 Quote:
Originally Posted by Grace  Sanger’s strongest objection is that she is expected to help these people:
“Such philanthropy . . . encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant” (Ibid., pp. 116-117).
Those who would help the poor and unfortunate through charity suffer from excessive sentimentalism:
“. . . let us not close our eyes to one of the greatest dangers inherent in such warm-hearted humanitarianism. For it is a curious but neglected fact that the very types which in all kindness should be obliterated from the human stock, have been permitted to reproduce themselves and to perpetuate their group, succored by the policy of indiscriminate charity of warm hearts uncontrolled by cool heads” (“The Need of Birth Control in America,” Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities | Margaret Sanger, as others such as Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, university presidents and faculty, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, important people from all walks of life, embraced eugenics as a benefit for the human race. Smearing Sanger for beliefs embraced by a multitude at the time does nothing to discredit Planned Parenthood. About.com: http://hnn.us/articles/1662.html
"In her direct assistance to one half of the human race, Margaret Sanger offered to women their inalienable rights and their individual power, a power not to be manipulated by federal, state, or municipal laws -- the power to bring into the world her children only when it was right for the mother and for the child, the power truly to better the race. As Sanger says, "Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment."
Accepting the science of the time that claimed sterilization saved the feebleminded, who were not capable of parenting, from themselves and from a life of institutional confinement, it seemed only common sense to Margaret Sanger to approve an operation that had no effects on the individual's life other than to prevent conception. Yet Margaret Sanger had a problem--as Justice Holmes did not--with sterilization as compulsory and with "the difficulties presented by the idea of 'fit' and 'unfit.' Who is to decide this question?" she asked. " The greatest danger to liberty lurks in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
--Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis |