50 years ago: Good riddance to Margaret Sanger

On September 6, 1966, Margaret Sanger died, eight days before her 87th birthday. Mrs. Sanger, born Margaret Higgins, was a nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn, New York on October 16, 1916. Promotion of contraception was illegal then, but Mrs. Sanger fought her case in the courts and eventually won the right to promote her views. She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 and the Clinical Research Bureau in 1923, and with financial assistance from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., travelled to various foreign countries to promote birth control. Conflict within the ABCL led Mrs. Sanger to leave the organization in 1928 and she took full control of the CRB, renaming it the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. The ABCL and BCCRB merged in 1939 to become the Birth Control Federation of America, which changed its name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Mrs. Sanger helped to found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood in 1946, which became the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952.

Mrs. Sanger was a racist and eugenicist who had actual Nazis contributing to her Birth Control Review magazine. Planned Parenthood operates more than half of the abortion clinics in the United States; videos were made in 2015 that seemed to show personnel at Planned Parentood clinics offering to sell body parts of aborted fetuses. If the body count resulting from her ideas is any indication, Margaret Sanger may have been the most evil woman in history. She, like the Pharisees, had her reward; she was named Humanist of the Year for 1957 by the American Humanist Association, and has several buildings named in her honour.

This blogger has neither the time nor the desire to go into great detail about the evils of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood; some of the blogs on my blogroll have material on these subjects (especially the Planned Parenthood body parts scandal), and readers are encouraged to search them for information. I recommend the book Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood by George Grant (1988) as an excellent expose of Margaret Sanger and the organization she helped to found.