re: #20 Dark_Falcon

Much of the problem people have with Sanger has to do with her embrace of one cause. These next two paragraphs are quoted from the article in question:

(bolding mine)

To be fair to Margaret Sanger, she had no idea of what horrors others would commit in the name of eugenics, and she never proposed anything like the mass murders committed under the Nazis infamous T4 Program. But she had let the eugenics movement her voice in its early years (to the extent of writing a pro-eugenics book titled The Pivot of History in 1922) and thus must bear some blame for the excesses that followed.

Sanger wasn’t motivated by racism, not at all. But the use of some the laws she championed against blacks at the very least doesn’t look good, and it was made worse by the fact that she never really gave an accounting for her early support of eugenics. To be fair, by the time she wrote her autobiography in 1938, the embrace of the rhetoric and some of the goals of the worst of those who had promoted eugenics by the Nazis meant she could hardly give an explanation without providing her foes with something to discredit her with.

So while Sanger wasn’t really racist, her association with a movement that did some truly horrible things left her sometimes looking like one from the vantage point of our own time.

Yes and no. Eugenics was a wildly popular idea of the day, eagerly embraced by lots and lots of people who are not being trashed by wingnuts. Horrible stuff was done in its name as well, long before the Nazis got involved.

Sanger can be criticized from here to Sunday, but the reason that she’s the only eugenics booster any of these people know about is that they want to trash Planned Parenthood.