Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement
Thursday, June 10th, 2010 - by Terry MelansonRebecca R. Messall - 06/03/201
On a Sunday dedicated to honoring motherhood, May 11, 2010, the Denver Post chose to celebrate everything glaringly responsible for preventing or terminating motherhood. And, to someone like me who is slightly older than the “Pill” and who was 18 at the time of Roe v. Wade, the appearance of the Post’s Mother’s Day article was curious because there is much more that people should know about the threesome of Margaret Sanger, the “Pill” and Planned Parenthood, the nations’ largest abortion provider.
Margaret Sanger belonged to an organization called the American Eugenics Society, organized in the early 1900’s. Members from the American Eugenics Society actually formed Sanger’s original group whose name was changed to Planned Parenthood, but even the latter’s first three presidents were officers or members in the AES, including Alan Guttmacher. Sanger is listed as a member in 1956 under her then-married name, Mrs. Noah Slee.
Later called social biology, genetics, and population control, eugenics was a “scientific” endeavor born from evolutionary biology. It was never confined to state-sponsorship under Communists and Socialist dictators. Eugenics operated quite openly in the United States, England and around the world. The efforts of the American Eugenics Society resulted in many states passing laws to sterilize more than 63,000 Americans. Several states passed official apologies in the 1990’s. The eugenics movement, particularly Margaret Sanger, ranted against the Catholic Church for opposing eugenic legislation and ideology.

