Originally Posted by OKgrannie

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. "