Cruel Crusader
How Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood by Abortion & Infanticide
by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
I saw a sickly baby in the arms of a terrified woman whose drunken husband had thrown the wailing, naked infant into the snow,” wrote Margaret Sanger in My Fight for Birth Control, published in 1931. “I remember having keen sympathy with that man!” The mother had given birth to eleven children, six of them still living, and this last one, who “evidently had eczema” and “whined night and day,” was just “too much for the father’s nerves.” And so, “out of the door into the snow the nuisance went!”
Her readers would not have been surprised. In Woman and the New Race, published in 1920, the founder of Planned Parenthood declared, “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
While today she is widely known, and treated as a secular saint, for her fight to legalize contraception, Sanger is not as well known, and in secular and pro-choice circles never criticized, for her ardent efforts to justify abortion and infanticide.
Sexual Evolution
In fact, Sanger envisioned an “evolution” from one to the other: “I sought to show the evolution of birth control from infanticide, through abortion, to modern methods of scientific and harmless prevention,” as she put it in My Fight. But there was a problem with this evolutionary scheme: For contraception to replace infanticide and abortion, it would have to be foolproof.
In Woman and the New Race, Sanger reported that women were constantly asking her, “Will it prevent absolutely?” She would reply that yes, there were methods “which are not only dependable, but which can be used without injury.”
She would assure them that doubts about their effectiveness came from “uninformed” doctors and neighbors. Even if the law forbade her to name the methods, she could tell them they had “stood the test of certainty” in Holland, France, and England, as witnessed by those countries’ falling birthrates.
But in My Fight a decade later, after having given women all these assurances, she flatly contradicted herself. She admitted that the “need for reliable methods has been far greater and more extended than the ability on the part of the medical profession or science to supply them” and that “biologists and bio-chemists are now at work perfecting the science of contraception.” Contraception offered no “certainty” after all.
So what happens when contraceptives fail and women are faced, to use her term, with “involuntary motherhood”? Sanger explained that “nearly all” working-class women in this situation fall into two groups: The first will “find refuge in abortion,” and the second will be “hopelessly” resigned to bearing the child. Those “in whom the feminine urge to freedom is strongest choose the abortionist”—women, she said, are driven to defy “church and state” by “the strongest force” in their nature, by an “absolute, elemental, inner urge” of the “feminine spirit”—while the others bring children to birth all the while “hoping that they will be born dead or die.”
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on abortion from the online archives
30.3—May/June 2017
on the Misuse of Property Rights to Justify Slavery & Abortion by Robert Hart
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
24.1—January/February 2011
How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson
more from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
The Slow Vindication of Leon Podles by S. M. Hutchens
27.5—Sept/Oct 2014
The Culture of Death's Campaign Against the Catholic Church by Brantly Millegan
31.2—March/April 2018
The Transmission of Christianity Is Not a New Task by Nathanael Devlin
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
