Margaret Sanger: “Birth Control and Racial Betterment”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In the late 1910s Sanger worked to expand the birth control movement beyond its radical base and draw support from academics, scientists, and physicians in an effort to win greater public acceptance and pave the way for the establishment of legal clinics. A court ruling in 1919 on the appeal of her conviction for having opened the first birth control clinic in America in 1916 had allowed for the setting up of doctor-run clinics. But the scientific and medical establishments still questioned the legitimacy of birth control, distrusted Sanger's lay leadership, and resisted affiliations with a movement perceived to be both feminist and too extreme.

Among these establishment figures were eugenicists—scientists, academics, and laypeople who believed that heredity was responsible for the mental and physical traits of individuals. They argued that scientifically directed breeding could encourage good characteristics and prevent defects from being transmitted to future generations. They believed that the mentally deficient were more prone to procreate and in procreating put a burden on society that the educated and more “fit” had to bear. Some went further and argued that entire races or nations were inferior. These eugenicists sought to limit the fertility of the poor, of nonwhites, and of recent immigrants who, they thought, were more likely to pass on inferior character traits such as shiftlessness, intemperance, sexual immorality, and criminality as well as mental retardation. By holding out the promise of resolving social problems and relieving society of the burden of supporting the poor, the insane, criminals, and the so-called feeble-minded, eugenics attracted Progressives, reactionaries, Socialists, and National Socialists (Nazis)—all convinced, at least for a time, that a better society could be built through scientific breeding.

“Birth Control and Racial Betterment” was Sanger's first extended discussion of eugenics. It was published in the Birth Control Review, a monthly journal meant to unite birth control activists across the country. In the article, Sanger attempts to align eugenics and birth control by emphasizing their shared goals. Her aim was both to capitalize on the popularity of eugenics, a reputable branch of social science in the immediate post–World War I period, and to make birth control respectable—more a health and economic matter and less a campaign for reproductive rights. Sanger believed that birth control must work in concert with eugenics to produce a stronger and healthier human race. She argues in this article that the two movements must together help reduce the reproduction of both the physically and economically “unfit”—those who would pass on debilitating illness or disability as well as those who could not provide proper care for their children. However, she disagrees vehemently with the majority of eugenicists, who called for increased fertility from the wealthier and more educated classes. As she put it, “We hold that the world is already over-populated. Eugenists [her term] imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state.”

Sanger insists that all women be given contraceptive information and access to safe birth control so that each woman could make her own childbearing decisions. Sanger also addresses sterilization, heredity, and spacing of births, topics she would expand upon in Pivot of Civilization (1922), her most sustained work on eugenics and the intellectual foundation of the birth control movement. Sanger's early writings on eugenics defended women and the working class against the assumptions of eugenicists. The eugenicists believed that normal, healthy women ought to have as many children as possible, while those judged unfit should have their right to make childbearing decisions taken away. Sanger, trusting that a woman knew her own home conditions and health best, argued that any woman, wealthy or poor, was the best arbiter of when she should have a child. For Sanger poor was not a synonym for “unfit,” and birth control was a tool that families would adopt themselves rather than having it imposed upon them—a tactic the eugenicists advocated.