Eugenics
After World War I, Sanger increasingly appealed to the societal need to limit births by those least able to afford children. The affluent and educated already limited their child-bearing, while the poor and uneducated lacked access to contraception and information about birth control. Here she found an area of overlap with eugenicists. She believed that they both sought to "assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit." She distinguished herself from other eugenicists, by writing "eugenists [sic] imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother." Sanger was a proponent of negative eugenics, which aimed to improve human hereditary traits through social intervention by reducing the reproduction of those who were considered unfit.
Sanger's view of eugenics was influenced by Havelock Ellis and other British eugenicists, including H.G. Wells, with whom she formed a close, lasting friendship. She did not speak specifically to the idea of race or ethnicity being determining factors and "although Sanger articulated birth control in terms of racial betterment and, like most old-stock Americans, supported restricted immigration, she always defined fitness in individual rather than racial terms." Instead, she stressed limiting the number of births to live within one's economic ability to raise and support healthy children. This would lead to a betterment of society and the human race.[119] Sanger's view put her at odds with leading American eugenicists, such as Charles Davenport, who took a racist view of inherited traits. In A History of the Birth Control Movement in America, Engelman also noted that "Sanger quite effortlessly looked the other way when others spouted racist speech. She had no reservations about relying on flawed and overtly racist works to serve her own propaganda needs."
In "The Morality of Birth Control", a 1921 speech, she divided society into three groups: the "educated and informed" class that regulated the size of their families, the "intelligent and responsible" who desired to control their families in spite of lacking the means or the knowledge, and the "irresponsible and reckless people" whose religious scruples "prevent their exercising control over their numbers". Sanger concludes, "There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped."
Sanger's eugenics policies included an exclusionary immigration policy, free access to birth control methods, and full family planning autonomy for the able-minded, as well as compulsory segregation or sterilization for the "profoundly retarded". Sanger wrote, "we [do not] believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding." In The Pivot of Civilization she criticized certain charity organizations for providing free obstetric and immediate post-birth care to indigent women without also providing information about birth control nor any assistance in raising or educating the children. By such charities, she wrote, "The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth."
In personal correspondence she expressed her sadness about the aggressive and lethal Nazi eugenics program, and donated to the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda.
Sanger believed that self-determining motherhood was the only unshakable foundation for racial betterment. Initially she advocated that the responsibility for birth control should remain with able-minded individual parents rather than the state. Later, she proposed that "Permits for parenthood shall be issued upon application by city, county, or state authorities to married couples," but added that the requirement should be implemented by state advocacy and reward for complying, not enforced by punishing anyone for violating it.
She was supported by one of the most racist authors in America in the 1920s, the Klansman Lothrop Stoddard, who was a founding member of the Board of Directors of Sanger's American Birth Control League. Chesler comments:
Margaret Sanger was never herself a racist, but she lived in a profoundly bigoted society, and her failure to repudiate prejudice—especially when it was manifest among proponents of her cause—has haunted her ever since.
Abortion
Margaret Sanger opposed abortion and sharply distinguished it from birth control. She believed that the latter is a fundamental right of women and the former is a shameful crime. In 1916, when she opened her first birth control clinic, she was employing harsh rhetoric against abortion. Flyers she distributed to women exhorted them in all capitals: "Do not kill, do not take life, but prevent." Sanger's patients at that time were told "that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but it was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun." Sanger consistently distanced herself from any calls for legal access to abortion, arguing that legal access to contraceptives would remove the need for abortion. Ann Hibner Koblitz has argued that Sanger's anti-abortion stance contributed to the further stigmatization of abortion and impeded the growth of the broader reproductive rights movement.
While Margaret Sanger condemned abortion as a method of family limitation, she was not opposed to abortion intended to save a woman's life. Furthermore, in 1932, Margaret Sanger directed the Clinical Research Bureau to start referring patients to hospitals for therapeutic abortions when indicated by an examining physician. She also advocated for birth control so that the pregnancies that led to therapeutic abortions could be prevented in the first place.
