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The Margaret Sanger Song - (2006)
Adapted by the composer from quotes of Margaret Sanger
for medium voice and piano
"More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- [ 1 ]
that is the chief aim of birth control."
Let's abort our children by the millions. [ 2 ]
The "weeds" and "reckless breeders" and "defectives." [ 3 ]
Yes, let's abort those children in the millions.
The "feebleminded" "never should have been born."
Let's abort your children by the millions
"To create a race of thoroughbreds." [ 4 ]
Yes, let's abort more children by the millions.
The "poor" and "indigent" and those we scorn.
"The most merciful thing that a large family does [ 5 ]
To one of its infant members is to kill it."
Kill it. Kill it. Kill it. Kill it.
Kill it. Kill it. Kill it. Kill it.
Let's abort our children by the millions.
The "weeds" and "reckless breeders" and "defectives."
Yes, let's abort those children in the millions.
The "feebleminded" "never should have been born."
Kill it. Kill him. Kill her. Kill them.
"Human weeds." "Reckless breeders."
"No Gods, no masters!"
"Morgues of freedom!"
"Filling the hospitals!"
Kill them now![ 6 pages, 1' 55" ]
Margaret Sanger
While this song lyric was constructed by the composer from verbatim quotes linked by a few editorial additions, the sentiments are wholly those of Margaret Sanger. For this reason, many words and phrases remain in quotation marks. Therefore I do not put my name as author to this lyric but rather Sanger's name as is fitting, proper and ultimately tragic.
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) is credited as the founder of the birth-control movement in the United States, as well as being an international leader in the field. She is credited with originating and popularizing the phrase "birth control." After a short time working as a teacher she turned to obstetrical nursing in New York City. There she deduced links between urban poverty, "uncontrolled" fertility, high rates of infant and maternal mortality, and deaths following failed illegal abortions. Sanger became a feminist who believed in women's right to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and devoted herself to removing the legal barriers against publicizing facts about contraception. In 1914 she began publishing The Woman Rebel to challenge laws restricting the distribution of information on birth control. She was indicted and fled to Europe, but when she returned to stand trial in 1916 the charges against her were dropped.
Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, one of the parent organizations of the Birth Control Federation of America, which in 1942 became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger served as honorary chairwoman for Planned Parenthood. She also organized the first World Population Conference in Switzerland (1927) and served as first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (founded in 1953).
One of her British counterparts, Marie Stopes, acted in a similar way bringing ever greater awareness of birth control to Europe; in 1922, Stopes founded Britain's Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. One should note the "racial progress" aspect of these women's thinking. Among their international movement's legal achievements was the rescission in America of the Comstock Act of 1873, which had classified contraceptive literature and devices as "obscene materials." Moreover their own personal prejudices seem harsh by today's standards. Stopes, for example, decried lesbianism as a "disease." This is particularly amusing from an historical perspective given the recent outcry over possibly identifying homosexuals in utero in order to determine whether or not to abort them. A "women's right to choose" in the modern parlance came immediately into conflict with her right to choose the sexual orientation of a child. Those who advocated abortion seemed to invest in the cognitive dissonance that aborting homosexuals might be morally and politically incorrect, all the while tacitly suggesting that aborting heterosexual children was an agreeable and politically correct thing to do.
A controversial woman of her time, Margaret Sanger wrote extensively on a woman's right to an abortion, but in a far wider way she was also caught up with plans for the societal eradication of those she deemed "feebleminded" and "unwanted" through various programs of immigration restrictions, compulsory sterilization, segregation to labor farms and, for the purpose of racial "purification," rewards for couples who chose voluntary sterilization. These bigoted opinions are less widely known than her opinion concerning a woman's legal right to obtain a safe abortion, which has come to be known by the federal court case, Roe v. Wade, and pleasantly known through the slogan, "A Woman's Right to Choose."
In Sanger's "Plan for Peace" (Birth Control Review, April 1932), she suggested that couples be required to obtain a permit for the birth of a child, with the state as the arbiter of who may or may not have offspring. Opposing other groups for their religious views against abortion, she accused the Catholic church of enforcing "subjugation" on women, and the YMCA and YWCA, Christian organizations, of being "brothels of the Spirit and morgues of Freedom," which is how these additional phrases find their way into the text of "The Margaret Sanger Song." [ 6 ]
While moral and legal arguments still enflame passions for and against abortion, I find many of these direct quotes from Margaret Sanger to be harsher than arguments today allow. Eugenics, after the many atrocities which its totalitarian enthusiasts evidenced, still remains a historically grounded argument for "improving the species." From Plato forward, selecting the best for "breeding" has been a consistent argument. English scientist Francis Galton coined the term and argued for eugenics in his Hereditary Genius (1869). Sanger argued for eugenics as well, a fact suppressed in modern abortion politics of the last decades. especially as regards eugenic practices directed at minorities.
"I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan...I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses...I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak...In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered." (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, Cooper Square Press, 1938. p. 366)
Sanger is quoted [ 7 ] as saying, ""We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Without question, she wrote of "genetically inferior races," though such a phrase today evokes outrage.
Running through history from even before Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) through to and beyond Ehrlich's discredited The Population Bomb (1968) has been the prediction that human population would explode and the resources of the natural world would be unable to nourish such a demographic explosion. Rather, an opposite effect is now being noted in which whole national populations, enthused with the availability of birth control over a century's span of time, are finding their populations shrinking to the point of significant societal and cultural decline. All this is occurring in the midst of generally plentiful natural resources for water, food and land, which proves the population explosion" theorists to have been popular, successful at selling their theory yet demonstrably wrong. Politics, it may be observed, often errs; wrenching correction then ensues, as has been true throughout history.
Sanger's enthusiasm for "the fit" on an individual racial preference basis seems rather to be proving itself "unfit" in the long term on a societal level, as demographic decline of whole national populations predicts declining prosperity and the need for what one commentator called "replacement bodies" through mass immigration from other lands and cultures. It seems, with hindsight, that Sanger's enthusiasm "to create a race of thoroughbreds" -- which seems to have meant the white, secular and heterosexual intelligentsia -- is in fact creating its opposite, a Darwinian decline in whole "progressive" cultures for whom birth control became the approved law and sanctioned reasoning.
Time will tell, as the birth control movement of Sanger and Stopes did not foresee national and "racial" demographic regression as the consequent to their seemingly progressive movement. As one commentator noted, "Over the next quarter-century, the number of workers in Europe will decline by 7 percent while the number of over-sixty-fives will increase by 50 percent, trends that will create intolerable fiscal difficulties for the welfare state across the continent."
Jean-Claude Chesnais [ 8 ], director of research at France's National Institute for the Study of Demography, said: "Europe is old and rigid. So it is fading. You can see that as the natural cycle of civilization, perhaps something inevitable. And in many ways, low population growth is wonderful. Certainly to control fertility in China, Bangladesh, much of Africa -- that is an absolute triumph. Yet we must look beyond simple numbers. And here I think Europe may be in the vanguard of a very profound trend. Because you cannot have a successful world without children in it." There is little chance that European birth rates will rise, so the United Nations has made a number of projections about how to deal with this "demographic deficit."
In only a century's time, the once seemingly sensible and progressive work of Sanger and those like her has come full circle, where "a woman's right to choose" has given rise to a Darwinian decline -- the now recognized "demographic deficit."
Sanger has clearly written that the eugenic solution to "human weeds" is "to create a race of thoroughbreds." Such opinions should be noted, and this 12/8 "soft shoe" song setting with a moderate range for all singers as show above, is a pleasantly ironic reading of her strongly-held opinions, to demonstrate that beneath the pleasantries of the modern abortion argument are age-old harsh realities, proven by harsh, century-old words.
"Kill it" as a repeated song lyric certainly stands out as dissonant to modern social protest against war and capital punishment, as one example of the extreme cognitive dissonance of modern politics. This poetic song lyric is a reminder that the evil of eugenics might be couched in popular images but is ultimately brutal, as the Nazi Party so clearly showed, using its theories to support the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, the seriously mentally ill and homosexuals. Birth control alone has brought unexpected consequences as well, with whole populations in demographic decline, a simple consequence of Sanger's clearly stated enthusiasm to "kill it," repeated rhetorically in the song text to emphasize her murderous rhetoric.
Such words should neither be ignored nor be forgotten. Any offence which might be taken at this "song" should be directed at Sanger, not the composer who has only sought to highlight her words dramaturgically and melodically in an "upbeat" musical setting, which begins with an opening recitative leading to this tiny "abortion aria." For that upbeat character, a tempo indication of "dotted quarter equals 100" was chosen.
The harmonic gesture at measure 5 is one of diatonic ascending and descending parallel major triads generating a playfully dissonant polytonal character, while accompanying a melody line staunchly remaining in D major, irrespective of the changing harmonies beneath it. Thus, F sharp major's A sharp competes with the melody's A natural throughout, and the false relation of the G sharp third of E major and tonic of G major create a gentle cacophony. This is a dramaturgical reflection of the changing reasoning which stands behind the adamant message which has not changed, though the "public relations" shifts.
The short opening recitative features parallel seconds and sevenths, the normative harmonic dissonances within a tonal system. These more "stern" harmonies yield to the charm of the song verse itself.
I find it ironic to note that Sanger's "No Gods" notion is in direct opposition to Charles Darwin's seminal work which she understood so incorrectly. A simple reading of the final chapter suggests that Darwin thought quite differently than the eugenics enthusiasts who so easily misrepresented his views, especially as regards a "Creator."
Charles Darwin wrote, "Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual." [ 9 ]
Additionally, in Darwin's last words in this seminal work, he wrote, "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." [ 10 ]
Comparing Darwin's notion of "grandeur in this view of life" with Sanger's notion of "human weeds," we find the eugenics idea is far distant and quite Malthusian, seeing birth of certain humans as "defective."
To that end, there is now a clear demographic proof of the folly of this eugenic dream, and this proof follows from some Darwinian principles as expressed simply by science fiction author, Robert Heinlein. " Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and go on as long as the women and children are saved. But if you fail to save the women and children, you've had it, you're done, you're through! You join Tyrannosaurus Rex, one more breed that bilged its final test." [ 11 ]
Darwin made no such political value judgment as did Sanger and Stopes and the generations of abortion enthusiasts who followed them, for Darwin's was a conclusion of science, and Sanger's and Stopes' a conclusion of racial purity politics pretending to be grounded in science.
Lastly I would challenge those who would be offended by this parody of Sanger's own words to highlight their real horror to read the words of a Nobel Laureate, Mother Teresa, and rethink their devotion to the modern group think of abortion on demand, government funded and irrespective of reason for all:
"Let us make this year that we make every single child born, and unborn, wanted. We are talking of peace. These are things that break peace, but I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself. And we read in the Scripture, for God says very clearly: Even if a mother could forget her child - I will not forget you - I have carved you in the palm of my hand. We are carved in the palm of His hand, so close to Him that unborn child has been carved in the hand of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that sentence, that even if a mother could forget something impossible - but even if she could forget - I will not forget you. And today the greatest means - the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here - our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us. Our children, we want them, we love them, but what of the millions. Many people are very, very concerned with the children in India, with the children in Africa where quite a number die, maybe of malnutrition, of hunger and so on, but millions are dying deliberately by the will of the mother. And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today. Because if a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between. Let us make this year that we make every single child born, and unborn, wanted." [ 12 ]
The choice is to emulate Margaret Sanger and what is stated openly to be the "greatest destroyer of peace" or peace itself as advocated by Nobel Laureate Mother Teresa, for the lives of these two women and their views of abortion are incompatible. I contend that alongside Mother Teresa and her Nobel Peace Prize stand Darwin's real arguments, as well as most world religions, many modern demographers, and the truest sense of humanity. The rabbinic parlance of traditional Judaism, "choose life," and the words of Mother Teresa, "the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion," are arrayed against the morality of Sanger plainly to choose death as she stated, "The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." Mercy indeed.
The score is available as a free PDF download, though any major commercial performance or recording of the work is prohibited without prior arrangement with the composer. Click on the graphic below for this piano-vocal score.
NOTES
These footnotes below are intended to document with sources the conclusion made above. One might argue with the theme, but one should not argue with the hard data and especially with the direct quotes of the primary sources, for the abortion-eugenics argument of Sanger and Stopes seems first and foremost about racism.
[ 1 ] p.12, Birth Control Review, May 1919. If Sanger is to heeded, then birth control equates to Darwinian natural selection. She concludes in advance that this "selection" will improve the species by limiting a perceived population explosion among the "unfit." Robert Samuelson writes of current demographics trends, "There's no more population 'explosion.' In wealthier countries, motherhood is going out of style and plunging birthrates portend population loss. This is a hugely significant development, even if we don't fully understand the causes -- 30 years ago experts didn't predict it -- or consequences. One way or another, the side effects will be massive for economics, politics and people's well-being. Indeed, they may already have started. Is it a coincidence that Germany and Italy, two countries on the edge of population decline, are so troubled?" (The Washington Post Writers Group, 26 May 2006)
Sanger was among those "experts." She foresaw a eugenic paradise, and failed to foresee instead the decline which it has assisted into being.
UCLA'S Anderson Forecast published an article written by Nicholas Eberstadt entitled "Four Surprises in Global Demography." (A Newsletter of FPRI's Center for the Study of America and the West, Volume 5, Number 5, July 2004). It reads in part:
...today we can observe some important and surprising exceptions to these generalizations. Four of these unanticipated trends are (1) the rapid spread of sub-replacement fertility, (2) the emergence of unnatural gender imbalances among the very young, (3) sustained increases in death rates, and (4) American "demographic exceptionalism."
The Rapid Spread of "Sub-Replacement Fertility"
Sustained reductions in family size in the context of peace and social progress-were first witnessed in late eighteenth-century Europe. In the first half of the twentieth century, European countries unveiled another demographic first: non-catastrophic sub-replacement fertility. During the interwar period, a number of European states reported fertility patterns that, if continued, would lead to an eventual stabilization and indefinite population decline thereafter, absent offsetting immigration. These low fertility regimens were entirely voluntary: heretofore, such low birth Rates had virtually always been attended by war, pestilence, famine, or disaster. Europe experienced a baby boom after World War II, but sub-replacement fertility has now returned with a vengeance.
To maintain long-term population stability, a society's women must bear an average of about 2.1 children per lifetime. According to projections of the U.S. Census Bureau, Europe's total fertility rate (or TFR-births per woman per lifetime) is about 1.4. Indeed, nearly all the world's developed regions-Australia and New Zealand, North America, Japan, and the highly industrialized East Asian outposts of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea- are reporting sub-replacement fertility. (Israel remains an exception.) But sub-replacement fertility is clearly no longer mainly a developed-nation phenomenon. If the Census Bureau's projections are roughly accurate, just about half the world's population lives in sub-replacement countries or territories.
Apart from Mongolia, according to the Census Bureau, all of East Asia is sub-replacement, as are Thailand and Burma in Southeast Asia, Kazakstan and Sri Lanka in South-Central Asia, many Caribbean societies, and most South American countries.
Perhaps the biggest surprise, given received notions about the Arab/Muslim expanse, is the recent spread of sub- replacement fertility to parts of the Arab and the Muslim world. Algeria, Tunisia, and Lebanon are now sub-replacement countries, as is Turkey. And there is the remarkable case of Iran, with a current TFR of under 1.9, which is lower than the United States'. Between 1986 and 2000, the country's TFR plummeted from well over 6 to just over 2. If modernization and Westernization are the handmaidens of sustained fertility decline, as is often supposed by students of demography, both terms are apparently being given a rather new meaning.
There are no reliable methods for anticipating just how low fertility levels may sink, or how long sub-replacement fertility may persist in various locales. One consequence, however, is already clear: it will force a great aging of the populations affected.
All of the developed countries are already "graying." This is most pronounced in Japan, where, by the year 2025, it is expected that one out of nine people will be 80 or older. Japan's prospective aging is unprecedented, and the scale of the transformation suggests the enormousness of the challenges that will accompany it. Japan, Europe, and North America are places where people traditionally got rich before they got old. In the decades ahead, many national populations are going to get old before they get rich.
China promises to be the most important case in point. Thanks to low levels of mortality, its population control program, and its now-low fertility, China is aging at a breathtaking velocity. Between 1975 and 2000, China's median age jumped from just over 20 to about 30; by 2025, it is projected to rise by nearly another decade. By then, it is quite possible that China's median age will be higher than America's. But China is much poorer than Japan or the U.S. were at every comparable stage of their aging processes.
China's rapidly aging population faces a looming triple bind. Apart from the family, China lacks any functional nationwide arrangements for pensioning its elders. Thus, a great many Chinese will have to continue to work into old age. But working life in China typically entails more physical labor, which does not favor the frail, than work in Japan or the United States. China's aging problem has the makings of a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy.
The term, "sub-replacement fertility" refers to a population. Sanger and her allies referred to the individual in their enthusiasm for birth control. The two were and remain unalterably interconnected. Eberstadt's article speaks of the "rapid spread of sub-replacement fertility." The lingo is fancy, while the meaning is plain. A population in decline is a population which opts for birth control, to add to the various other causes for death of the young -- a replacement generation, on which so much is predicated. Without reproduction equal to the needs of replacing a population, that population's culture will dwindle and its ideals, values and culture must necessarily wither. The Darwinian understanding suggests that this evidences that population as plainly unfit. It is to this that Margaret Sanger has contributed, and therefore her words need be revisited to experience with the hindsight of a century's experimentation what "kill it" -- her words verbatim -- has meant to whole nations and cultures.
[ 2 ] "Millions" is a number readily agreed to and unchallenged in Planned Parenthood documentation, much like the ubiquitous "Billions served" message of fast food restaurants. The scholarly Rabbi Eli Schochet of Shomrei Torah commented that "millions" is a word often reserved to define the Holocaust of World War II, or the results of decades of pogroms of Soviet Russia, the genocide in Cambodia under Pol Pot, and the wholesale slaughter in Rwanda, but rarely stirs a similar critical conclusion for many in the ongoing political debate about abortion, which entities should support it financially and what it means.
To Wither or Not to Wither
Irrespective of morality, abortion and birth control seem to be massively impacting Western populations, as they dwindle in numbers unimagined at the start of the birth control phenomenon of the 20th century. The most "fit" societies seem to be those who evidence reproductive outcomes of approximately 2.1 children per family, while "unfit" societies evidence reproductive rates below this statistical biological replacement value. Sanger's eugenic theories seem to have gotten Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" wholly wrong, as demographically tested and verified over the span of many decades. Societies which abort their young in greatest numbers do not show signs of survival, but rather withering. Sanger's eugenics has contributed to this withering numbered now in the "millions." There is no debate in population figures, and no long term political value in pretending the demographic changes are not occurring.
Birth Control of the Inadequate
One might look at how "inadequates" were discussed among the peers of Sanger, and in the same journal. As an example: "Reference is made throughout this discussion to the mentally, physically and socially inadequates. One might ask who are included in this group, since it is for those so afflicted that sterilization is suggested as a desirable measure Those classed as inadequate include 1) The Mentally Defective, 2) The Mentally Diseased, 3) The Epileptics, 4) Those afflicted with certain physical disorders, such as Leprosy, 5) The Defective Delinquents, 6) The Moral Degenerates, 7) The Drug Habituates, 8) Those afflicted with social disease, such as Syphilis, 9) The confirmed Criminals." In "Selective Sterilization," by E. A. Whitney, MD, Birth Control Review, Vol. XVII, No. 4, April 1933.
In the same issue, one finds: "By selective sterilization we mean the sterilization of defective individuals in order to prevent them from procreating them kind. By preventing the birth of mental defectives, we raise the general average level of intelligence throughout the population -- since the preponderance of births in the average and superior group is relatively increased." In "Towards Race Betterment," by Theodore Russell Robie, MD, Birth Control Review, Vol. XVII, No. 4, April 1933.
A Comparison to Another Race Betterment Strategy
A comparison in order to inform: "On January 27, Germany’s Bundestag commemorated the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp. This year the focus was placed on the 300,000 disabled victims of the notorious Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. Under Aktion T-4, people were gassed or given a lethal injection and cremated since 1939 in six killing facilities in Germany and Austria. This helped the Nazi regime to refine its system for processing millions, rather than just thousands of victims. During the ceremony, a few relatives of victims related their stories. A philosopher, Hartmut Traub, narrated the story of his 27-year-old uncle Benjamin, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which had virtually became a death sentence in Nazi Germany. In 1941 he was taken on an 'outing' with 60 other inmates of a mental institution to Hadamar where they were executed with carbon monoxide. Gold teeth and the brains of more interesting 'specimens' were removed." In "Nazi euthanasia victims honoured in Bundestag," by Michael Cook, BioEdge, 28 January 2017.
Additionally, one reads: "...mass killings were already well underway before the 1942 conference. Doctors had been sterilizing people diagnosed as genetically ill since 1934, and systematic mass murder of such people had been taking place since 1939 as part of what became known as Action T-4. Those who didn't fit in with racist Nazi ideals of health were sent to six killing facilities in Germany and Austria. 'Euthanasia began with the denunciation of people as useless mouths to feed,' Lammert told the audience, which included German Chancellor Angela Merkel and German President Hans-Joachim Gauck. 'Barbarism of language is barbarism of the spirit. Words became deeds'." In "Bundestag remembers Nazi 'euthanasia' victims," by Jefferson Chase. Deutsche Welle, 27 January 2017.
[ 3 ] p. 117, Birth Control in America, "The Career of Margaret Sanger," by David Kennedy, quoting a 1923 Sanger speech.
[ 4 ] p. 2, Birth Control Review, Nov. 1921.
[ 5 ] In Women and the New Race, Eugenics Publishing Co., 1920, 1923. One should note Sanger's choice of "mercy" to describe killing an infant. It is, at best, a macabre choice. But Sanger stated that the urge to infanticide was greater than the urge to motherhood. For any who might doubt this, the book is available from Project Gutenburg as a free download. From Women and the New Race, one will read, "If infanticide did not spring from a desire within the woman herself, from a desire stronger than motherhood, would it prevail where women enjoy an influence equal to that of men? And does not the fact that the women in question do enjoy such influence, point unmistakably to the motive behind the practice?"
Stunning Parallels
Moreover, Sanger corresponded with Ernst Rudin, architect of the National Socialists in Hitler's Germany, and Sanger published Rudin's "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need" in Birth Control Review, which Margaret Sanger started and continued to influence until its demise in 1940. The article appeared three months before the German 'sterilization law was passed in Germany.
Lest this seem out of place for Sanger, she wrote in A Plan for Peace (1932) of her plan "to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization transmitted to offspring." Her plan also called for giving "certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization," and apportioning "farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives."
In other words, eugenic concentration camps for those deemed "dysgenic" -- an adjective defined as "causing deterioration of hereditary qualities of a stock."
[ 6 ] The Woman Rebel - No Gods, No Masters, May 1914, Vol. 1, No. 3.
[ 7 ] Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon. In addition, in 1939, Margaret Sanger organized the “Negro Project,” designed to eliminate members of what she considered an “inferior race.” She claimed “the masses of Negroes ... particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit...” “Beyond Birth Control: The Population Control Agenda." L. Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (New York: Penguin Press, 1990), p. 332. See also, G. Grant, Killer Angel: A Biography of Planned Parenthood’s Founder Margaret Sanger (Ars Vitae Press: Franklin, Tenn., 1995), p. 72-73.
In fact, throughout the 1930s, Sanger spoke to convocations of the Ku Klux Klan. (See pages 366-367 of Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (1971 reprint by Dover Publications, Inc. of the 1938 original published by W.W. Norton & Company) She argued that there were in fact "genetically inferior races." The overt racism of Margaret Sanger, found documented in her own words has been suppressed in favor of the Mathusian argument for abortion as the answer to over-population.
Environmentalism through the Simplest Answer
Ted Turner, one of the co-chairs of the State of the World Forum, wants to drastically reduce the world’s population:
"The simplest answer is that the world’s population should be about two billion, and we’ve got about six billion now. I haven’t done the actuarial tables, but if every woman in the world voluntarily stepped up and said, ‘I’ll only have one child,’ and if we did that for the next 80 to 100 years that would reduce the kind of suffering we’re having. ... We could have 10 billion people living below the poverty line, or we could have two billion people living well, and having color TVs and an automobile. The planet can support that number of people, and that’s the way it was in 1930. … Personally, I think the population should be closer to when we had indigenous populations, back before the advent of farming.” Source: T. Rembert, “Ted Turner: Billionaire, Media Mogul ... And Environmentalist” (Interview).
It should be noted, in order to measure his ideological stance with his personal behavior, Turner has had three unsuccessful marriages and has five children. [The emphasis is mine.] It seems obvious that his view of what other people should do to prevent over-population is not related to his own personal life. This is essentially an elite racist argument, in which the wealthy ideologue sees reduction in another ethnic, cultural or racial "class" as good, while said advice is not applicable to his class and station.
[ 8 ] Quoted in Population Implosion Worries a Graying Europe, by Michael Specter in the New York Times, July 10, 1998.
Whole National and Cultural Populations Becoming Infetrile
Specter further quotes Dr. Pierpaolo Donati, professor of sociology at the University of Bologna and a leading Catholic intellectual "Prosperity has strangled us. Comfort is now the only thing anybody believes in. The ethic of sacrifice for a family -- one of the basic ideas of human societies -- has become a historical notion. It is astonishing." So for Sanger, urban poverty was linked to "uncontrolled" fertility, while controlled fertility would "breed" prosperity. The problem is that prosperity is an intergenerational economic phenomenon, and requires, as Chesnais [cited above] states, a world with "children in it." Birth control, therefore must also be linked to infertility of whole national and cultural populations, whose demographic decline is most assuredly linked to birth control and abortion, as well as issues of prosperity and taxation.
The Birth Dearth and Death Spiral
In a similar view, British Member of Parliament David Willetts has written, "Europe faces a birth-dearth. Nobody wants to force women to have more children than they wish. But we have created an environment in which people are having fewer children than they aspire to. ("At the Launch of his Pamphlet 'Old Europe?', 23 Sep 2003.) Willetts added, "What Europe really needs is more babies. This is not a matter of forcing traditional roles on women: countries were the feminist revolution has advanced furthest also have higher birth rates. Nor can people be forced to have more children than they want."
Rakhsat Sleiman offers a similar conclusion in "Europe's Demographic Evolution Through to the Year 2050" (Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales, June 2006). He writes, "...the fall in the working populations and the number of young people will be sufficiently large to lead to a reduction in population sizes, that in some cases will be significant."
In yet another similar viewpoint, George Weigel addressed Europe's "two culture wars," illuminating the trajectory of Europe's demographic crisis and its "self-defeating, nihilistic, post-modernism." He wrote, "The overall picture is sobering enough. Not a single European Union member has a replacement-level fertility rate, i.e., the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population. Moreover, eleven EU countries—including Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and all three Baltic states—display 'negative natural increase' (i.e., more annual deaths than births), a clear step down into a demographic death-spiral." [Commentary Magazine, May 2006.]
This "death-spiral" began with the advocacy of state-sponsored birth control and abortion. As Margaret Sanger so clearly said, "Kill it." It is societal norms, whole populations and cultures which are being "killed," i.e., proven "unfit," while Sanger saw the unfit as poor minorities who she happily called "reckless breeders." This view is only now beginning to be documented as racist, though it has been from the start.
In considering the future, the European Union commissioned and published a report which speaks to the critical need for "replacement bodies", which states, "...demographic growth in the EU has resulted more from immigration than from natural increase." [p. 19, The New Global Puzzle - What World for the EU in 2025?, Nicole Gnesotto and Giovanni Grevi, eds., EU Institute for Security Studies, 2006.]
The Unfit, Self-Limiting Heart of Eugenics
This is proof from contemporary demographers that population replacement, due to sub-replacement fertility which is fueled in part by prevalent, state and insurance sponsored abortion, is necessary for the simple survival of a people and a culture. These demographic realities are beginning to overturn Malthusian arguments, and expose the lunacy of eugenics as espoused by Sanger and others of her convictions.
It is those poor who are the new migrant pool of "replacement bodies," birth control having exterminated the "thoroughbreds" of Sanger's and Stope's eugenic fantasy, and not merely the "unwanted" and "defective."
A true Darwinian would conclude that those who opt for birth control and abortion are in fact "self limiting" and therefore proving themselves "unfit," a conclusion which would surely have astounded this naive yet central woman in the forefront of feminism and "abortion rights." For today's fallacious interpreters of Darwin, the single fact of natural selection is that fitness is the natural way forward, while aborting a generation is the exact opposite -- though it fulfills the Malthusian image of population reduction -- the polar opposite of natural selection.
[ 9 ] p. 488, Chapter XIV, "Conclusion." Charles Darwin, (1859) "On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life." London: John Murray. 1st edition, 1st issue.
[ 10 ] op. cit. p. 490.
[ 11 ] Robert A. Heinlein, quotation from Heinlein's address at the U.S. Naval Academy April 5, 1973.
[ 12 ] Mother Teresa, in The Nobel Peace Prize, 1979 Nobel Lecture, 11 December, 1979.
