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Lest we forget the humble beginnings of Planned Parenthood...
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“Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.” This is a statement by Ms Sanger in the first paragraph of her published article in the the quarterly “Birth Control Review”, September 1921. The Public Papers of Margaret Sanger: Web Edition
The article is a quick overview of how she hopes birth control will play a useful role in the Eugenics movement.
It's important to note that when Ms Sanger use the term race or racial she means the human race not a specific race. Discrimination and bigotry existed but the term racism didn’t gain currency until later in the 1930s.
The eugenics movement evolved from the discovery, in 1904, that hereditary characteristics carried by genes could be manipulated to enhance desirable characteristics and suppress undesirable ones The movement when seen out of the context of its time can and has been deliberately misinterpreted as sinister and depraved. It wasn’t, not originally.
Why this desire to improve the human race? The 19th and early 20th centuries were ones of staggering alcohol consumption, family violence, extensive poverty, widespread mental retardation. and saloon based political corruption. The connection between drunkenness, child abuse, wife beating, job loss, and poverty was known. Unknown was the connection between alcoholism and mental retardation, low birth weight and infant’s failure to thrive. Eugenics promoted the belief that breeding for the good genes would eradicate poverty, mental retardation, crime, disease and violence.
The eugenics movement can be roughly divided into two phases; the first a genuine interest in improving the human condition and the second as a method to manipulate race. Margaret Sanger left the movement when it became obvious that eugenics had taken on a nefarious aspect of racism.
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