Talk:Margaret Sanger

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Sanger and Eugenics?

There are various made up quotes attributed to Sanger including this:

"Colored people are like weeds and are to be exterminated". -- Margaret Sanger.

However, the following is more correctly attributed (although again the exact wording is disputed):

"We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the negro population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of the more rebellious members" --Margaret Sanger

“Margaret Sanger may have been the woman to put "Planned Parenthood" into effect; however, she did it with the thoughts of exterminating an entire culture of people.”

Source?

“She wanted to be rid of the black race and when it was being shown how much of a bigot she truely was, she went ahead and hired an African-American Social worker to help open a clinic in the Bronx of New York. Where the Media made her look like a hero, this step on helped to perpetuate her desire to extinquinsh the black population. An abortion clinic run by a black and located in an area largely populate by blacks was exactly what this woman wanted.

Margaret Sanger openly supported the Klu Klux Klan. "Always, to me any aroused group was a good group and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Klu Klux Klan." --Margaret Sanger

Again this is nonsense dercat

So go ahead and erect a statue in her honor, or place her bust in one of the baby-killing clinics, but also know 'why' she created these clinics. They weren't created to "help women". They were created to kill the negro population and you are treating her like she's a hero. In fact, she's just the opposite.

- Preceding unsigned comment by Stitchmain (talk | contribs) 20:08, 5 December 2013

The first quote is fake. The second is a misquote. You will find both listed here under Misattributed.

Contrary to your demonizing rhetoric, there is no genuine evidence that Margaret Sanger harbored eliminationist desires. She did recount speaking about birth control at a Ku Klux Klan meeting in her autobiography, though from her account, she clearly was not a member. We also already list that quote on this page.

And this page is here to talk about improvements to this page of quotations, not a forum about abortion. In the future, please end your Talk page comments with ~~~~ to sign and date your posts. ~ Robin Lionheart (talk) 00:29, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

The first "quote" is listed as misattributed https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger#Misattributed

Unsourced

• Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

• Anyone, no matter how ignorant, how diseased mentally or physically, how lacking in all knowledge of children, seemed to consider he or she had the right to become a parent.

• It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them.

• The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.

Letter from Margaret Sanger to Dr. C.J. Gamble, December 10, 1939.

This letter [1,2,3], typed with single lined spacing on three sheets of paper, each 9 inches by 11 inches, and addressed from Margaret Sanger to Dr CJ Gamble, dated 10 December 1939, is a crucial primary document in the continuing debate about Margaret Sanger's alleged, stated support in December 1939 for the extermination of the Negro population (African Americans in today's parlance). The original is part of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.

In my view, there needs to be a lengthy quote from this letter included on the Margaret Sanger Wikiquote page. At a minimum, there needs to be a link from the Margaret Sanger Wikiquote page to the relevant page at Smithlibraries.org (see references below). Ideally, there needs to be a digital transcript of the letter included in a Wikisource page for Margaret Sanger, but this would require the permission of the Sanger family estate, who own the copyright, and of the Sophia Smith Collection.[4]

1) http://smithlibraries.org/digital/items/show/495
2) http://smithlibraries.org/digital/files/original/d6358bc3053c93183295bf2df1c0c931.pdf
3) Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966, “Letter from Margaret Sanger to Dr. C.J. Gamble, December 10, 1939.,” Digital Collections, accessed May 7, 2014, http://smithlibraries.org/digital/items/show/495.
4) Rights - Copyright: Sanger family estate. For purposes of private study, scholarship, and research, you may print or download this content. Publication and/or broadcast in any form requires permission from the copyright holder (if any) and the Sophia Smith Collection.
138.130.246.13 00:54, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

We already source the quote from it to the link in [1] and [3], and that page links to that PDF [2] and also JPEGs. By Wikisource:Copyright policy, Wikisource only hosts works with compatible free content license like CC-SA or GNU FDL or works in the public domain. Since some anti-abortionists have demonstrated a willingness to fabricate phony Sanger quotes, the estate would likely be wary of releasing the letter under a license permitting derivative works. So Wikisource will probably not be able to archive the letter until it enters the public domain in 2046 (if my understanding of the USA's unreasonably long copyright terms is correct; I am not a copyright lawyer). ~ Robin Lionheart (talk) 04:45, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Surely the best way to prevent fabrication is to source primary documents and make them available to all?

We are sourcing to high-quality images of the primary documents, available to all at the smithlibraries.org addresses above. When their copyright runs out, perhaps Wikisource will reproduce them too. ~ Robin Lionheart (talk) 18:14, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Charity: VERY MISLEADING quotation!!!!!

The page, as written now (don't worry, I'm about to fix it) includes an outrageous misrepresentation of her actual view! The quote begins:

[Charity] conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother.

This is misleading because she was NOT writing about charity GENERALLY!! She was writing about ONE SPECIFIC KIND OF charity: programs which provided assistance to pregnant women, and assistance in procuring pre-natal and obstetric care, but did nothing for the women after they had recovered from childbirth, and did nothing for the children. So the charity was helping the women have more kids than they could take care of, and not helping them take care of these children. THAT's what Margaret Sanger was calling "a stupid cruelty". NOT charity generally. HandsomeMrToad (talk) 02:34, 1 February 2020 (UTC)