So why does Margaret Sanger get a pass?
Kevin and Marilyn Ryan wrote in the Boston Pilot:
Students want dorm names changed at Harvard, or President Calhoun’s name taken off buildings at Yale; Cecil Rhodes is no longer admired for providing scholarships to study abroad; an avalanche of complaints circulate at the University of Virginia where Jefferson left his favorite legacy. Students are worried their benefactors were racists in their time.
Yet Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, is studied and celebrated as an icon. Hillary Clinton calls Sanger one of her heroes. In her quest to make history for the sisterhood, Hillary Clinton likes to target doubters in the abortion debate as attacking “reproductive rights.”
How is it that $528 million in government funding is given to Planned Parenthood each year? The line is that they provide “other health services.” Isn’t it a stretch to say that women go to Planned Parenthood for diabetes or anemia tests when there is universal healthcare?
Today’s liberal icon Margaret Sanger has won, despite her unsavory views about which human beings should thrive and develop and which should not. A square is named for her in Manhattan at the intersection of Mott and Bleecker Streets. But long ago, back in the 1930s, Sanger wrote that eugenic sterilization is an urgent need. She urged targeted population control and fervently opposed the multiplication of, in her words, “bad stock.”
She wrote in 1922 that we must encourage “the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burdens of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others, which brings with it, a dead weight of human waste.” During her campaign to suppress one race in particular, she is quoted as saying “Eugenics is…the most adequate and thorough avenue for the solution of racial, political and social problems.”
She said these things when Woodrow Wilson was alive. He is, of course, another target of complaints that he was racist.
I know why. And so do you. It’s because even more important than finding and stomping out racism (even from history) is the sacred right to abortion.
