Margaret Sanger's Eugenics

[Nie Trink Wasser]

I've never read about Sanger's interest in eugenics until now.

I had known about other American involvement with the Nazis via eugenics in the film The Lynchburg Story, but today Ive discovered Margaret Sanger's interest in eugenics as well.

If anyone has or can provide anymore knowledge on this subject, please do so in the thread.

(I would like to note that this is not a thread that I would like to focus on abortion, but one that discussed Sanger's interest in eugenics)

Sanger's early writings clearly reflected Malthus' influence. She writes:

Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization

In another passage, she decries the burden of “human waste” on society:

It [charity] 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 [emphasis added]. Ibid., 116-117

She concluded,

The most serious charge that can be brought against modern “benevolence” is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Ibid., 123.


The Review printed an excerpt of an address Sanger gave in 1926.

In it she said:

It now remains for the U.S. government to set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means. In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition. The number of the feeble-minded would decrease and a heavy burden would be lifted from the shoulders of the fit. Margaret Sanger, “The Function of Sterilization,” The Birth Control Review, October 1926, 299

 

[Mr Manifesto]

An interesting book is "The Nazi Doctors" by Robert Jay Lifton (I thought it was 'Lipton', but who am I to question Amazon?). It charts the Nazi's eugenics programmes and how it was influenced by American psychaitrists who floated similar theories. The Nazis just took it the next step, from the retarded and ill to Gypsies, Jews, etc. Worth reading if only to read about the 'special diets' (one lettuce leaf a day until patient starves). I imagine Margaret will mentioned in there somewhere.






























(and in case you're about to blow a cog because I actually gave you a friendly post for once: Sinister W! )

 

[Nie Trink Wasser]

thanks Mr. Man.

The doctor mentioned in the film The Lynchburg Story is Dr. Harry Laughlin . I've got more info on the film at my site here : http://aaronn.monoperative.net/ic.html

A significant number of Progressives -- including David Starr Jordan, Robert Latham Owen, William Allen Wilson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert Latou Dickinson, Katherine Bement Davis, and Virginia Gildersleeve--were deeply involved with the eugenics movement.

http://www.publiceye.org/racism/Eugenics/MQ Eugenics Paper-02.htm

"Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child -- this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways." - Bertrand Russell

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/11/sept92/brussell.htm

The fact is that eugenics was popular across the political spectrum for many years, both in England and in North America (e.g., Paul, 1984; Soloway, 1990). In England, many socialists supported eugenics. Even those viewed as critics, such as J. B .S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben and Julian Huxley were not against eugenics per se, but came to believe that eugenics in capitalist societies was infected with class bias. Even so, some (see Paul, 1984), accepted the idea of upper class genetic superiority.

Not only were R. B. Cattell's eugenic beliefs commonplace in that milieu, but he was influenced by prominent socialists who supported eugenics, men such as Shaw, Wells, Huxley and Haldane, some of whom he knew (Hurt, 1998). Jonathan Harwood (1980) actually cited the example of Cattell to demonstrate that British eugenics was not a right-wing preserve in the inter-war years (although Keith Hurt, 1998, has noted that Harwood later characterised Cattell's 1972 book on Beyondism as a "right-wing eugenic fantasy").

Oppenheim (1982) claimed that American eugenicists were opposed by those in the Progressive Movement, juxtaposing the hereditarian reformism of the former with the environmental reformism of the latter. Actually many progressives were also eugenicists and incorporated the idea of eugenic reforms into their larger agenda (e.g., Burnham, 1977); there was a great deal of cross-over between the two movements (e.g., Pickens, 1968).


http://www.ferris.edu/isar/bios/Cattell/HPPB/killed.htm