Article ID: JAF4334 | By: Bob Perry

This article first appeared in the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL, volume 33, number 04 (2010). The full text of this article in PDF format can be obtained by clicking here. For further information or to subscribe to the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL go to: http://www.equip.org/christian-research-journal/

SYNOPSIS
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, is considered a “great hero” of that organization because of her ardent pursuit of women’s health and equality issues, especially as represented by a woman’s right to control her own fertility. From the pro-choice perspective, she was a feminist advocate for underprivileged women who sought to offer them an alternative to abortion by providing a more humane method of escaping their desperate circumstances: birth control. Conversely, prolife advocates point out the negative causes to which her work contributed, namely the abortion, eugenics, and population control movements.

Both of these perspectives are incomplete, however, if they do not address ideas that went far deeper than a superficial benevolence for the plight of poor women. Sanger believed in a humanist progressivism that saw birth control as desirable in an enlightened society because it rendered infanticide invisible. Her worldview was conceived in bizarre and difficult family circumstances and fostered in the associations she formed with some of the most influential Darwinists of the twentieth century. Her extramarital love affair with H. G. Wells served to complete her direct ideological connection with Darwin himself. Sanger embraced social evolution as the driving force in the world, and followed its tenets to their logical conclusions. Though her views were once considered radical, they have become mainstream and gone global. This may be her most enduring legacy.

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