Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood officials have always tried to deflect any criticism of their founder’s B-movie worldview of weird science and ideological compulsion. Though they have managed all manner of intellectual gymnastics and historical revisionism in a feeble attempt to deny it, hide it, and belie it, Sanger was undeniably mesmerized by the fashionable elitism of Malthusian Eugenics.”

She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact a “menace to civilization.” She really believed that “social regener­ation” would only be possible as the “sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility” were repulsed. She had come to regard organized charity to ethnic minorities and the poor as a “symptom of a malignant social disease” because it encouraged the prolificacy of those “defectives, delinquents, and dependents” she so obviously abhorred. She yearned for the end of the Christian “reign of benevolence” that the Eugenic Socialists promised, when the “choking human undergrowth” of “morons and imbeciles” would be “segregated” and ultimately “sterilized.” Her greatest aspiration was “to create a race of thoroughbreds” by encouraging “more children from the fit, and less from the unfit.” And the only way to achieve that dystopic goal, she realized, was through the harsh and coercive tyranny of Malthusian Eugenics.”

In other words, she was a true believer not simply someone who assimilated the Flash Gordon jargon of the times—as Planned Parent­hood officials would have us believe. She was a committed elitist bent on undermining the familial bonds of the poor and disenfranchised.”

Thus, as she began to build the work of the American Birth Con­trol League, and ultimately, of Planned Parenthood, Margaret relied heavily on the men, women, ideas, and resources of the Eugenics movement. Virtually all of the organization’s board members were Eugenicists. Financing for the early projects—from the opening of the first birth control clinics to the publishing of the revolutionary lit­erature—came from Eugenicists. The speakers at the conferences, the authors of the propaganda and the providers of the services were almost without exception avid Eugenicists.

The Birth Control Review — Sanger’s magazine and the immediate predecessor to the Planned Parenthood Review regularly and openly published the racist articles of Malthusian Eugenicists. In 1920 — for instance, it published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard’s fright­ening book of Fascist diatribe, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.” In 1923, the Review editorialized in favor of restrict­ing immigration on a racial basis.” In 1932, it outlined Sanger’s own “Plan for Peace,” which called for coercive sterilization, mandatory seg­regation, and at rehabilitative concentration camps for all “dysgenic stocks.” In 1933, the Review published a shocking article entitled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.” It was written by Sanger’s close friend and advisor, Ernst Rudin, who was then serving as Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and had earlier taken a prominent role in the establishment of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. Later that same year, it published an article by Leon Whitney entitled, “Selective Sterilization,” which adamantly praised and defended the Third Reich’s pre-holocaust “race purification” programs.”

The bottom line is that Sanger self-consciously organized the Birth Control League—and its progeny, Planned Parenthood—in part, to promote and enforce the scientifically elitist notions of racial purification and perfection. Thus, like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, and the Mensheviks, Sanger’s enterprise was from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist. And this racist orientation was all too evident in its various programs and initiatives: govern­ment control over family decisions, nonmedicinal health-care exper­imentations, the rabid abortion crusade, and the coercive sterilization initiatives.