08-23-2015, 09:19 AM
(08-23-2015, 07:41 AM)BonnieBengal Wrote: I guess the racist Margaret Sanger got her way.
I heard this the other day, and I guess this is good enough place as any to put it (I mean, I COULD start ANOTHER PP thread, but one new topic a day is enough....
) Anyway, the radio program Here & Now had a segment with historian Ester Katz titled "Was Margaret Sanger Out To ‘Control’ The Black Population?". Some highlights from the story:
Quote:On Ben Carson’s characterization of Sanger as a eugenicist
“I think Mr. Carson should get to know Mrs. Sanger a little better, since he obviously doesn’t know either much about Mrs. Sanger or eugenics. The eugenics was a very broad movement. Some people believed that selective breeding could be used to improve the human race; other people just thought you could improve the human race by being careful about who reproduced so that those with inherited conditions would be discouraged from reproducing – those with biological or mental problems, again, that were genetic, should be discouraged from reproducing. Sanger came into the eugenics movement from the left. She never wanted to encourage any group to produce more people or any other group to produce less. She thought everybody should have fewer children… By defectives she meant those with mental or physical ailments – that is, they could be passed on. She meant biological defectives. In that way it’s an unfortunate term that she used. She never used that term in terms of black people or any other class of people.”
Quote:On Sanger’s relationship with the black community
“Planned Parenthood locations were placed wherever they could get them. What Sanger understood was that birth control, until she came into the movement, was primarily class based. If you had the money you could get the doctor who would give you the knowledge or the contraception to allow you to decide when or whether to have children. If you were poor, you didn’t have the access. What she wanted to do was make access and make opportunity equal. If that meant going into poor neighborhoods or black neighborhoods, she was perfectly willing to do that. In fact, she started a bureau up in Harlem in 1930 with the support of leaders of the black community who were asking for this assistance.
“Leaders of the black community certainly admired Sanger and wanted her help. Everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois to Martin Luther King Jr. all asked for her help and she worked closely with leaders in the black community to provide the resources that the black community needed to allow women there to control the number of children that they had. And if they didn’t have access to it, she was anxious to provide that access, that education. She also understood that there would be some in the black community that would be uncomfortable discussing these things with white nurses and physicians, and so she encouraged black nurses and black physicians to provide this very intimate information.”
It's a pretty interesting listen, and at about 10 minutes long it isn't all that time consuming.
