Hello!
Welcome to the eugenics podcast. I'm
Patrick Merricks.
I'm Marius Turda. Good morning, Marius. How
are you doing?
Good morning, Patrick. I'm very well thank
you. Yourself? I'm perfect. Thanks.
We're surviving the heatwave so ready to
talk about eugenics,
again! So today we're talking about a
very topical
subject: birth control and planned
parenthood.
So this is, as always, based on some
recent news articles so here we have
this
developing movement sort of against 
Margaret Sanger,
the birth control advocate and some
would say pioneer,
but also connected to eugenics. So, who
was Sanger?
We see the movement continuing, of
certain institutions
distancing themselves from their
own controversial past. Now in this
particular case, Margaret Sanger was actually the founder
and the main
figure of planned parenthood movement
and birth control movement in America, so
this is quite a
bold move on behalf of the organization
in New York
to remove the name, considering
she's the founder!
So let's look at a little overview of
of Sanger; her involvement in birth
control, some of the, you know, important
moments and publications. So what do we have here?
She's actually an icon
and she's canonized by women activists
and by feminists,
and she's also criticized by
others, who see
her involvement with eugenics and racism as very problematic.
But if we look at her life and
activities
it's utterly impressive. C. P.
Blacker, the secretary of the
British Eugenics Society,
mentioned at some point in a text he
wrote
in 1966 on the occasion of
Sanger's death that if we look at back
of the 20th century
and we look at the population explosion
of the 20th century, as he called it,
there's one person we will will always
mention
and one person whose activities will
will refer to and this is Margaret
Sanger.
He put Sanger on the same level with
someone like
Lenin or Stalin or Hitler in terms of
shaping
the 20th century, so if we look at
her life we could see that actually
she's achieved so many extraordinary
things:
birth control, sex educator, writer,
nurse. Nurse she started as, working in
New York,
on the East Side and this is where she
encountered poverty
and the difficulty women had in rearing
children
and caring for their families so she
realized herself
being she she was she was coming from
an Irish,
numerous families, there were 11 children
in total,
so she realized how difficult it is for
a woman to
live with unrestricted
fertility and no access to birth
control.
So she got very early on engaged in this,
which caused her a lot of trouble:
we have an image here from 1929 when
she's covering her mouth because she
could not talk about birth control.
The magazine she published The Woman
Rebel was initially banned from
distribution by U.S. postal office
because
it violated the laws against
obscenity
and so on, so forth. So that's a very
important aspect of her life and
probably something that all of us
are aware of and remember and
commend her for, which is the birth
control movement; the other
one is the work she's done in terms of
seeding and planning the organization
that later became
Planned Parenthood Federation. So we can
see
here the World Congress that she
organized
in Geneva in 1927, the population
congress, the first;
and then the third one, very important,
in Bombay
in India, which led to the creation of
the International Planned
Parenthood Federation. So these are two
main
aspects of her work, amongst other things,
that people always remember but at the
moment of course the discussion is
whether
her beliefs in eugenics and her racist
comments should should lead to a re-evaluation
of her contribution
to birth control of movement
worldwide.
Yeah, so you mentioned the connection
between birth control and eugenics,
so so how did Sanger see this?
She believed that birth control can
achieve more than eugenics can.
She endorse eugenics; she saw it
as part and parcel of the empowerment of
women, of the emancipation;
feminism and eugenics were interlinked
for her as much as birth control
and eugenics were interlinked. She did
believe that
there is similarity between the two
movements but birth control can actually
do more than eugenics can. Birth control
can stop all reproduction of
'unwanted' individuals,
of 'unfit' people; it can help
get rid of poverty, can help emancipate
the women
who are having difficulties; so
birth control is the most powerful way
of dealing with overpopulation and
eugenics was just part and parcel of
that.
Birth control was in connection
with eugenics control and in connection
with population control - for her,
they were all interlinked.
Okay so another form of eugenic
birth control would be sterilization,
one of the more controversial
measures in eugenics history.
So Sanger's position on this?
Yeah, she, as many at the time of
course,
particularly in America, she believed
that voluntary sterilization
can help, although of course she
thought that ultimately the emphasis
eugenicists
put on negative eugenics
is not leading to the outcomes she
desired.
So, although she agreed that in some
cases sterilization of the 'feeble-minded' of the 'unfit'
may provide the solution, it's not the
final
answer to overpopulation.  The final answer and the program she
wanted to  have applied
worldwide
was birth control. So, ultimately,
it could reduce the reproduction of
certain
individuals, but sterilization will never
be a solution to population control;
so that's an important aspect of her
thinking and how she
interspers her arguments about birth
control with certain eugenic
and to our sensibilities today
some very racist comments about certain
groups of people: the poor or certain ethnic minorities such as the Blacks and so on, so forth.
So she saw that for her, as for
for other people at the time, feminism,
women emancipation, the control of
reproduction
and eugenics were all together part of a
very progressive
and forward-looking way of dealing with
what they saw
as the biggest problem of the 20th
century: namely, over-population.
So as we bring it back to present
day.
So as you mentioned a lot of the
the movement against Sanger
today is connecting
to race and the Black Lives Matter. So,
yeah, do you have any thoughts on
that?
It is something that has
to be done and scholars have been doing
this for a long time:
revising and rewriting and questioning
Margaret Sanger's connections to
eugenics, to the eugenic movement
both in America and in Britain. She was
very close to the British Eugenics
Society,
she was very close to certain
eugenicists 
in Britain. She learned a great deal
about sexuality, free love and eugenics from Havelock
Ellis,
a person who influenced her greatly.
And also there is a big connection
between her and
certain racist
ideas that circulated in the 1930s- 40s.
To re-evaluate that and to put into the
proper historical context is very
healthy and has to be done
within the bigger debate we have at the
moment about renegotiating,
disruptions, about re-reading certain
canonical
interpretation of the great figures of
the 20th century.
And she was certainly one of them. She is
high there
with the likes of great men and
women of science
and social activism and women's
emancipation.
Okay, well, thank you Marius for
another
very interesting discussion and
also thanks to
everyone for watching the video or
listening. So
once again, thank you Marius and see
you next time. Thank you Patrick.
Until next time.
