1) She proposed allowing Congress to solve “population problems” by appointing a “Parliament of Population.”
2) Sanger called the various methods of population control, including abortion, “defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”
3) Sanger believed that the United States should “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, Insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.”
5) People whom Sanger considered unfit, she wrote, should be sent to “farm lands and homesteads” where “they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.”
6) She was an advocate of a proposal called the “American Baby Code.”
“The results desired are obviously selective births,” she wrote.
According to Sanger, the code would “protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.”
7) While advocating for the American Baby Code, she argued that marriage licenses should provide couples with the right to only “a common household” but not parenthood. In fact, couples should have to obtain a permit to become parents.
8) She believed that large families were detrimental to society.
“The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children,” she wrote.
“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it,” she continued.
9) She argued that motherhood must be “efficient.”
“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,” Sanger wrote.
10) Population control, she wrote, would bring about the “materials of a new race.”
“If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy,” Sanger wrote.
11) Sanger wrote that an excess in population must be reduced.
“War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap,” she wrote.
Mothers, “at whatever cost, she must emerge from her ignorance and assume her responsibility.”
12) “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” Sanger wrote.
13) In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1957, Sanger said, “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world, that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically.”
“Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin—that people can—can commit,” she said.
