Margaret Sanger is widely heralded as the founder of the modern birth control movement, a major figure in the rise of women's liberation. While this is true, Sanger's contribution was not simply a blow for women's freedom. In some of its inconvenient details it was more ambiguous than that.
Hoping to broaden her base during the 1920s, Sanger linked the mission of contraception to that of eugenics. While she "believed that some of the eugenics movement's ideas were stodgily Victorian or "inspired by class…and sex bias," the bedrock language of eugenical thinking began to permeate her vocabulary.
Her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, contained an "Introduction" by H. G. Wells, science fiction writer and well-known eugenicist. In the book Sanger declared "the lack of balance between the birth-rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' [to be] admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization…"
She opened her fourth chapter, entitled "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded," with the following words:"There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile."
Writing a guest editorial for Collier's magazine in 1925, Sanger described the imperative need for action. "We are spending billions, literally billions," she wrote, "keeping alive thousands who never in all human compassion, should have been brought into this world. We are spending more in maintaining morons than de-veloping the inherent talents of gifted children. We are coddling the incurably defective, and neglecting potential geniuses." To dramatize her point, she quoted the distinguished California botanist, Luther Burbank, who had been, along with Henry Osborne [president of the American Museum of Natural History], a founder of the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association in 1906:
"America…is like a garden in which the gardener pays no attention to the weeds. Our criminals are our weeds, and weeds breed fast and are intensely hearty. They must be eliminated. Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce. All over the country to-day we have enormous insane asylums and similar institutions where we nourish the unfit and criminal instead of exterminating them. Nature eliminates the weeds, but we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce."
Oh dear, Sanger as well. Once you start looking at the eugenics movement, it all gets very, very ugly doesn't it?
Posted about Typecasting over at Autism's Edges last month, but hadn't gotten over here to let you know. . .
http://autismsedges.blogspot.com/2007/03/brilliant-and-bright-dull-and.html
In the autism activism and advocacy world there is very real concern about the research emphasis on finding "the autism gene" and what effect prenatal testing would have on neurological diversity.
Posted by: mothersvox | 11 April 2007 at 10:19 PM