March 28, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi received Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s highest honor, the Margaret Sanger award. It’s fitting that the award go to this modern day reincarnation of Margaret Sanger: another rich, white, progressive who calls abortion sacred ground—Nancy Pelosi.
Beyond being the founder of PPFA, just who was Sanger and how does she compare to Nancy Pelosi?
In Sanger’s own words, history reveals that eugenics, not women’s rights, was the cornerstone of her crusade for population control. Webster defines eugenics as “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed.”
Margaret Sanger was an American elite whose second marriage to oil tycoon Noah Slee provided much of the financial backing for her activism. As an enlightened progressive, Sanger proposed that America must control the “weeds” of society: the poor, the uneducated, and the unfit.
Before her founding of the American Birth Control league in 1921, later to become PPFA, she founded the magazine “Birth Control Review” in 1917. Eugenics themed articles abounded in Birth Control Review: “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928), and many others.
Sangeer believed that charity for the poor only exacerbated what was in Sanger’s mind a social crisis. In The Pivot of Civilization (Chapter V, “Cruelty of Charity”), Sanger wrote: “Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. … Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks [of people] that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”
Sanger called for a different approach. In “Plan for Peace” (April 1932, Vol 26, Number 4) she called for “…a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted … to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be … for the period of their entire lives.”
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Bankrolled by wealthy American moguls like Clarence Gamble, Sanger countered empathy and charity with The Negro Project in 1939. Developed by white birth control reformers, it convinced black leaders such as Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. that birth control improved the situation of blacks. At least that’s what they were sold.
However, “Influenced strongly by both the eugenics movement and the progressive welfare programs of the New Deal era, the Negro Project was, from the start, largely indifferent to the needs of the black community and constructed in terms and with perceptions that today smack of racism,” says the NYU Margaret Sanger Papers Project.
Today’s apologists claim this is not what was envisioned but have to ignore Sanger’s continued promotion of birth control as eugenics at the time: “Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective.” (Margaret Sanger, “Women and the New Race” Chapter 18)
In a live 1957 interview, Mike Wallace confronted Sanger with a direct quote from her pre-show interview: “It is not only wrong, it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit the dissemination of birth control, even among its own members.” Sanger at first denied making the statement but when Wallace pressed, she could only say that she didn’t believe she said it quite that way.
Although her mother was a Catholic, Sanger considered the Catholic Church an enemy of women’s progress and acknowledged that her father was an atheist. As one of 11 children, Sanger wrote in her first autobiographical book, My Fight for Birth Control, “I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails with large families.”
Enter the modern day reincarnation of Margaret Sanger: rich, white, progressive Nancy Pelosi.
As evidenced by receiving the Margaret Sanger Award, no one pushes contraception and abortion harder than Pelosi.
Pelosi maintains she is a staunch Catholic but also says that when life begins “shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”
Like Sanger, Pelosi believes that it should be illegal for religious people to reject that philosophy. Questioned about Catholic bishops suing the Obama administration over contraception and abortion mandates, Pelosi inexplicably retorts, “I am going to stick with my fellow Catholics in supporting the Administration on this.”
In 2014, Pelosi’s delusions go even farther. Pelosi says “as a mother of five children…as a practicing and respectful Catholic, [abortion] is sacred ground.”
Pelosi is among the top 15 richest members of Congress. Her 12th Congressional District is among the richest in the nation, ranked 7th of 436 other districts in income per capita.
“The biggest sin is to bring a diseased child into the world,” Sanger told Wallace. Sanger explained that we are divinity; we determine sin, not some god or church teaching or the Bible. Perhaps that explains why Pelosi can label abortion as sacred ground.
A rich, white, progressive who rejected Catholic teaching like Pelosi, Sanger also dressed up her desire to eliminate the weeds of society as “women’s rights.”
This is the award Pelosi eagerly accepted. And this is the recognition Pelosi richly deserves.