Margaret Sanger - Eugenics Quotes

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Eugenics, which had started long before my time, had once been defined as including free love and prevention of conception... Recently it had cropped up again in the form of selective breeding.

Margaret Sanger
Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science... as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.

Margaret Sanger
Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.

Margaret Sanger
The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.

Margaret Sanger
We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates... that uncontrolled fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable traits.

Margaret Sanger
I accepted one branch of this philosophy, but eugenics without birth control seemed to me a house built upon sands. It could not stand against the furious winds of economic pressure which had buffeted into partial or total helplessness a tremendous proportion of the human race. The eugenists wanted to shift the birth control emphasis from less children for the poor to more children for the rich. We went back of that and sought first to stop the multiplication of the unfit. This appeared the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.

Margaret Sanger
Eugenics aims to arouse the enthusiasm or the interest of the people in the welfare of the world fifteen or twenty generations in the future. On its negative side it shows us that we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all—that the wealth of individuals and of states is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization.

Margaret Sanger