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The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic

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I was personally offended when Planned Parenthood recently announced plans to give its Margaret Sanger Award to the BBC documentary "The Dying Rooms."

Don't get me wrong: The documentary is a wonderful and courageous piece of work. An undercover camera crew managed to gain entry to China's state-run orphanages and videotape the mistreatment and murder of the girls there. I appeared in the documentary, testifying that this tragedy is a direct consequence of the country's one-child policy.

It was the award, named after Planned Parenthood's founder, to which I objected. For Sanger had little but contempt for the "Asiatic races," as she and her eugenicist friends called them. During her lifetime, she proposed that their numbers be drastically reduced. But Sanger's preferences went beyond race. In her 1922 book "Pivot of Civilization" she unabashedly called for the extirpation of "weeds .... overrunning the human garden"; for the segregation of "morons, misfits, and the maladjusted"; and for the sterilization of "genetically inferior races." It was later that she singled out the Chinese, writing in her autobiography about "the incessant fertility of [the Chinese] millions spread like a plague."

There can be no doubt that Sanger would have been wildly enthusiastic over China's one-child policy, for her "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children," published in 1934, decreed that "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit ... no permit shall be valid for more than one child." As for China's selective elimination of handicapped and abandoned babies, she would have been delighted that Beijing had heeded her decades-long call for exactly such eugenicist policies.

Indeed, Sanger likely would have turned the award on its head, choosing to praise publicly rather than implicitly criticize China's government for its dying rooms. Even the inhuman operators of Chinese orphanages might have gotten an honorable mention, in order to underline the importance of their front-line work in eliminating what she called the "unfit" and "dysgenic." Sanger was not one for subtlety in such matters. She bluntly defined "birth control," a term she coined, as "the process of weeding out the unfit" aimed at "the creation of a superman." She often opined that "the most merciful thing that the large family does to one its infant members is to kill it,", and that "all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class."

Sanger frequently featured racists and eugencists in her magazine, the Birth Control Review. Contributor Lothrop Stoddard, who also served on Sanger's board of directors, wrote in "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy" that "We must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally non-Asiatic regions inhabited by the really inferior races." Each issue of the Birth Control Review was packed with such ideas. But Sanger was not content merely to publish racist propaganda; the magazine also made concrete policy proposals, such as the creation of "moron communities," the forced production of children by the "fit," and the compulsory sterilization and even elimination of the "unfit."

Sanger's own racist views were scarcely less opprobrious. In 1939 she and Clarence Gamble made an infamous proposal call "Birth Control and the Negro," which asserted that "the poorer areas, particularly in the South ... are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations." Her "religion of birth control" would, she wrote, "ease the financial load of caring for with public funds ... children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation."

War with Germnay, combined with lurid tales of how the Nazis were putting her theories about "human weeds" and "genetically inferior races" into practice, panicked Sanger into changing her organization's name and rhetoric. "Birth control," with its undertone of coercion, became "family planning." The "unift" and the "dysgenic" became merely "the poor." The American Birth Control League became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Following Sanger's death in 1966, Planned Parenthood felt so confident that it had safely buried her past that it began boasting about "the legacy of Margaret Sanger." And it began handing out cutely named Maggie Awards to innocents who often had no inkling of her real views. The first recipient was Martin Luther King-who clearly had no idea that Sanger had inaugurated a project to set his people free from their progeny. "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," Sanger wrote Gamble. Had Dr. King known why he may have been chosen to receive the award, he would have recoiled in horror.

The good news is that Sanger's-and Planned Parenthood's-patina of respectability has worn thin in recent years. Last year Congress came within a few votes of cutting a huge chunk of the organization's federal funding. The 1995-96 Planned Parenthood annual report notes that it has closed up shop in Mississippi, and that the number of its staff and volunteers has fallen by 4,000 over the previous year.

Perhaps the next time the Maggie Award is offered to someone of character and integrity-and more than a passing knowledge of Sanger's bigotry-he will raise an indignant cry of refusal. He will have ample grounds.

Mr. Mosher, author of "A Mother's Ordeal: One Woman's Fight Against China's One-Child Policy," is vice president for international affairs of Human Life International in Front Royal, Va. Michael W. Bird, a writer living in Minneapolis, helped with the research for this article.

Michael Perry has edited a fascinating collection of rare and hard to find materials relating to Margaret Sanger and the early birth control movement. Although a major part of the book is devoted to Sanger's Pivot of Civilization, the nearly three dozen selections from a variety of other writers (including Theodore Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, Victoria Woodhull Martin, and David Starr Jordan) are probably the best part of the book. Many of these essays cannot be located easily and have been long unavailable except at major research libraries. Perry does a superb job in letting the individual writers speak for themselves. The fact that some of the writers included say outrageous things is not Perry's fault. As someone who has read widely from the primary source materials of the era represented here, I can say that Perry's collection is a fair-minded sampling of the range of views that existed.

Like or dislike Margaret Sanger, her book in her own words will change what you think of her. Her association with eugenics (hereditary improvement of race or breed in humans) has caused Sanger to lose some luster these days. It would be fair to describe her eugenics as "soft," or "passive," as the text of her book does not actively state a desire for forced sterilization. The reader will find in the appendix, however, that forced sterilization was one of the tenets of the American Birth Control League, of which she was a founder. Throughout "Pivot" one will not find the word "race" defined by Sanger as we might today - skin color, or some ethnicity. Rather, one sees that she talks about humankind as a whole - the "human race." One more readily understands where much of her supposed racism stems from, as she speaks movingly and often about the plight of the poor family, especially the woman, and how simple knowledge/education would cure most of this problem. She illustrates the depth of her knowledge herself, perhaps from her travels and contacts, about how more enlightened parts of the world were handling their own population difficulties.

Margaret Sanger very clearly shows her skill as superb essayist. The whole book can be taken as one long essay, but was probably a work of many Sanger essays drawn together. The resulting compendium would please your high school English teacher. Whether the reader will like the author's trains of logic, those trains do get built up from premise to premise, a technique which must have irritated many a condescending male critic of the day! It would be good to remember, too, that many, many famous persons in the early 20th century were staunch advocates of eugenics: Theodore Roosevelt, H.G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson, Havelock Ellis, and most socialists (excepting, perhaps, Norman Thomas).

Sanger punctures Karl Marx's theoretical social engineering quickly, but thoroughly, midway through the book a couple times. She did not touch his signature theory of capital creation, rather, she showed why real people would not let such a social system as his get off the ground. This little snippet will be a worthwhile bunch of paragraphs to many readers. Many times the author opines about the benefits of living in the U.S. It is true that Sanger churns out piles a bad-news statistics about the U.S., but clearly this happens because that was where most of the reliable numbers existed.

Ms. Sanger founded Planned Parenthood but was also a proponent of eugenics, advocating selective breeding, sterilization and euthanasia. In 1932 Sanger urged "a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring." In her 1938 autobiography, she describes how well she got along with the woman's branch of the KKK at Silver Lake, N.J. in a speech she gave to them, hanging on well into the night talking with the ladies after the speech. She was associated with The Negro Project, whose main idea was to recruit charismatic black ministers to encourage black women to practice birth control, thereby reducing the number of black babies being born. In a December 10, 1939 letter, Sanger wrote to Dr. Gamble, head of The Negro Project: "We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
These are hew own words. Her book is dark but her past is darker still. Why on earth Would Hillary Clinton accept an award with Sangers name on it??

To begin with The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic by Margaret Sanger, edited by Michael Perry is a misleading title. Of the 263 pages, we don't get to Sanger's volume until page 178. In other words the "historical perspective" takes up more than half of the volume. In addition, these 178 pages consist of articles carefully selected to cast Sanger and the birth control movement in the most negative light. It purports to give the true history of the birth control movement, but in fact is designed to demonstrate that eugenics is "a kissing cousin of birth control" and to reveal Sanger's "real agenda."

In Perry's view Sanger's "real agenda was: "Coercion," which he writes is "one step short of compulsion," and "means that you narrow someone's choices, so those targeted feel that they have only one option--not having a child." (p. 12). With this purpose, Perry includes articles designed to support his very arguable thesis, and then includes a transcription of Sanger's Pivot of Civilization. And even this is not free of Perry's intrusiveness, as he adds his own opinion (often without any substantiating evidence) on what Sanger meant at every key point. And in case the reader might overlook what he has decided are the most damning sentences, he puts them in boldface.

Finally Perry's editorial comments are fraught with errors and omissions as when he writes on pg. 156 of Sanger's article "An Answer to Mr. Roosevelt" that "An interlibrary search did not locate this article in the December issue of Metropolitan Magazine as claimed. But Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor (p. 508) says it appeared on page 66." As Chesler is a good researcher, her information is correct -- the article did appear in Metropolitan Magazine in Dec. 1917 under the headline "Birth Control Margaret Sanger's Reply to Theodore Roosevelt" as a letter to the editor.

If readers want to read Sanger's PIVOT OF CIVILZATION, I suggest they check their libraries and find a copy of her original 1922 version or go online and get it from PROJECT GUTENBURG.

...Whether Sanger was a "racist" or not depends on the meaning you attach to the word. As I note in the book, a better description of her is that she was an elitist--a characteristic she shares with many in today's political left.

The book gives every single word of Sanger's most intellectual book, The Pivot of Civilization. It also includes 31 chapters with other articles from the period, mostly lengthy quotes from those who supported Sanger. They make it clear that liberals, socialists, feminists, progressives and media outlets such as the New York Times were strong supporters of measures to reduce the birthrates of those they deemed "unfit" and "feebleminded"--typically by forced sterilization or incarcation in uni-sex institutions. They not only believed that, they were as proud of those beliefs as they are today about their support for abortion.

I quote those sources at great length to allow them to explain why as liberals, feminists, and socialists, they believed that. (The roots lie in a blend of Darwinism and pessimism.) I also let them point out that the primary opponent to their coercive agenda was the religious right--Catholics, fundamentalists and Orthodox Jews.--exactly the situation as it stands today. I illustrate in numerous ways that when Sanger and others refer to the "feebleminded" they're using coded language that means recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Catholics from Italy, and poor native-born whites. That's better termed elitism than racism.

Readers are welcome to read the book and evaluate it for themselves. I put nothing in their mouths. Roughly 80% of the book consists of lengthy quotes from Sanger and her supporters.

The book also sheds light on our present debate over legalized abortion and the zeal liberals and feminists display for providing poor black and Hispanic mothers with abortion. All that has changed is the population they target with their birth limiting measures...

If you want to read Margaret Sanger's book, read Margaret Sanger's Pivot of Civilization, as published by Humanity Press or as available on-line, not this chopped up attack on her book by someone with a major agenda.

This book is awful. I am writing a thesis on Margaret Sanger and wasted my time today. I cannot believe that a university library would actually purchase this book as it's the most unacademic piece on Sanger I've read. On the first page Perry implies that Planned Parenthood promotes teen promiscuity to make profit when teens need to go back for birth control and abortions. I don't have time to write a longer review, but just look at the other reviews! Half of them are by the author himself (which is pathetic, by the way). If you take out those reviews, there is no way this book would have 3.5 star rating.

Very interesting material. It's reveals some of the strange ideas that were fervently held by intelligent people, such as the obsession with "feeblemindness."

I not only want my money back, I want the author to pay me for the time I spent reading this piece of trash. If you are one of the ten people in the world who believes that birth control pills should be outlawed, this book is for you. But if you were born with a brain, then don't waste your money on this book.