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Man arose from the ape and inherited his passions, which he can only refine but dare not attempt to castrate unless he would destroy the foundations of energy that maintain civilization and make life worth living and the world worth beautifying.[i]
 

The only weapon that women have, and the uncivilized weapon that they must use, if they will not submit to having children every year and a half, is abortion.  We know how detrimental abortion is to the physical side as well as the psychic side of women’s life.  It is a women’s instinct, and she knows herself when she should and should not give birth to children, and it is more natural to trust this instinct and to let her be the judge then it is to let her judge herself by some unknown God.  I claim it is a woman’s duty and right to have for herself the power to say when she shall and shall not have children.[ii]


Its central challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex.[iii]
 

Margaret Sanger, in The Pivot of Civilization, detailed her prophesy on the impact of birth control:
 

I look, therefore, into a Future when men and women will not dissipate their energy in the vain and fruitless search for content outside of themselves, in far-away places or people. Perfect masters of their own inherent powers, controlled with a fine understanding of the art of life and of love…they will unafraid enjoy life to the utmost. Women will for the first time in the unhappy history of this globe establish a true equilibrium and ‘balance of power’ in the relation of the sexes… Interest in the vague sentimental fantasies of extra-mundane existence, in pathological or hysterical flights from the realities of our earthliness, will have through atrophy disappeared, for in that dawn men and women will have come to the realization, already suggested, that here close at hand is our paradise, our everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity. Not by leaving it and our essential humanity behind us, nor by sighing to be anything but what we are, shall we ever become ennobled or immortal. Not for woman only, but for all of humanity is this the field where we must seek the secret of eternal life.[iv]
 

Margaret Sanger was born on September 14, 1879, the sixth of eleven children.  Her father, Michael Higgins, was an Irish Catholic immigrant who fancied himself as a freethinker and a sceptic.  Margaret’s mother, Anne Purcell, was a second generation American from a strict Catholic family.  Frail with tuberculosis she was utterly devoted to her atheist husband.  The family suffered cold, privation, hunger, scorn, shame, and isolation because of the father’s radical Socialist ideas and activities.  Margaret would later describe her family’s life together as “joyless and filled with drudgery and fear.”[v]
 

In spite of her non-believing father’s efforts to undermine Margaret’s young and fragile faith, her mother had her baptized in St. Mary’s Catholic Church on March 23, 1893.  A year later, on July 8, 1894, she was confirmed.  Both ceremonies were held in secret - her father would have been furious had he known.  For some time afterward she displayed a keen devotion to spiritual things, but gradually her father’s cynicism snuffed out any flame.  By the time she was seventeen her passion for Christ had collapsed into a hatred of the Church, which became her spiritual hallmark for the rest of her life.[vi]  She wrote:
 

I never liked to look at Jesus on the Cross. I could not see any good it did to keep looking at him.  We could not help him, as he had been crucified long ago.[vii]
 

Margaret moved away as soon as she could to a boarding school, Claverack College of the Hudson River Institute, where she got her first taste of freedom. According to biographer, Madelaine Gray, she plunged into radical politics, suffragette feminism, and unfettered sex.[viii]  And after a failed trial marriage at 18, in 1897, she escaped from the harsh “bondage” of paid labor by entering into another marriage to William Sanger in 1902.  He was a young man of great promise.  An architect with the famed McKim, Mead, and White firm in New York City, he had already made a name for himself working on the plans for Grand Central Station and the Woolworth building.
 

The Sangers settled into a pleasant apartment in Manhatten’s upper east side and set up housekeeping.  But the housekeeping had little appeal to Margaret.  She quickly grew restless and soon engaged in extramarital affairs while encouraging her husband to do the same.  She pronounced the marriage bed to be "the most degenerating influence in the social order" and advocated a "voluntary association" between sexual partners.[ix] Her doting husband began casting about, trying to find a way to satisfy her passions.  He sent her off for long vacations in the Adirondacks.  He hired maids and attendants.  He bought her presents.  He even built her an extravagant home in the suburbs.  In short order they had three children, two boys and a girl.  After nearly a decade of undefined domestic dissatisfaction, Margaret convinced William to sell all they had and move back into Manhattan hubbub and fast-paced social life.  Meanwhile, William began to renew old ties in radical politics by attending Socialist, Anarchist, and Communist meetings in Greenwich Village.  “Occasionally attending with her husband,” says Gray, “Margaret plunged headlong into the maelstrom of rebellion and revolution.”[x]
 

While William was happy that Margaret had finally found a cause that satisfied her restless spirit, he gradually became concerned that she was taking on too much, too soon.  Their apartment was in a perpetual state of disarray.  Their children were constantly being farmed out to friends and neighbors.  And their time alone was non-existent.  But when Margaret fell under the spell of the militant utopian and free sex advocate Emma Goldman, William’s husbandly concern turned to disapproval.  Margaret had gone from an archetypal “material girl” to a revolutionary firebrand almost overnight.  And now she was taking her cues from one of the most controversial insurrectionists alive.
 

According to Gray, Margaret was completely overwhelmed.  She hung on Goldman’s every word and began to read everything in Goldman’s library including the massive seven volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis, which stirred her in a new lust for adventure.  She told William she needed emancipation from every taint of Christianized capitalism, including the strict bonds of the marriage bed.[xi]  Divorce was narrowly averted, when William rented a cottage on Cape Cod and took Margaret and the children on a long vacation.
 

In the time following, Margaret occupied herself by dabbling in midwifery by day and at night by speaking to intellectuals, radicals, artists, actors, writers and activists, who gathered at Mabel Dodge’s Fifth Avenue apartment, to mingle, debate and conspire.  Margaret’s topic of discussion was always sex.  When it was her turn to lead an evening, she held Dodge’s guests spellbound, ravaging them with intoxicating notions of “romantic dignity, unfettered self-expression, and the sacredness of sexual desire.”[xii]  Free love had been practiced for many years by avant-garde intellectuals in New York.  Eugene O’Neill took on one mistress after another, immortalizing them in his plays.  Edna St. Vincent Millay “hopped gaily from bed to bed and wrote about it in her poems.”  As shown, Emma Goldman enjoyed unrestrained sexploits.  Says Gray, “But no one championed sexual freedom as openly and ardently as Sanger.”[xiii]  Mabel Dodge would write in her memoirs:
 

Margaret Sanger …introduced us all into the idea of birth control, and it, along with other related ideas about sex, became her passion.  It was as if she had been more or less arbitrarily chosen by the powers that be to voice a new gospel of not only sex-knowledge in regard to conception, but sex-knowledge about copulation and its intrinsic importance.  She was the first person I ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh.  This, in those days was radical indeed when the sense of sin was still so indubitably mixed with the sense of pleasure…Margaret personally set out to rehabilitate sex…She was one of its first conscious promulgators.[xiv]
 

Everyone seemed delighted by Margaret’s explicit and brazen talks.  Everyone except her husband.  According to Gray, William began to see the Socialist revolution as nothing more than “an excuse for a Saturnalia of sex.”  He took her and the children to Paris.  After two weeks, she begged him to return to New York.  He refused, so she abandoned him there, and returned with the children.[xv]  She wrote in her 1931 book, My Fight for Birth Control:
 

My first marriage failed, not because of love, romance, lack of wealth, respect or any such qualities which are supposed to be lacking in broken ties, because the interest of each widened beyond that of the other…From the deep waters into which I had been swept by the current of events it was impossible to return to the shallow pool of domesticity.[xvi]
 

Without great financial support, she started writing and published a paper called The Woman Rebel.  It was an eight sheet pulp with the slogan “No Gods! No Masters!” emblazoned across the masthead.  The first issue denounced marriage as a “degenerate institution,” capitalism as “indecent exploitation,” and sexual modesty as “obscene prudery.”  The next issue, the article entitled ”A Women’s Duty” proclaimed that “rebel women” were to “look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eye.”  Another article asserted that “rebel women claim the following rights: the right to be lazy, the right to be an unmarried mother, the right to destroy…and the right to love.”  In later issues she published several articles on contraception, several more on sexual liberation, three on the necessity for social revolution, and two defending political assassination.[xvii]
 

Charged with three counts of lewd and indecent articles, she eventually fled on a false passport to England to escape prosecution.  Before departing she released in the mail a pamphlet called Family Limitation.  It was lurid and lascivious, designed to enrage the postal authorities and titillate the masses.  But worse it was dangerously inaccurate, recommending such things as Lysol douches, bichloride of mercury elixirs, heavy doses of laxatives, and herbal abortifacients.  Margaret’s career as the “Champion of Birth Control” was now well underway.
 

Once in England she started attending lectures on Neitzsche’s moral relativism, anarchist lectures on Kropotkin’s subversive pragmatism, and communist lectures on Bakunin’s collectivistic rationalism.  But she was especially interested in developing ties with the Malthusians.  In his magnum opus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in six editions from 1798 to 1826, Malthus wrote:
 

All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons…Therefore…we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use.  Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits…but above all, we should reprobate specifically remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total expiration of particular disorders.[xviii]
 

Malthusians believed that if Western civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the radically inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to be eliminated.  Malthusianism gave Sanger the “high ground” upon which to argue her case for birth control (and co-associated sex liberality), using scientifically verified threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension and overpopulation as the backdrop.  But even more important, Sanger’s exile in England, gave her the chance to make some critical interpersonal connections as well.  Writes Gray:
 

Her bed became a veritable meeting place for the Fabian upper crust: H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Arbuthnot Lane, and Norman Haire.  And of course, it was then that she began her unusual and tempestuous affair with Havelock Ellis.[xix]
 

Ellis was the iconoclastic grandfather of the Bohemian sexual revolution.  The author of nearly fifty books on every aspect of concupiscence from sexual inversion to auto-eroticism, from the revolution of obscenity to the mechanism of detumescence, from sexual periodicity to pornographic erotism, he provided the free love movement with much of its intellectual apologia.  Much to his chagrin however, he himself was sexually impotent, so he spent most of his life in pursuit of new and more exotic sensual pleasures.  He staged elaborate orgies for his Malthusian and Eugenicist friends; he enticed his wife into innumerable lesbian affairs while he quietly observed; he experimented with mescaline and various other psychotropic and psychedelic drugs; and he established a network for both homosexual and heterosexual encounters.[xx] To Sanger, Ellis was a modern day saint.
 

By 1922 her fame and fortune were unshakably secure.  The Pivot of Civilization had become a best seller.  On morality Sanger wrote:
 

The moral justification and ethical necessity of Birth Control need not be empirically based upon the mere approval of experience and custom. Its morality is more profound….It gives us control over one of the primordial forces of nature, to which in the past the majority of mankind have been enslaved, and by which it has been cheapened and debased. It arouses us to the possibility of newer and greater freedom. It develops the power, the responsibility and intelligence to use this freedom in living a liberated and abundant life. It permits us to enjoy this liberty without danger of infringing upon the similar liberty of our fellow men, or of injuring and curtailing the freedom of the next generation. It shows us that we need not seek in the amassing of worldly wealth, not in the illusion of some extra-terrestrial Heaven or earthly Utopia of a remote future the road to human development. The Kingdom of Heaven is in a very definite sense within us. Not by leaving our body and our fundamental humanity behind us, not by aiming to be anything but what we are, shall we become ennobled or immortal. By knowing ourselves, by expressing ourselves, by realizing ourselves more completely than has ever before been possible, not only shall we attain the kingdom ourselves but we shall hand on the torch of life undimmed to our children and the children of our children.[xxi]      
 

Writing on her views of the role of science, she quoted R.G. Ingersoll:
 

There is but one hope. Ignorance, poverty, and vice must stop populating the world.  This cannot be done by moral suasion….This cannot be done by religion or by law, by priest or by hangman.  This cannot be done by force, physical or moral.  To accomplish this there is but one way.  Science must make the woman the owner, the mistress of herself.  Science, the only possible savior of mankind…[xxii]
 

According to Sanger, science likewise illuminates the whole issue of genius. Hidden in the common stuff of humanity lies buried this power of self-expression. Modern science is teaching us that genius is not some mysterious gift of the gods, some treasure conferred upon individuals chosen by chance. Nor is it, as Lombroso believed, the result of a pathological and degenerate condition, allied to criminality and madness. Rather is it due to the removal of physiological and psychological inhibitions and constraints that makes possible the release and the channeling of the primordial inner energies of man into full and divine expression. The removal of these inhibitions, so scientists assured her, makes possible more rapid and profound perceptions, - so rapid indeed that they seem to the ordinary human being, practically instantaneous, or intuitive. The qualities of genius are not, therefore, qualities lacking in the common reservoir of humanity, but rather the unimpeded release and direction of powers latent in all of us. This process of course is not necessarily conscious.[xxiii]  Here Sanger is echoing tenets common to anarchist, humanist and Gnostic paradigms, which will be studied throughout this book.
 

Sanger went on to embrace current medical discoveries as heralding a new and unprecedented era of mastery of the human body.  She writes:
 

For a clear and illuminating account of the creative and dynamic power of the endocrine glands, the layman is referred to a recently published book by Dr. Louis Berman.  This authority reveals anew how body and soul are bound up together in a complex unity. Our spiritual and psychic difficulties cannot be solved until we have mastered the knowledge of the wellsprings of our being.[xxiv]
 

Her cause seemed unstoppable now.  The revolution had truly begun.  Even so, writes Gray, Sanger was miserable.  Her private life was in utter shambles.  Her marriage had ended.  Her daughter caught cold and ultimately died of pneumonia.  Her boys were neglected and forgotten.  And her once ravishing beauty was fading with age and abuse.  Desperate to find meaning and happiness, she lost herself in a profusion of sexual liaisons.  She went from one lover to another, sometimes several in a single day.  She experimented with innumerable erotic fantasies and fetishes, but satisfaction always eluded her grasp.  She began to dabble in the occult, participating in séances and practicing Eastern meditation.  She even went so far as to apply for initiation into the mysteries of Rosicruciansim and Theosophy.[xxv]
 

She continued her sordid and promiscuous affairs even after old age and poor health had overtaken her.  Her attraction to occultism deepened.  And perhaps worst of all, by 1949 she had become addicted to both drugs and alcohol.  Although Planned Parenthood was well launched by this time, according to Gray, its success did little to ease her perpetual unhappiness.[xxvi]  Like her mentors Emma Goldman and Havelock Ellis, Sanger was not content to keep her lascivious and concupiscent behavior to herself.  She was a zealous evangelist for free love.  Even in her old age, she persisted in proselytizing her sixteen year old granddaughter, telling her that kissing, petting, and even intercourse were fine as long as it was “sincere,” and that having sex about “three times day” was “just about right.”[xxvii]  That Planned Parenthood is committed to undermining the moral values of teens is evident in virtually all its literature.  It teaches kids to masturbate.  It endorses premarital sex.  It approves of homosexuality.  It encourages sexual experimentation.  It vilifies Christian values, prohibitions, and consciences.[xxviii]  In The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger explains her philosophy of “sex drive”:
 

Restraint and constraint of individual expression, suppression of individual freedom ‘for the good of society’ has been practiced from time immemorial; and its failure is all too evident. There is no antagonism between the good of the individual and the good of society. The moment civilization is wise enough to remove the constraints and prohibitions which now hinder the release of inner energies, most of the larger evils of society will perish of inanition and malnutrition….Free, rational and self-ruling personality would then take the place of self-made slaves, who are the victims both of external constraints and the playthings of the uncontrolled forces of their own instincts.[xxix]
 

The great central problem, and one which must be taken first is the abolition of the shame and fear of sex. We must teach men the overwhelming power of this radiant force. We must make them understand that uncontrolled, it is a cruel tyrant, but that controlled and directed, it may be used to transmute and sublimate the everyday world into a realm of beauty and joy. Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise. So must we necessarily and inevitably conceive of sex expression. The instinct is here. None of us can avoid it. It is in our power to make it a thing of beauty and a joy forever: or to deny it, as have the ascetics of the past, to revile this expression and then to pay the penalty, the bitter penalty that Society to-day is paying in innumerable ways.[xxx]
 

Sanger’s other passion was Eugenics, which unashamedly espoused Northern and Eastern European White Supremacy.  This supremacy was to be promoted both positively and negatively.  Through selective breeding, the Eugenicists hoped to purify the bloodlines.  The “fit” would be encouraged to reproduce prolifically.  This was the positive side of Malthusian Eugenics. Negative Malthusian Eugenics on the other hand, sought to contain the “inferior” races through segregation, sterilization, birth control and abortion.  The “unfit” would be slowly winnowed out of the population as chaff is from wheat.[xxxi]  The great Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton, aimed biting critiques at the Eugenicists accusing them of “a hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head,” and for presuming to turn “common decency” and “commendable deeds” into social crimes.  “If Darwinism was the doctrine of ‘survival of the fittest,’ then Eugenics was the doctrine of ‘the survival of the nastiest.’”  In 1922, he released a remarkably visionary book Eugenics and Other Evils.  Chesterton pointed out, for the first time, the link between Neo-Malthusianism and Fascist Nazism.  He argued:
 

It is the same stuffy science, the same bullying bureaucracy, and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors, that has led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumphs.[xxxii]
 

Here, the reader would do well to remember Chesterton’s warnings when we further examine the humanist doctrines of unfettered biogenetics, pharmaceutics and what John Gilder critiques as the new “technocracy” – man’s means to utopia on Earth.
 

Margaret Sanger was especially mesmerized by the scientific racism of Malthusian Eugenics.  Part of the attraction for her was surely personal: her mentor and lover, Havelock Ellis, was the beloved disciple of Francis Galton, the brilliant cousin of Charles Darwin who first systemized and popularized Eugenic thought.  Moreover, she was convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.”  She believed that “social regeneration” would only be possible when 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 proliferation of “defectives, delinquents, and dependents.”  She yearned for the end of the Christian “reign of benevolence” that the Eugenic Socialists promised, when the “choking human undergrowth” of “moron and imbeciles” would be “segregated” and “sterilized.”  Her goal was “to create a race of thoroughbreds” by encouraging more children from the fit, and less from the unfit.[xxxiii]
 

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 birth control clinics to publishing of the revolutionary literature - came from Eugenicists.  The speakers at the conferences, the authors of the literature and the providers of the services were almost without exception avid Eugenicists.[xxxiv]
 

Margaret’s first birth control clinic was opened in 1916, in an impoverished and densely populated area of Brooklyn.  The neighborhood offered the ideal clientele: “immigrant Southern Europeans, Slavs, Latins, and Jews”.  As her organization grew in power and prestige, she began to target several other “dysgenic races” - including Blacks, Hispanics, Amerinds, and Catholics - and set up clinics in their respective communities as well.  By their estimation as much as seventy percent of the population fell into this “undesirable” category.  In 1939, they designed a “Negro Project” in response to “southern state public health officials” - men not known for their racial equanimity.  “The mass of Negroes,” the project proposal asserted, “particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”[xxxv]
 

Again and again Planned Parenthood has asserted that its birth control programs and initiatives are designed to “prevent the need for abortion.”[xxxvi] However, its claim that contraceptive services lower unwanted pregnancy rates is entirely unfounded.  A number of studies have demonstrated that as contraception becomes more accessible, the number of unwanted pregnancies actually rises, thus increasing the demand for abortion.[xxxvii]  And since minority communities are the primary targets for the contraceptive services, Blacks and Hispanics inevitably must bear the brunt of the abortion holocaust.  A racial analysis of abortion statistics is quite revealing.  As many as forty-three percent of all abortions are performed on Blacks and another ten percent are on Hispanics.  This despite the fact that Blacks make up eleven percent of the total U.S. population and Hispanics only about eight percent.[xxxviii]
 

As already seen, Planned Parenthood-style sex education is intentionally lurid.  As its founder intended, it is designed to break down sexual inhibitions and bring us into “higher self-consciousness.”  But in reality, Sanger’s philosophies are leading our youth down the garden path of experimentation, and then deserting them in a brier patch of disease, unplanned pregnancy and emotional trauma.  This study of Margaret Sanger is concluded with a current “Eugenics Manifesto”:
 

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