To Save Women's Lives

In a coincidence that for once works in liberals' favor, the birth control battle explodes at the same time as the release of a new biography of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

Unfortunately, the new biography falls far short of a much better biography written several years ago. Nevertheless the comparison reveals facts useful in fighting not only the fake controversy over contraception, but the mendacious criticisms of Sanger herself.

Michelle Goldberg concludes her analysis of Sanger in The Nation:

One of the grim ironies of Sanger’s story is that this great champion of women’s reproductive freedom could be cruel and cavalier about denying that same freedom to those she regarded as disabled. Nevertheless, both Baker and Chesler demonstrate that in this regard, Sanger was largely a product of her era. As Baker points out, in the 1927 decision Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court voted 8 to 1 to approve compulsory sterilization. In a majority opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes and signed by Louis Brandeis and William Howard Taft, the Court ruled, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute the degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” This certainly seems appalling today, but it hasn’t been allowed to define any of these men’s reputations. Most of us understand that it’s unfair to condemn people in the past for failing to meet the moral standards of the present.

If Sanger had been an unregenerate racist, the leaders of the civil rights movement might be expected to have noticed. Instead, in 1966, the year Sanger died, Martin Luther King accepted Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award. In the speech he wrote, delivered by his wife, Coretta Scott King, he described a “striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts.” Sanger, he explained, “was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions.” I’ve never understood why this speech isn’t better known, especially among pro-choice advocates. If Sanger’s moral failures are worth remembering, surely her triumphs are as well.

King's full speech, Family Planning — A Special and Urgent Concern, is here.