“We’ll be celebrating the 130th birthday of Planned Parenthood founder and pioneering contraception advocate Margaret Sanger with cake, games, and good company. Join us for our first event of the year and learn how you can become involved in Princeton Pro-Choice Vox!”
Arriving at Campus Club for the birthday party on the evening of Friday, Sept. 25, I was greeted by an aptly M&M-decorated “birth control pill” cake and an enthusiastic cohort of pro-choicers, all the ingredients necessary for the celebration. But oddly enough, no one seemed to know much about the birthday girl, other than — directly from the invitation — that she founded Planned Parenthood and promoted contraception. One member even admitted that Sanger’s birthday had actually occurred on the 14th, nearly two weeks prior to the party itself. The implications of my conversations were at once astonishing and laughable: Why would Pro-Choice Vox feel so compelled to celebrate the birthday of a person its members hardly knew on a date wholly irrelevant to that person?
Pro-Choice Vox’ poorly chosen event turns from unjustified to unconscionable when one considers just how controversial a figure Margaret Sanger was, not simply in the early 20th century, but even by today’s liberal standards. Sanger, who founded the American Birth Control League (which later would develop into Planned Parenthood), was a self-admitted eugenicist, classist and racist, and she made no secrets of her political intentions. In a 1932 Birth Control Review article, “A Plan For Peace,” Sanger writes of her plan to cure the world’s social ills:
“Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of the population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring."
Forcibly separating and preventing people from procreating—one wonders what “pro-choice” really means. A simplification of Sanger’s stance might hold that if you are either healthy enough, intelligent enough or financially supportable enough, then society can possibly, just possibly, make room for you. So much for Lady Liberty’s “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Like those of many eugenicists of her time, Sanger’s beliefs were in part racially motivated. As she explained to young women in her 1920 pamphlet, “What Every Girl Should Know:”
“It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.”
I don’t know much about aborigines, but Sanger’s anecdote reads like any other Princeton Campus Safety Alert that I’ve received, only that another minority is targeted. All kidding aside, this excerpt illustrates that her ideologies were well attuned to white supremacy. In her autobiography, Sanger recalls a visit to a women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan, in which her birth control lecture was praised and “a dozen invitations to similar groups were proffered.”
The most contentious of Margaret Sanger’s actions, however, was her 1939 launch of the so-called “Negro Project,” in which she convinced black ministers, doctors and educators, including W.E.B. DuBois, to support population control among African-Americans. What began with a precursor to Planned Parenthood opening birth control clinics in black Harlem soon spread to counseling centers — “abortion recommendation centers” — in minority communities across the United States. Today, various Planned Parenthood websites boast of minority outreach. And Margaret Sanger’s “Negro Project” legacy lives on. A 2008 Guttmacher Institute study found that 37 percent of abortions are performed on black women and 22 percent on Hispanic women, with the two races overrepresented by approximately 300 percent and 200 percent, respectively.
One has to ask, what exactly is Pro-Choice Vox celebrating? Is it Planned Parenthood’s racist roots? Or perhaps the idea that the world is 130 years further in eliminating society’s undesired? Or is it the fact that we can now have as much sex as we choose with as many partners as we choose while disregarding both the ethical and social consequences?
I don’t advocate that Pro-Choice Vox end the celebration of Margaret Sanger’s birthday in the same way that I don’t advocate that the United States end the celebration of Columbus Day due to its historical invocation of the European persecution of indigenous Americans. What I instead encourage is that if Pro-Choice Vox chooses to commemorate Sanger, that it then also acknowledge her true past. One can’t blame Pro-Choice Vox for being ignorant, just as one can’t blame the newly opened Campus Club — an extension of the University, mind you — for inadvertently sponsoring homage to a racist radical. But one would hope that Margaret Sanger’s 130th birthday would serve as a metaphorical lesson to all: “Don’t have sex with someone unless you really know them.”
Aaron Smargon is an astrophysics major from La Jolla, Calif. He can be reached at asmargon@princeton.edu.
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