Columnist calls Sanger a ‘hero’ despite her mission to decimate Black population
A Friday column by Milan Simonich that appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican praised racist Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a supporter of eugenics, who called for the extermination of the Black population.
Simonich, in attacking the Edgewood Town Commission, which passed a pro-life ordinance on Tuesday based on the federal Comstock Act, praised Sanger as a “hero,” writing:
The Comstock Act was weakened and then rendered toothless through a series of court rulings. The long fight had a hero.
Margaret Sanger, mother of three and a nurse in Brooklyn, opened the country’s first birth-control clinic in 1916. Sanger the next year served 30 days in jail for violating the Comstock Act.
She said in a December 10, 1939 letter, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”
Even Planned Parenthood rebuked Sanger, writing in 2021, “The difficult truth is that Margaret Sanger’s racist alliances and belief in eugenics have caused irreparable damage to the health and lives of Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, and many others. Her alignment with the eugenics movement, rooted in white supremacy, is in direct opposition to our mission and belief that all people should have the right to determine their own future and decide, without coercion or judgement, whether and when to have children.”
Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and chief executive of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, wrote in the New York Times, “Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan at a rally in New Jersey to generate support for birth control. And even though she eventually distanced herself from the eugenics movement because of its hard turn to explicit racism, she endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which allowed states to sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge — a ruling that led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the 20th century.”
McGill Johnson concluded, “Margaret Sanger harmed generations with her beliefs.”
However, Simonich is now propping up Sanger as a hero, despite her ties to the KKK, support for eugenics, and racism against Black people and those with disabilities.
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