductive health." It's hard to see how women can have a "choice" when they are subjected to forced abortions and sterilization. Shame on feminism for allowing Margaret Sanger and her cronies in the eugenics movement to advance their agenda under the guise of freedom and justice. Unfortunately the agenda of Planned Parenthood is engrained in our contraceptive culture.
This book is a must-read for anyone in the pro-life movement, whether your concern is eugenics, embryonic stem-cell research, contraception, abortion, euthenasia or the death penalty.

I thought it was a factually written work of history. Having my degree in historical studies, I thought that she did a wonderful job delving into the facts, and citing the appropriate references for her arguments. I would encourage readers to read this book, and not to shy away from a work for fear of what facts it might bring forth. It is most definitely a historical, not political work.

This book connects some dots in history that our public education and college educations don't want connected namely Margaret Sanger's hand in helping to motivate the most sinister scientific idealogy in history EUGENICS! It examines Planned Parenthood's many leaders who were also eugenicists. Keep in mind that eugenics was anathema to woman's rights to reproduce being that at it's apex it led to the administration of mandatory sterilization of thousands of womenfrom disadvantaged backgrounds. This book led me to gems like this article featured in the NY Times in 1950 of Margaret Sanger calling for the government to forcebly sterilize women [...]

The book's references are all listed in the extensive bibliography and all the author's research was done in the library of congress so most of the book is based on the key player's own quotes. She even gets into how eugenics is connected to the genetic engineering movement. The book is written in a very eloquent manner but is not difficult to read or bogged down with overly academic terminology also the author doesn't tow the line that most authors do when criticising the birth control movement and evagelizing through the entire book with religious passages.

Well documented and astute study of the Huxley-like world Sanger would have loved to see come to fruition. Those intersted in this topic should also read "the War Against The Weak." A stark reminder that those who know what is best for us are just waiting for their chance. Sanger did not invent the blueprint, she sought to further it.

This is a great source to cite when telling the real motivations behind Margaret Sanger's goals for birth control. Sanger will be sainted by any college professor. It is nice to have some ammunition against someone who holds Sanger in such high esteem. Including but not limited to professors, pro-abortion rights political junkies, or anyone who thinks Planned Parenthood is anything more than racist organization who covers up for rapists and kills babies.

If people really want to read about the real racist, and monster in regards to goverment sanction of regulating groups of people especially the helpless, poor, dregs of society and the unborn this is a excellant book that describes, how disgusting this fraction of a human being really is.

The author, Angela Franks, is a pro-life zealot. She is violently anti-choice, and anti-birth control. Like many pro-life zealots, she views Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger, as satan incarnate.

Margaret Sanger's primary concern, as clearly expressed in her own writings, was (1) the health of women, and (2) to empower women to space-out their children in accordance with their family circumstances. It is true that Sanger discussed voluntary eugenics in some of her writings, as many of her contemporaries did, as well. But - putting things in proportion - eugenics are a very tiny part of Sanger's philosophy.

The pro-life movement in the U.S. has demonized Sanger, and the primary tool they use is to seize on the few eugenic-related writings of Sanger and blow them up all out of proportion. And that is what this book does. It is a propaganda piece, written by a pro-life zealot.

If you want a more balanced portrayal of Sanger, you can try her own autobiography, or "Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America". A good book for teenagers is "Margaret Sanger: Rebel For Women's Rights" by Cox. The most objective, detailed book is "Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger" by Kennedy.