Margaret Sanger<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
 
          "In building naturalistic alternatives to religion, we need to focus on exemplary role models in history:  humanist heroes and heroines…Among these are…Margaret Sanger."  Paul Kurtz, Free Inquiry, August/September 2006, 8.
 
1.     "Margaret [Higgins] Sanger was born on <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />September 14, 1879, in the small industrial community of Corning in upstate New York, the sixth of eleven children.  Her father, Michael Higgins, was an Irish Catholic immigrant who fancied himself a freethinker and a skeptic."  George Grant, Grand Illusions:  The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (Franklin, TN:  Adroit Press, 1992), 47.
 
2.     Margaret Higgins married William Sanger with "ties in radical politics by attending Socialist, Anarchist, and Communist meetings down in Greenwich Village…Margaret shed her bourgeois habits and took to Bohemian ways.  Instead of whiling the hours away in the elegant shops along Fifth Avenue, she plunged headlong into the maelstrom of rebellion and revolution…getting acquainted with the foremost radicals of the day:  John Reed, Eugene Debs, Clarence Darrow, Will Durant, Upton Sinclair, Julius Hammer, and Bill Haywood.  She joined the Socialist Party."  Ibid. 49, 50.
 
3.     Margaret Sanger "began to read everything in Emma Goldman's library including the massive, seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis…She told William that she needed emancipation from every taint of Christianized capitalism, including the strict bonds of the marriage bed." Ibid. 51.
 
4.     Margaret Sanger published a paper called The Woman Rebel.  "It was an eight-sheet pulp with the slogan 'No Gods! No Masters!' emblazoned across the masthead.  She advertised it as a 'paper of militant thought,' and militant it was indeed.  The first issue denounced marriage as a 'degenerate institution,' capitalism as 'indecent exploitation,' and sexual modesty as 'obscene prudery.'" Ibid. 53.
 
5.     "Margaret's English exile gave her the opportunity to make some critical interpersonal connections as well.  Her bed became a veritable meeting place for the Fabian upper crust:  H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Arbuthnot Lane, and Norman Haire.  And of course, it was then that she began her unusual and tempestuous affair with Havelock Ellis.  Ellis was the iconoclastic grandfather of the Bohemian sexual revolution…he had provided the free love movement with much of its intellectual apologia." Ibid. 57.
 
6.     By 1922 her book The Pivot of Civilization "was one of the first popularly written books to openly expound and extol Malthusian and Eugenic aims.  Throughout its 284 pages, Margaret unashamedly called for the elimination of 'human weeds,' for the cessation of charity, for the segregation of 'morons, misfits, and the maladjusted' and for the sterilization of 'genetically inferior  races.'
 
7.     After divorcing William Sanger, Margaret married J. Noah Slee, president of the Three-in-One Oil Company and a millionaire. Before the wedding ceremony she had Slee sign a prenuptial agreement.  "It stipulated that Margaret would be free to come and go as she pleased with no questions asked.  She was to have her own apartment and servants within her husband's home, where she could entertain 'friends' of her own choosing, behind closed doors.  Furthermore, Slee would have to telephone her from the other end of the house even to ask for a dinner date.  Margaret told her lovers that with that document, the marriage would make little or no difference in her life-apart from the convenience of the money, of course.  And she went out of her way to prove it; she flaunted her promiscuity and infidelity every chance she could get." Ibid. 60.
 
8.     "Margaret Sanger was not content to keep her lascivious and concupiscent behavior to herself.  She was a zealous evangelist for free love.  Even in her old age, she persisted in proselytizing her sixteen-year old granddaughter, telling her that kissing, petting, and even intercourse was fine as long as she was sincere." Ibid. 64.
 
9.     "Margaret Sanger was committed to the revolution.  She wanted to overthrow the old order of Western Christendom and usher in a 'New Age.'" Ibid. 64.
 
10.  "I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than Capitalism." Sanger, Ibid. 65.
 
11.  "Today, Planned Parenthood is continuing Sanger's crusade against the church.  In its advertisements, in its literature, in its programs, and in its policies, the organization makes every attempt to mock, belittle, and undermine Biblical Christianity." Ibid. 65.
 
12.   "When Leon Trotsky came to the United States briefly in 1917, he met Margaret Sanger and her friends and came away with a feeling of great revulsion.  In his memoirs, he recorded nothing but distaste for the rich, smug Socialists he encountered in the Village.  He said they were little better than 'hypocritical Babbits,' referring to the Sinclair Lewis character who used his parlor-room Socialism as a screen for personal ambition and self-aggrandisement.  Sanger and the other Village elitists were revolutionaries only to the extent that Socialism did not conflict with wealth, luxury, and political influence." Ibid. 64.
 
13.  "But Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist [an activist for a Master Race], and she would turn her otherwise noble birth control organizations into a tool for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives, mass incarceration of the unfit and draconian immigration restrictions.  Like other staunch eugenicists, Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenically superior strains could multiply without competition from the 'unfit.'  She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and unfit as 'human waste' not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human 'weeds' should be 'exterminated.'"  Edwin Black, War Against The Weak:  Eugenics and America's Campaign To Create A Master Race (New York:  Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004), 127.
 
14.  "More than a Malthusian [humans would run out of food], Sanger became an outspoken social Darwinist, even looking beyond the ideas of Spencer.  In her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, Sanger thoroughly condemned charitable action.  She devoted a full chapter to a denigration of charity and a deprecation of the lower classes."  Ibid. 129.
 
15.  "Sanger condemned philanthropists and repeatedly referred to those needing help as little more than 'human waste.'"  Ibid. 129.
 
16.  "Sanger's solutions were mass sterilization and mass segregation of the defective classes, and these themes were repeated often in Pivot of Civilization." Ibid. 131.
 
17.  In Sanger's book, Woman and the New Race, she declared, "Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts.  The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."  Ibid. 133.
 
18.  "At times, Sanger publicly advocated extermination of so-called 'human weeds.'"  Ibid. 133.
 
19.  "Sanger surrounded herself with some of the eugenics movement's most outspoken racists and white supremacists.  Chief among them was Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy."
 
20.  "Shortly after Stoddard's landmark book was published in 1920, Sanger invited him to join the board of directors of her American Birth Control League, a position he retained for years." Ibid. 133.
 
21.  "Another Sanger colleague was Yale economics professor Irving Fisher, a leader of the Eugenics Research Association." Ibid. 134.
 
22.  "Among the leading psychiatrists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry was Ernst Rudin, who headed the genealogical and demographic department.  Rudin would soon become director of the institute.  Later, he would become an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression." Ibid. 285.
 
23.  "Rudin was the star of German eugenics." Ibid. 286.
 
24.  "Sanger's magazine and the immediate predecessor to the Planned Parenthood Review-regularly and openly published the racist articles of the Malthusian Eugenicists.  In 1920, it published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard's frightening book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.  In 1923, the Review editorialized in favor of restricting immigration on a racial basis.  In 1932, it outlined Sanger's 'Plan for Peace,' calling for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and rehabilative concentration camps for all 'dysgenic stocks.'  In 1933, the Review published 'Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need' by Ernst Rudin, who was Hitler's director of genetic sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene.  And later that same year, it published an article by Leon Whitney entitled, 'Selective Sterilization,' which adamantly praised and defended the Third Reich's racial programs." George Grant, Grand Illusions, 95, 96.
 
25.  "Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and 1957 'Humanist of the Year.'"  Claire Chambers, The Siecus Circle:  A Humanist Revolution (Belmont, MA:  Western Islands, 1977), 233.
 
26.  "In an article appearing in The Humanist, author Miriam Allen DeFord describes it this way:  'It was the radicals-political, economic, and religious-among whom Margaret Sanger found her first supporters:  and she herself was one of them.  Her father, Matthew Higgins, was a Socialists and the 'village atheist' of Corning, New York.  The word 'Humanism' in its present religio-scientific meaning was not then current.  But call it Freethought or Rationalism or Secularism, it was and it remained Margaret Sanger's creed.  The first paper she founded and edited as called The Woman Rebel, and its masthead bore the motto: 'No gods, no masters.'"  Ibid. 323,324.
 
27.  "Another leftist affiliation of Mrs. Sanger's was membership in the American Round Table of India, which is cited in the House Committee on Un-American Activities' Appendix IX as a "Communist front.'  The secretary of this front was Robert Norton, cited as a 'well-known member of the Communist Party.'"  Ibid. 324.
 
28.  "While abroad in 1914-15, Mrs. Sanger added spice to her life history by a liaison with the notorious Havelock Ellis, who, with Ethical Culture leader Percival Chubb, had been a principal organizer of the socialistic Fabian Society of Great Britain.  Ellis was a sexual pervert and drug user, who, with a circle of fellow leftists, pioneered in the experimental use of hallucinogens in private orgies."  Ibid. 325.
 
29.  "Ellis was clearly a pathological case.  He urged his wife into Lesbianism and drug addiction…Ellis finally drove his wife into a state of mental collapse, which became complete when he wrote to her about his intimate relationships with Margaret Sanger." Ibid. 325.
 
30.  "Until her death in 1966, Margaret Sanger was honorary chairman of Planned Parenthood.  Among other significant honors won by Mrs. Sanger in her lifetime was the 'Humanist of the Year' Award for 1957."  Ibid. 326.
 
31.  This is Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee, who is, according to Paul Kurtz, editor of Free Inquiry, a heroine of the Secular Humanist movement. Can anyone seriously imagine Margaret Sanger replacing, for example, Winston Churchill, encouraging the Brits not to surrender to Adolph Hitler with her message of atheism, socialism, social Darwinism, eugenics, free love, etc.  On the contrary, Churchill was exhorting his fellow Brits to stand against Hitler and his Nazi (eugenics) movement by defending Christianity and Western Civilization. (See Deborah Davis Brezina, The Spirit of Churchill (Murfreesboro, TN:  Avalon Press, 2006).
 
"Those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble harvest it.  By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of His anger they come to an end." Job 4:8,9
 
Prepared by David A. Noebel, Summit Ministries, Manitou Springs, Colorado 80829