Margaret Sanger was a walking contradiction.
The founder of the birth control motion spent her life arguing that females’s liberation was asserted on their ability to manage their own recreation. In other words, she thought the choice to be a mom was scheduled only for those who were considered deserving by society, a judgment naturally formed by her contemporaries’ racism and prejudices versus people with disabilities.
Sanger’s complex legacy and the long shadow it has actually cast over Planned Parenthood, the organization she established, is now under the microscope.
Recently, the higher New York chapter of Planned Being a parent (PPGNY) revealed it was renaming a Manhattan building that bears her name. The removal of Sanger’s name “is both a required and overdue action to reckon with our tradition and acknowledge Planned Being a parent’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within neighborhoods of color,” Karen Seltzer, board chair at PPGNY, stated in a declaration. “Margaret Sanger’s issues and advocacy for reproductive health have been clearly documented, but so too has her racist tradition.”
The nationwide organization, which supports PPGNY’s choice, said it is likewise embarking on a historical self-evaluation, analyzing Sanger’s location in its origin story as part of a bigger reckoning around institutional bigotry at its health centers.
The rejection of Sanger comes amidst an electrified movement for racial justice that has brought new analysis to once-revered historical figures, monoliths and organizations. In a short period, the country has actually seen ratings of statues taken apart, a football team change its racist name, and NASCAR ban the Confederate flag. Progressive heroes with complicated pasts, like Sanger, have not been spared. Her innovative work ultimately introduced reproductive health for countless females, but her association with eugenics has actually also formed how Planned Being a parent serves Black women today.
HuffPost spoke with scholars who have actually studied Sanger to comprehend how she went from promoting ladies’s reproductive flexibility to embracing an ideology inextricably linked to bigotry.
How Sanger Went From Feminism To Eugenics
Sanger, who trained as a nurse, opened the very first birth control clinic in the nation in 1916, at a time when both contraception and abortion were unlawful. She was detained practically right away. Undeterred, she went on to discovered the American Contraception League, the predecessor to Planned Parenthood. Her work was grounded in the belief that women had a basic right to manage their own recreation, a radical idea at the time. “Enforced motherhood is the most complete rejection of a woman’s right to life and liberty,” she wrote in an essay.
Nevertheless, in the 1920 s and ’30 s, Sanger began to line up with the then-widely supported eugenics motion, which presumed that the human race might be improved through motivating people with positive traits like intelligence and hard work to replicate. Sanger believed that contraception, in addition to releasing females from undesirable pregnancies, could also help improve society.
Scholars such as Ellen Chesler, who composed “Female of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Contraception Movement in America,” have argued that she adopted the language of the eugenics