Margaret Sanger (1879-1966): Founder of Planned Parenthood,

By Brannon S. Howse

If you were to ask anyone to name the people who have directly or indirectly caused the most deaths in the twentieth century, names such as Hitler, Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh would likely top the lists. I submit, though, that there is one person whose track record in blood leaves any one of the others in a distant second place.

As of this writing, some 50 million babies have been murdered in America alone through abortion, and in many ways each death can be traced to the work of the woman who is the subject of this chapter. Founded by Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood has for decades led the way in providing abortions to America’s women. It now generates an estimated $1 billion per year in its despicable industry soaked with the blood of America’s infants. 

I’ve studied the lives of many people, and Margaret Sanger is one of the most vile, mean, and racist of all. Liberal professors and media outlets that say anything positive about Planned Parenthood or Margaret Sanger show themselves to be ignorant, racist, or both. 

Rooted in Dirt:

After divorcing her first husband and the father of her three children, Sanger became the publisher of a liberal newspaper called The Woman Rebel which boasted the slogan “No Gods! No Masters!” And indeed, as a member of the Socialist Party, she was a rebel in more ways than one could count.

The premiere issue of The Woman Rebel, denounced marriage as a “degenerate institution,” capitalism as “indecent exploitation,” and sexual modesty as “obscene prudery.” In the next issue, an article entitled “A Woman’s Duty” stated that “rebel women” were to “look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in their eyes.” In issues to follow, she published articles on sexual liberation, social revolution, contraception, and two articles that defended political assassinations. As a just reward for her work, Sanger was served a subpoena indicting her on three counts of publishing lewd and indecent articles. To avoid prosecution, she fled to England, where she became acquainted with the eugenics movement. She spent a year there before returning to the U.S. to promote the new and even more horrendous ideas she had learned in Europe. 

Once back in the States, Sanger organized a public relations campaign to have all charges against her dropped. To put her eugenics worldview into practice she opened a birth control clinic in Brownsville, New York, an area inhabited by Slavic, Latino, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. Sanger stated that these ethnic groups were “dysgenic and diseased races” that needed to have their “reckless breeding” curbed. Barely two weeks after the clinic opened, it was shut down, and Sanger and her sister were sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse for distributing obscene material and prescribing dangerous medical procedures. 

Not the least discouraged, Sanger became acquainted with the doctors and scientists who had worked with Nazi Germany’s “race purification” program and who had no compunction about the euthanasia, sterilization, abortion, and infanticide programs of the early Reich. Sanger even published several articles in Birth Control Review that reflected Hitler’s White Supremacist worldview.

During the next few years, Sanger authored several best-selling books and spoke regularly to large and receptive audiences, not only in America but throughout the world. In The Pivot of Civilization, she praised the cause of eugenics, openly calling for the eradication of “human weeds,” for the “cessation of charity,” for the segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted,” and for the coercive sterilization of “genetically inferior races.” Sanger became a celebrity with a following.

As her popularity soared, Sanger married a multimillionaire, who eagerly funded her cause. To avoid further legal trouble, she opened a new clinic but called it a “Research Bureau.” The new strategy of creating benign-sounding terminology for her work and ideas rocketed her to a new level of success. In addition to her husband’s money, she received large grants from foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, and Mellon.

Reinventing Her Plans:

When the horrors of Hitler’s Nazi doctors and scientists came to light after World War II, Sanger once again had to remake her image and distance herself from the disgraced Europeans. She founded a new organization with a new name:  Planned Parenthood, successfully hiding her racism and bigotry behind family-friendly terms like “family planning.” But family planning means today what it meant in Sanger’s day—abortion on demand. 

You might be tempted to think Planned Parenthood has by now rejected its racist roots, but you would be mistaken. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the man who succeeded Sanger as president of Planned Parenthood, made it clear that “we are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.” Similarly, Faye Wattleton, president of the organization during the 1980s, said she was proud to be “walking in the footsteps” of Sanger. And in 1994 then-president of Planned Parenthood Pamela Maraldo continued the tradition of extolling the organization’s tradition: “Today, Planned Parenthood proudly carries on the courageous tradition of Margaret Sanger.” Bear in mind too, that the organization carries on this “proud heritage” with massive amounts of taxpayer funds. If America socializes healthcare, government-funded abortions will probably increase drastically. They will eventually be provided to any woman who wants to murder her unborn child.

There are some frightening historical precedents for this kind of moral slippage. We typically lay the blame for German atrocities in World War II primarily at the feet of the country’s leaders. But I contend that the worldview, values, and conduct of a vast number of Germany’s populace are to blame, as much as Hitler's Nazi Party. And make no mistake, if our government begins to euthanize millions of senior citizens and the disabled through the rationing of healthcare, most of the American people will be as responsible as any doctors and politicians because we allowed the foundation to be laid with the desire for abortion on demand and the right to die. We allowed our children to be imbued with postmodernism, moral relativism, situational ethics, and the end-justifies-the-means rationalization. 

Deadly Consequences:

History may not repeat itself precisely, but it does rhyme. What happened in Germany is now possible in America as the barrier of a Christian worldview has largely been removed from the American conscience. Just before he died, Dr. Leo Alexander, chief medical assistant to the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, observed about the U. S., "It is much like Germany in the Twenties and Thirties. The barriers against killing are coming down." 

The foundation was laid for the slaughter of five million Jews and six million non-Jews not by the Nazi Party, but by the parents of disabled children and family members of the mentally ill and disturbed. In the 1930s and 40s Germany: 

[quote] the lives of hundreds of thousands of terminally ill, incurably sick and mentally incompetent patients were terminated, not by sadistic monsters but by Europe's medical elite. The history of that era is all too similar to the present to be ignored. [end quote]

Hugh Gallagher confirms it "would be a mistake to call [the German euthanasia experience] a Nazi program. It was not. The program was conceived by physicians and operated by them. They did the killing."

To date, millions of Americans have chosen to abort their children, and millions have voted for candidates who promise to uphold a woman's legal right to kill her unborn child. The German people learned that selfishness and moral relativism laid the foundation for the slaughter of more than 11 million people. What has America's slaughter of 50 million unborn babies laid the foundation for? Will Christians speak up or be silent? Or will they ignore Abraham Lincoln’s somber warning, “Silence makes cowards out of the best of men.”

In 1996, Mark Rothe and Dr. Timothy Quill drafted an amicus brief that they submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in which they argued against the legalization of physician-assisted death. They argued: 

[quote] First, child euthanasia was permitted for disabled and "defective" infants and children. Soon thereafter, an adult program for an "easy death" of mentally ill and incurably sick Germans was instituted on grounds of compassion. Later, Jews and other "undesirables" were included, this time for racial and eugenic reasons. Ultimately, the genocide that was the Final Solution grew out of these programs of medicalized killing. The practice of physician aid-in-dying had small beginnings. In March 1937, a child was killed by his father because he was significantly mentally ill. When put on trial for murder, the local health office came to the father's defense, influencing the court to grant him a nominal prison sentence instead of the death penalty asked for by the prosecutor. The next year, a man named Knauer wrote the German government, asking that his blind and mentally retarded daughter, born without an arm and leg be granted Gnadentod (mercy death). The chancellor instructed Dr. Karl Brandt to investigate and, if the letter were true, to grant the request. [end quote] 

And these are not isolated cases: 

[quote] Many parents were eager to obtain the Wohltat of physician-assisted death for their ill, deformed, or disabled children and many "wrote to hospitals to ask if their child could be relieved of his or her misery and be granted euthanasia." In May 1939, an advisory group, the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe and Genetically Determined Illness, was formed to determine if and how a euthanasia program for children and adults would operate. The adult project was housed in Berlin at number 4 Tiergartenstrasse. It was thus code-named "T-4" and in the beginning there appeared to be a broad level of support for this throughout the country. [end quote]

Within a few years, there were up to thirty killing centers in Germany. "The German experience in physician-assisted death was the direct result of utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis and the view within the medical community that the value of human life is relative, that some persons are better off dead. It was not the result of jack-booted thugs in brown shirts."

Keep in mind that this is German people killing German people through what they believed were "mercy killings." The practice also served as a cost-benefit analysis not unlike what the U.S. government established through the 2009 stimulus bill. "The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K board…This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for young patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly...”

"The T-4 program was not a part of the Holocaust, rather, it was T-4 and the child euthanasia programs which preceded and served as models for the genocide of the Final Solution." "In fact, even the idea of the infamous shower room gas chambers originated in the T-4 program with the killing of German Gentile patients." "No Jews were among them; most Jews had already been sent to the concentration camps. The Nazis considered euthanasia a quasi-ethical sort of murder, and reserved it for members of their own kind." "Neither racism nor anti-Semitism were a factor in these developments in Germany. T-4 doctors occasionally even gave lethal injections to severely injured German soldiers." Euthanasia was thought to be a blessing and a merciful act that was reserved for "true" Germans. That is until a few years after the German euthanasia program was established. World War II had begun and all needed resources were needed to fund the war. Jews who had been denied a "mercy death" were now going to be exterminated by what the German people and doctors had created. 

"Jews and other selected undesirables would be transported from the concentration camps to the same killing centers used by the T-4 program." This new program was named 14f13. "After the success of T-4 and 14f13, the hospital gassing equipment and procedures were adopted by Adolf Eichmann for use in the Final Solution." "The final solution to the 'Jewish problem' that was finally decided upon in early 1942, and implemented later, was chosen largely because the means to that solution already existed in the euthanasia program, killing centers, and gas chambers. Indeed, the same gassing equipment used in the T-4 and 14f13 hospital operations were dismantled, transported, and re-installed at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor. "The T-4 physicians and other personnel were also put to work in the camps." 

Dr. Andrew Ivy, another Nuremberg prosecutor’s medical assistant, has stated that if it were not for the already established, physician-assisted death programs, "it is conceivable that the entire idea and technique of death factories for genocide would not have materialized." Many experts believe if it were not for the already established death centers, the Jews might possibly have just been deported because many German soldiers that took part in firing squads either had mental breakdowns or committed suicide. The gas chambers of the T-4 program solved this "problem" of psychological casualties among the German army.

A nation's leaders usually mirror its people. President James Garfield cautioned Americans about this:

"The people are responsible for the character of their Congress, [and other elected officials]. If that body be ignorant, reckless and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them…"

Ideas have consequences, and once a nation becomes willing to murder its own children, the people will eventually murder each other. Fully nationalized healthcare in America will ultimately bring with it the euthanization of seniors who supported abortion on demand or the right to die. The right to die is becoming the duty to die, promoted by many humanist liberals. John Hardwig from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee wrote a 13-page paper entitled, Is There a Duty to Die? In his short but dangerous work, the good professor makes the case that indeed there is duty to die under wide-ranging conditions such as: 

"when continuing to live will impose significant burdens—emotional burdens, extensive care giving, destruction of life plans, and, yes, financial hardship—on your family and loved ones. This is the fundamental insight underlying a duty to die." 

Fabian Socialist Julian Huxley became the first director general of the United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organization and authored UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1948) in which he declared: 

"even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable."

Even if we know abortion will continue and that active euthanasia will increase, we, as Christians, must speak out and oppose the satanic origin of these practices. To do less is to agree they are acceptable, and I, for one, will not agree because God has declared "thou shall not murder." I challenge Christians to give generously to pro-life groups and adoption agencies. 

Churches must also plan now for ministries to seniors and the disabled who will otherwise be denied medical treatment through healthcare rationing. Many church members are doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in position for “such a time as this.” Christians in the medical community may soon be the only ones who will offer care to those the government would otherwise terminate.  Jesus said, "Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these brethren, you did it to Me." Our elderly and infirm are fast becoming some of “the least of these.”

It is not out of the question that a government which has already allowed the murder of 50 million babies and which now drafts legislation to permit euthanizing the disabled and senior citizens through the rationing of healthcare is also a government that would deny medical care and treatment to those deemed undesirable, unfit, and a nuisance because of their Biblical worldview. Margaret Sanger’s standing as the greatest death-monger of all time is unlikely to be challenged. Her numbers seem destined only to grow. 

Copyright 2009 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.