Margaret Sanger, eugenics heroine, my guru on earth

Margaret Sanger is a women we hear about, but must of what we hear is not true.  The Left upholds her as an abortion crusader, the Christian Right paints her a racist genocidal maniac who wanted to eliminate blacks by terminating their pregnancies, and the common person does not know her at all.  But truth be told, I personally do know much about Margaret Sanger as she is my life heroine and guru and I have read all of her books (but not all of her papers).

My interest in Margaret Sanger began around the age of 23 or so. Do to seeing so much suffering and unhappiness around me, I had come to philosophize the reasons why so many things were wrong. The answers to these questions are multifaceted, nuanced and ever changing, but there is one avenue of thought which I entertain and believe is perennial, and that is Eugenics.  

Eugenics is more of less guiding the breeding and engineering of human beings to the point that they are free from many diseases and have amplified physical, mental, emotional and metaphysical powers.  However there is a dark twin opposite to eugenics, which tends to creep up in civilized societies, and that is dysgenics, conditions and breeding standards which increase diseases and weaknesses in the human race and are a strain on our material and ethereal being. 

Many who hold these beliefs also believe our current modern state of haphazard breeding coupled with idleness and too much assistance has weakened the human race, so have the abuses of capitalism and communism, both of which have at least at times, thrown the human animal into squalid living conditions which only selected for the most brutish members of our race while wasting away the more delicate thinkers who built democracy and the now far gone philosophies Ancient Greece. 

Like myself, Margaret Sanger went through a lot of suffering in her life, and she saw it in others as well.  She was born 1879 into a poor Irish Catholic family in an industrial town in Upstate New York.  Her mother was sick and overburdened by having birthed 18 children and raising 11 of them; her father was an alcoholic atheist philosopher, kind and evolved but totally irresponsible. The mostly Catholic town people had too many children to feed, unsatisfactory working conditions, and personal problems which made living exceedingly painful for many.

However Sanger did marry well, to an architect, and was able to see what middle class living was like, but she herself said it was almost like the hands of destiny which kept pushing her back to see the needs of the poor who lived in utter despair.  She became a travelling nurse, but most of her work took place in the slums of New York City where she worked among the putrid and overcrowded dwellings of the new incoming immigrants.

Again what Sanger saw over and over was too many mouths to feed, mothers and fathers working in life draining jobs and dangerous working conditions for long hours with few holidays. This left the people stressed out and bitter; they would take this out on their children, and wives and alcohol until the point that parents could no longer take it and would push their young children into the very same factories which had destroyed their own lives, and they did this with a coldness which comes when parenthood becomes slavery rather than a duty or joy.

Sanger's breaking moment came when she met an expectant mother to be who had nearly killed herself by trying to induce an abortion as she already had too many children.  After the doctor saved her life, the woman asked how she could stop having children, for which the doctor would give her no aid.  It was not long after this that Margaret was called back to this very same home where she encountered the mother dead, she had once again tried to induce an abortion and killed herself, or she may have committed suicide I can't remember.

This final sight of this misery flew Margaret into a conviction that she must do something to change the plight of men women and children, the families needed to be better planned so that all could be fed and children would not be viewed as an unwelcome burden.  Also parents needed time to elevate themselves and break the shackles of the industrial revolution, as well as thwart the false promises of Communism.  She decided to dedicate her life to legalizing and providing birth control to the masses.

You see in Sanger's time, during the inter-war period, birth control was not only illegal but was also legally obscene so one could not even send birth control literature through the mail system.  Sanger defied this law again and again as she worked to free the common man and woman from their then current biological bondage.  For this she was arrested many times and was subjected to social hounding and abuse. 

However Sanger also had another stated purpose in birth control and that was eugenics, she believed that slowing down the birth rate would have a eugenic effect on the population by making sure the mother was strongest and best nourished between births.  She also believed that births guided by love rather than accident and with more selective guidance would produce a "new race" with new characteristics who could bring peace to earth.  Sanger worked very hard with eugenicists from every race to ensure her vision. 

Sanger eventually built modern day Planned Parenthood after she legalized the use of birth control.  It is funny how many people, both Nazis and Christians, state that Margret Sanger was actually a secret racist because Planned Parenthoods tend to be found in non-white ethnic neighborhoods and disproportionately abort children of darker races; but Sanger, in all of her writings and lectures was always vehemently vociferously anti-abortion, so she could not have had this plan to abort any racial class into extinction, rather she worked with all races to improve themselves through plannned parenthood.

However Sanger was much more than a reformist and crusading eugenicist, she was a philosopher and radical.  In her magnum opus, "The Pivot of Civilization", Sanger not only brings forth her theories on Eugenics, birth control, industrialism and communism, but she also touches upon her theories surrounding sex and sexual liberation. Margaret hung around many prominent thinkers of the time, such as Aldous Huxley, but she was also closely acquainted with the sexology pioneer Havelock Ellis.

Through Ellis and other budding sexologists, Sanger helped promulgate the theory that genius and personal power came from the act of disinhibition,by losing all our fears and apprehensions and speaking, moving and acting the way we feel most natural and impulsed, we gain such rapid and profound mental and physical perceptions that our reactions almost seem oracular to outsiders. Sanger believed freedom of the sex act was the most disinhibiting action humans could take, and so she promoted sexual liberalism as a form of group empowerment and personal evolution, and she wanted women to join this power circle by lifting their fears of unwanted pregnancy.

So who was Margaret Sanger?  Yes, she was a eugenicist, she did work with eugenicists and expressed her desire to see a "new race", but she was also a passionate and empathic crusader for human liberty and self-empowerment.  During Sanger's time it was nearly impossible to selectively breed a new human race, but the poor, sick and infirm could use birth control to limit their families to numbers they could sustain and care for, thus improving the overall health of the population.

But her advocacy had another dimension, a dimension perhaps her male counterparts can more appreciate, Sanger spoke of "cradle competition", the fact that the educated classes bred more slowly than the working poor; it was near impossible to increase birth rates among the intelligentsia and physically fit, but the numbers could be evened out by slowing down the production of that grade of population who found it nearly impossible, due to exploitation, to care for themselves... this would also make the labor class less numerically disposable.

All of the eugenic institutions which were established during the inter-war period have since disappeared, and their theories have disappeared with them, all accept Margaret Sanger and her Planned Parenthood.  The modern day organization carries no mention of Sanger's original intentions, which was ultimately to breed a "cleaner race", but in the same sentence she called for a "greater individuality. The mostly Left controlled Planned Parenthood are blissfully unaware of the chain of events the founder has started.

Unlike almost any other thinker, Sanger actually was a "liberal", she did not advocate Leftist or Fascist control of the system to force humans to evolve but spoke and acted in their own interest, namely family limitation during a time when humans were under the unbearable pressure of having huge families in industrial towns which could not support them or create any standard of living, let alone dreams of selective breeding.

Many male eugenicists begrudge Sanger because of her sexually liberal philosophy, particularly for women, and because her cause and intervention of birth control has led to a rapid decline in the white birth rate in the Western world, but if we look at Sanger's intent we can find a ray of light.  Sanger was no libertine but saw sex and childbearing as the guiding force of civilization.  

It took 2-3 generations to get whites to this phase where most of us have been born into homes with manageable numbers of siblings, free from industrial and communist exploitation; the problem is not what Sanger did to bring about this golden opportunity, but the fact that whites are not properly taking advantage of this situation.  We no longer need marriage, forced sex or any other inhibiting morality to breed and engineer a new race, which were major factors during Sanger's time, but all we need is to be like Sanger, to bravely move forward with passion and drive.