Positive And Negative Attitudes Of Eugenics

Margaret Sanger was a controversial and historical nurse. She lived during a time of revolutionary change when the women’s rights movement was in full motion. Born in 1879, to a large impoverished family, she was the sixth of eleven children. Sanger was part of a family of devoted Catholics. During that time it was a common practice for women to birth as many children as possible. As a result, she was a witness to the effects of diseases, miscarriages, and multiple pregnancies that eventually led to her mother’s premature death. This had a significant impact on her ideologies. She eventually became known for advocating women’s reproductive rights and founding what is now known as Planned Parenthood.

I. Introduction. There are many remarkable personalities in our history, which made revolutionary changes in women’s lives. Two of them were Margaret Sanger and Eleanor Roosevelt. They contributed immensely to change the women’s fates and lives and to position them equally with men. Margaret Sanger was born in 1879, in Corning, New York; she was sixth of eleven children of Michel Higgins, an Irish Catholic stonecutter, and religious Anne Purcell Higgins. Her mother went through eighteen pregnancies and died at the age of forty-eight. She studied nursing in White Plains and worked as nurse in one of the poorest neighborhood of New York. In 1902 Margaret Sanger married architect and radical William Sanger. She didn’t finish her studying. Margaret gave birth to three children. In 1912 Sanger’s family moved to Manhattan. All her life Margaret Sanger was a courageous, dedicated and persistent American birth control activist, advocate of eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League. She was first woman opening the way to universal access to birth control.

Children. They are a soft spot in nearly everyone’s hearts, and when it comes to the topic of making sure they are protected and cared for, the utmost time often gets invested. This has been true throughout most of history, where children were, and still are, protected with their own set of rights and laws. However, in the 1920s, Margaret Sanger was one of the more prominent people fighting for the rights for children and mothers alike. Pioneer of Planned Parenthood and advocate for women’s rights, Sanger was often under harsh speculation at the time of her existence. Where most people were conservative, and a high population of people were religion oriented, Sanger went against the grain and fought for the idea of birth control, abortion for mothers, and for every child to be given the right to be born in to a family that could more than adequately care for them. Having been under harsh penalty of the law and escaping to Europe until charges on her were dropped, Sanger was no stranger to controversy. In 1925, she delivered a speech in New York to a conference called “The Children’s era” to pose her rather outlandish ideas on how to make this era for the children. Despite the underlining message being seen as positive, her overall address was ineffective in delivery due to her over use of pathos, the extensive, muddled out metaphors damaging her credibility, and lack of sufficient evidence to back up her claims.

Margaret Sanger’s hard work to legalize and promote contraception was rooted in her belief that those who were impoverished should not procreate. In her book My Fight for Birth Control, Sanger claims, “I associate poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, and jails with large families” (Planned Parenthood). Sanger set out to “sterilize the unfit” and make known methods to control the population (Planned Parenthood). Many of her colleagues were racist and believed contraception should be used for the purpose of maintaining

Margaret Sanger built upon Davenport’s movement through the concept of contraception rather than sterilization. Although her initial purpose was not to create a superior race, the contraception movement had an equally detrimental effect upon society. Fuelled by the anger from her mother’s death, Sanger wrote The Woman Rebel advocating controlling who could reproduce (Citation). Just as Davenport, she had criteria for those she wished to eliminate including, Jews, Blacks, and Chinese (Schweikart and Allen 529-532). She also believed that large families were wasteful and wrong. In her book Women and the New Race, Sanger stated that “the most merciful thing a large family could do to new baby is to kill it.” She believed he could not be properly loved and cared for and furthermore considered him a waste of resources(“Margaret Sanger: Family Planning”). Her articles were condemned illegal and she fled to England where she truly let her colors show. She established the Birth Control Review in 1917 and wrote pro eugenics articles including “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” and “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics”. The positive response in England encouraged Sanger to return to the U.S to market birth control in a more palatable fashion as family planning. This

Margaret Sanger was, at large, a birth control activist, but this speech was more about the questioning of birth control corrupting morality in women. People must remember, in the day and age

Margaret Sanger founded a movement in this country that would institute such a change in the course of our biological history that it is still debated today. Described by some as a "radiant rebel", Sanger pioneered the birth control movement in the United States at a time when Victorian hypocrisy and oppression through moral standards were at their highest. Working her way up from a nurse in New York's poor Lower East Side to the head of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Margaret Sanger was unwavering in her dedication to the movement that would eventually result in lower infant mortality rates and better living conditions for the impoverished. But, because of the way that her political

     In addition to the articles she composed, Margaret Sanger decided to make sexual protection an option for all people. Previously, contraceptives and spermicides were only distributed to those who had information on the matter and access to them (Margaret 1). Sanger was past 80 when she saw the first marketing of a contraceptive pill, which she had helped develop, although legal change was slow. It took until 1965, a year before her death, for the Supreme Court to approve the use of contraception, but Sanger had accomplished a goal (Margaret 1). Now, contraceptives were available to all women, in all walks of life, regardless of their financial situations. In her mind, poor mental development was largely the result of poverty, overpopulation and the lack of attention to children. This was definitely one of the reasons why Sanger desired to make protection available to lower class citizens, along with the wealthy.

Eugenics is the pseudoscience of obtaining desired traits in a population through controlled repopulation, specifically by preventing those deemed “unfit” by “Nordic stereotypes” from breeding. Most modern day Americans do not realize the origins of eugenics, which was planted by Charles Darwin and Sir Francis Galton and bloomed in America, and what effect it had on the attempt to create a master race in Nazi Germany. America played a very influential role in German eugenics by collaboration between scientists and funding from American corporations. The negative connotation associated with this science is usually directed towards the scientists of the Holocaust under Adolf Hitler, and not towards American scientists who also partook in horrific experiments and performed inhumane acts as well. This is absurd when you consider that the United States was the backbone of the eugenics movement internationally and only developed a negative perspective of the research when it became affiliated with the holocaust and the troubling actions of Nazi Germany.

Sanger expresses her ideas of eugenics. In her publication, Margaret says that less people should have kids. Being the founder of Planned Parenthood, she thought that it was a good idea to distribute birth control and later provide abortions. Margaret forced sterilization because she thought it was a way to achieve “Racial Health” as her understanding. Another thing that Margaret believed in was that immigrants shouldn’t be allowed to have babies. Dating back to 1921, this shows how social and cultural division was alive and more powerful than ever even during the 1920’s. Just because a woman is a foreigner, shouldn’t close the doors to women that would want to form a family. Besides, race and culture shouldn’t separate mothers it should unite them so they can all have equal rights as soon to be

Margaret Sanger, a New York and an active feminist, led the fight for contraceptives, which are methods or devices to prevent pregnancy. Sanger, whose mother at a young age because she had birthed eleven children, helped shape her into a very individualistic and assertive woman. She was a part of the Socialist party, while studying to be a nurse, and starting a family of her own. In 1912, she began to work in the slums with the poor immigrant women who lived there. Her experience in the slums with these women, helped shaped her strong opinion on why women should be in control of childbearing. This was not the only thing that shaped it, but helped further her outlook after she was a witness to her own mother’s death. Her final call to action though was the ghastly stories of self-induced abortions and the tales of more than horrific pregnancies.

Margaret Sanger was a very involved woman. Her mother had a total of 18 pregnancies and died at the young age of 50. Sanger was one of the 11 children. As Sanger got older she established the first birth control clinic. Sanger is a hero because she left her nursing career to devote herself to the cause of birth control, She founded Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and first thought of creating the birth control pill that many women use today, All to support her main fight for reproduction rights.

Many also believed it was the man’s decision as to how many children his wife should have. Sanger continued her quest opening a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, in 1916; one year later, the authorities arrested her for giving contraceptives to immigrant women (Bowles, 2011). At first glance it appears that Sanger had good intentions. “Others criticized her for involvement with eugenics, which was a scientific movement in which its practitioners advocated the notion that all mental and physical "abnormalities" were linked to hereditary and, with selective breeding, could be eliminated. They questioned whether or not Sanger's insistence on birth control and abortion was in fact a way to limit the growth of ethnic populations” (Bowles, 2011). “Of course, her activism put her directly at odds with law-enforcement officials and the Catholic Church, but little discussed is the actual extent to which her early Marxism guided much of what she managed to achieve. Her good friends included ultra-radicals like John Reed and Emma Goldman, and the truth is that Margaret’s feminism, and her support for eugenic ‘sexual science’, were both simply part-and-parcel of her own unique Marxist vision. Humanitarianism, per se, had little to do with what motivated Margaret Sanger” (Spooner, 2005). Sanger’s actions and motivations are a controversial topic that have been analyzed and debated for years. “According to her New York Times obituary,

In February 1919, Sanger published an article titled “Birth Control and Racial Betterment”. In this article, she starts out by saying, “Before eugenists, and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.”

If and when people understand the meaning of eugenics, there comes up the discussion of positive and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics can be defined as the government, or group of power, encouraging the procreation of offspring between those demonstrating a