Abortion Agenda Traced Back to One Person's "Tragic Legacy"
by Michael Larson
The culture of death in America, specifically referring to the practice of killing unborn babies and harming women, can be traced back to one person’s “tragic legacy” which was marred by lust, greed, destructive ideologies, angst against religion, and deception – Margaret Sanger. The abortion machine of Planned Parenthood is continuing its founder’s life’s work and shows no sign of slowing down.
Despite Planned Parenthood stripping her name from its flagship Manhattan clinic in 2020 citing her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” the abortion giant’s agenda today is indistinguishable from the culture of death that Sanger poured into it as a result of her relationships, worldview, and life’s work.
Since 1916 when Sanger opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in New York City, Planned Parenthood has become a multi-billion-dollar “nonprofit” organization. According to its 2022 annual report, Planned Parenthood has more than $2 billion in assets and generated more than $1.6 billion in revenue worldwide in 2022, including $670 million from government sources. In addition to now being the largest abortion provider in America, Planned Parenthood is also the largest provider of pornographic comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in public schools, and is the second largest provider of harmful puberty blockers and hormone treatments in America. Planned Parenthood is operating a perpetuating cycle of death that has claimed millions of lives in abortions since 1970; harmed more than 274,000 adults and minors alike with medical procedures performed in 2020-2022, including harmful, “experimental gender services;” and has provided public schools with CSE that promotes adolescent sexual activity and experimentation, and normalization of “transgenderism” that aims to channel more people into its “services.”
Understanding what Planned Parenthood is today necessitates understanding the organization’s founder and how her imprint underpins the whole organization. According to George Grant, who penned a 1995 biography on Sanger titled, Killer Angel, she had a difficult childhood in upstate New York filled with hunger and privation. Sanger’s frail mother tried to instill a Catholic faith into young Margaret where she was baptized and even confirmed in the faith at age 15. However, when her mother died shortly thereafter due to their privation, it was her father’s rough treatment and radical, socialist, and atheistic ideologies that ultimately imprinted on Sanger. As Grant points out, Sanger began to “unconsciously emulate” his personality even though she bitterly hated him.
After leaving home at age 17 as a high school dropout, she briefly taught kindergarten to immigrant children and then attempted to become a nurse, but as Grant notes, she never finished the training despite her claiming years later to be a trained and practiced nurse. She then married William Sanger, a financially secure architect with whom she had three children. Unfulfilled at home, Sanger became engrossed in her husband’s ties in the socialist, anarchist, and communist circles of New York City. She became “awestruck” with the ideals of Marxism, Socialism, and feminism. Her social circle would soon involve the likes of socialist Eugene Debbs, revolutionary activist and anarchist Emma Goldman, playwright Eugene O’Neill, and many other “avant-garde” intellectuals. As Grant states, she would also fuel her subversive tendencies by reading the “incendiary literature” of Lenin, Tolstoy, Voltaire, and many others that would refine her ideology into one of humanism, secular progressivism, and sexual liberation.
In 1914, Sanger published the magazine, Woman Rebel, with the slogan, “No gods and no masters.” Grant stated the first several issues of the magazine disparaged marriage as “a degenerate institution,” proclaimed sexual modesty as “obscene prudery,” and declared women have “the right to be an unmarried mother” with “the right to destroy.”
Sanger wrote, “Our ultimate objective is unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children.”
With Sanger’s writings on feminism, contraception, and promiscuity, the sexual revolution in America was beginning. New York City authorities threatened to arrest her for violating federal Comstock laws for sending “obscene and lascivious” materials through the mail. Fearing arrest, she left her children in the care of others and had her Socialist friends forge her a passport and secure her passage to England.
While in England, she became sexually involved with eugenicist Havelock Ellis, who published a variety of controversial works on human sexuality, homosexuality and “transgender psychology.” Ellis’ mentor was Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics,” and was the half-cousin of evolutionist Charles Darwin. Ellis, influenced by Galton and Darwin, then mentors Sanger and helps her plot a strategy for her return to America. The strategy involved eugenics, including segregation, birth control, sterilization, and abortion as solutions for poverty, sickness, racial tension, and overpopulation.
In 1916, Sanger returned to America and immediately began a public relations campaign gaining support for her ideas forcing the city to drop the pending charges against her. She then opened the first birth control clinic in New York City, which was illegal at the time, in an impoverished area of the city. This clinic would evolve into the Birth Control League that would open clinics in other communities, notably African American, Hispanic, and Catholic neighborhoods. Over the next 30 years, Grant stated that the Birth Control League would grow into a loose federation of other “birth control leagues, family planning associations, and eugenics committees.” It wasn’t until after the Second World War that the federation incorporated and adopted the name Planned Parenthood to deflect growing societal pressure against eugenics.
Sanger wrote in a 1923 New York Times article, “Birth control is not contraception thoughtlessly and indiscriminately practiced. It means the cultivation and release of the better racial elements in our society and the gradual suppression elimination and eventual extinction of defective stocks, those human weeds which threaten the blossoming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”
By this time she began experimenting in the occult and immersing herself in sexual liaisons, even sometimes several times a day. Her marriage had long ended, and she would eventually marry millionaire J. Noah Slee under a prenuptial agreement so the marriage would not interfere with her liaisons or her cause.
In 1939, Sanger launched the Negro Project, which was an initiative to propagandize birth control in black communities to curtail their population growth.
Clarence Gamble, a eugenicist and field director for the project, stated, “There is great danger that [the project] will fail because the Negroes think it a plan for extermination. Hence let’s appear to let the colored run it…”
Grant noted that Sanger and the Negro Project directors wanted “engaging” black personalities to lead the project, which was a “ruse” to get black people “to cooperate in their own elimination.” Sanger and the Eugenics movement in America even captured the attention of Adolf Hitler, who employed a close friend and advisor of Sanger, Ernst Rudin, as his director of genetic sterilization.
According to Seth Gruber, CEO and Founder of the pro-life organization White Rose Resistance, the Negro project was “racism and eugenics combined.”
In 1966, Sanger died at age 86 while still serving on the board at the organization she created. However, according to Grant, the company had quietly removed her several times due to many financial scandals related to her extravagant living and personal improprieties. Grant noted that Planned Parenthood had always brought her back because the board felt the organization “simply could not survive without her.”
While Planned Parenthood today attempts to distance itself from its founder, Sanger’s imprint of sexual revolution, eugenics, and death are clearly visible in the organization’s profitable abortion, sex education, and “gender services” enterprise.
Today, more than 65 million unborn babies have been killed since 1973 and 40 percent of those abortions are performed on black unborn babies, even though black females capable of childbearing are just three percent of the population. In addition, Planned Parenthood today has intentionally located 86 percent of its abortion facilities in or near minority neighborhoods.
The Sexuality Information Education Council of the United States (SIECUS): Sex Ed for Social Change, founded by a former Planned Parenthood director in 1964, now provides sex education to public school children emphasizing the humanist and progressive views on sexual pleasure and gender using pornographic and obscene material. As a result, now more than 120,000 children have been diagnosed with gender confusion in the last five years while the U.S. “gender surgery industry” that harms children with irreversible and mutilating procedures is expected to grow to $5 billion by 2030.
Both Grant and Gruber categorize Sanger with names like Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Mao Zedong, stating all five collectively “shed more innocent blood in the 20th century” than all the “tyrants of previous history combined.”
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Margaret Sanger’s worldview was rooted in social Darwinism. Her goal was the development of a superior race achieved through selective population control by means of sterilization, birth control, and abortion. Like Charles Darwin, she believed in ‘favored races.’ She wanted more production of the ‘fit’ and less from the ‘unfit.’ Margaret Sanger’s ideology and dehumanization of individuals made in the image of God should be soundly rejected.”