Margaret Sanger = Thomas Jefferson

Friday April 24, 2009

Categories: Contemporary Culture, Current Events, Life, Politics

Well, duh!

The good thing is that the racist, xenophobic, classist convictions of Margaret Sanger just might be slowly creeping into the mainstream. I mean...slowly. Every time Hilary Clinton professes her love for Sanger, another opportunity pops up to make the point.

At the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fielded questions from three congressmen who asked her about abortion.
New Jersey representative Chris Smith asked Clinton about her praise of Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist Margaret Sanger at a Planned Parenthood awards banquet in Houston last month. He also asked her if "the United States' definition of the term reproductive health or reproductive services or reproductive rights includes abortion?"
Clinton punted on the Sanger question and instead offered a full-throated defense of international abortion rights. Clinton answered Smith's question about the "reproductive health" terminology directly, saying that "reproductive health includes access to abortion." While this isn't news, it does shed some light on President Obama's assertion in 2007 that "reproductive care" is "at the heart" of his health care plan.
When it was Nebraska congressman Jeff Fortenberry's turn, he followed up on Rep. Smith's Sanger question:

Your remarks last month, when you called Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, a person whom you enormously admire, were stunning to me. Margaret Sanger clearly embraced bigotry and racism. She advocated for the elimination of the disabled, the downtrodden and the black child. In one of her writings, she said, "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." I don't believe these ideologies have a place in our pluralistic society. And you went on to say that you will use American foreign policy in your position to further reproductive rights, which includes abortion, across the globe.

Madame Secretary, I don't believe we should use American foreign policy to export abortion. This will undermine, in my view, our foreign relations in many areas throughout the world, including Latin America and Africa and among Muslim peoples. Promoting the international abortion industry is an imposition of our own woundedness upon others. Abortion has caused tremendous grief in this society, and its export I believe will be seen as a form of neocolonialism that is paternalistic and elitist and an assault on the dignity especially of the poor and vulnerable. I believe women deserve better, women throughout the world deserve better.
In Clinton's response, she compared her admiration for Sanger to her admiration for Thomas Jefferson:

Well, Congressman, let me say with respect to your comments about Margaret Sanger, you know, I admire Thomas Jefferson. I admire his words and his leadership and I deplore his unrepentant slaveholding. I admire Margaret Sanger being a pioneer in trying to empower women to have some control over their bodies and I deplore statements that you have referenced. That is the way we often are when we look at flawed human beings. There are things that we admire and things we deplore.

One of the last projects Michael worked on was a prayer card distributed in January, which features a prayer that President Obama and all public officials might have their hearts opened to the sanctity of life.

The card has proved a popular item,and orders have come in from all over - including, one day, a woman from a South American country requesting 100,000. The secretary asked...why? Why do you want prayer cards for your country praying for our president?

"Because," the woman said, " more babies will die from abortion in our country because of his actions funding them."

(In the end, they just gave permission for them to make their own version of the prayer card down there.)

My iconoclastic, combative daughter has been taking AP US History this year and has observed that the bigoted views of some historical figures - like Father Coughlin - are highlighted - while those of others - aka Margaret Sanger, are completely ignored.

Here's a good outline of Sanger's views.

And here's Mike Wallace's 1957 interview with Sanger.

Of course, anyone who studies history knows that the collection of movements we can group under the moniker "Progressive" in late 19th and early 20th century America was characterized in part by a fear of the immigrant, the foreign, the Catholic, the non-Anglo-Saxon, the Jew, the poor. It was a fascinating mixture of motives - of seeking to improve people's lives, but to do so often by having them be fewer of them, and those that remained to be reshaped in the enlightened Anglo-Saxon image.

Oh, and speaking of Planned Parenthood, Matthew Archhbold at Creative Minority Report has a thorough post on Lila Rose, who has taken on the missiono of revealing the apparent habit of some Planned Parenthood offices of not reporting statuatory rape and assisting girls in circumventing parental consent laws.

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