Gender and Sexuality 4

Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives. So, in compliance with nature’s working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we can expect of it efficient motherhood. If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.

Margaret Sanger (1920): Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentano’s, p. 8.

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was a US-American women’s rights activist with ties to the eugenics movement.

Margaret Sanger co-founded the IPPF in 1952, which promoted global population control. There are overlaps between feminist, socialist and eugenics currents. The IPPF circulated eugenics’ problematic ideas, without directly referring to the Nazis’ racial hygiene doctrine.

*Betsy Hartmann (1995): Reproductive Rights and Wrongs. The Global Politics of Population Control. Cambridge: South Ende Press.

1920