The founder of ‘Planned Parenthood,’ Margaret Sanger, born in1879, and birth control advocate, although her views on ‘Eugenics’ would, not only damage her reputation, but would also hang like a cloud over her throughout her life.
Sanger wrote in her autobiography about speaking to a Ku-Klux-Klan group, and advocated for a ‘Eugenics approach to Breeding’ for the “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks (human beings) those human weeds, which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American Civilization.”
What was driving Sanger might be provided on page 133, in her book, My Fight for Birth Control, 1931. When attending the funeral of her mother, it is said that she blamed her father by saying to him, “You caused this. Mother is dead from having too many children.”
Her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, was apparently pregnant eighteen times in twenty-two years, unfortunately, only eleven of the children survived birth, the other seven pregnancies ending in miscarriages. She died at the young age of forty-nine.
An article by Kevin Vance, of the ‘Washington Examiner,’ dated April 24, 2009, reported that, Hilary Clinton, then, Madam Secretary of State, was asked by a House Foreign Affairs Committee member, Jeff Fortenberry, a congressman for Nebraska, about remarks she had made a month earlier, when she said, that she ‘admired ‘Margaret Sanger, enormously.’
In a lengthy response, Hilary Clinton, explained, “There are things we admire and things we deplore,” explaining she admired Sanger’s approach to empowering women to take control of their own body’s.
In 2014, the ‘Planned Parenthood Federation of America’ (PPFA), honoured Hilary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State, by presenting her with its highest honour, the PPFA Margaret Sanger Award, for her unwavering support of women’s health and rights throughout her public service career.
Margaret Sanger, died in 1966; she was 85 years old