Science advances little by little and discovery by discovery. Each discovery opens a new door, and new possibilities. Subsequent discoveries close some doors, eliminate some possibilities, and open new doors and new possibilities. In every generation there are widely current, scientifically plausible enthusiasms which subsequently turn out to be false.
Margaret Sanger has been the unfortunate victim of this phenomenon in recent years. If you do a web search on her you will find hundreds of websites claiming that she was the inspiration for various Nazi Eugenics programs and a strong suupporter of race science. Now I have read a few pages of one or two of her papers and I found that she seemed to be opposed to abortion. She cited birth control as a means of avoiding abortion. I have never seen a quote from her actually endorsing abortion. They may exist, but I have never found one.
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/sanger-hitler_equation.htm is a web page discussing these current attacks on Ms. Sanger. It is published by NYU and is written by a scholar of Ms. Sanger's positions. It strikes me as fair and balanced.
"Unfortunately these misrepresentations of Sanger as a Nazi sympathizer who carried out her own quiet form of genocide through abortions, the spread of harmful contraceptives and the advocacy of racist ?eugenic? policies -- supported by the circulation of Sanger?s controversial writings on eugenics -- have begun to infect unbiased student research that is increasingly dependent on unverified and unsubstantiated information only a mouse click away. Granted most of the Internet sites that link Sanger and Hitler as the dark angels of human carnage don't hide their pro-life, anti-choice associations. But the ?Big Lie? theory works -- the more you say it, the more it sticks."
"Sanger never met Hitler, except in her unconscious (see box below). And the reality is that despite the fact that Sanger?s anti-militarism and isolationism during the 1920s and 1930s at times obscured her abhorrence of the Nazis, she was deeply shocked and horrified by the evils and dangers of fascism, Hitler and the Nazi party. ?All the news from Germany is sad & horrible,? she wrote in 1933, ?and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right. The sudden antagonism in Germany against the Jews & the vitriolic hatred of them is spreading underground here & is far more dangerous than the aggressive policy of the Japanese in Manchuria.? (MS to Edith How-Martyn, May 21, 1933 [MSM C2:536].) She joined the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda and ?gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler?s rise to power in Germany.? (?World War II and World Peace,? 1940? [MSM S72:269].) For Hitler the feeling was mutual; in 1933 the Nazis burned Sanger?s books along with those of Ellis, Freud, German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, and others. (Ellis to MS, Sept. 3, 1933 [LCM 3:385].)"
"How then does Sanger end up keeping company with Hitler? In this predominantly Internet-based netherworld of revisionist Sanger profiles there are two paths linking Sanger to Hitler, and they frequently intersect. On one, Sanger is accused of murdering millions through abortion, either directly as an abortionist, or as the primary force in creating a culture that devalues human life as evidenced by the rising number of abortions through the twentieth century. This is the unacknowledged ?holocaust? commandeered by Sanger. In these absurd depictions she was an even more efficient killer than Hitler or Stalin. One well-quoted assault on Sanger?s legacy, George Grant?s 1995 book, Killer Angel, charges Sanger with the ?brutal elimination of thirty million children in the United States and as many as two and a half billion worldwide.? The fact that Sanger?s clinic did not offer abortions and that she advocated birth control as the only remedy for abortion does little to dispel the myth that Sanger pressed abortion upon the masses."
Note, this expert on Ms. Sanger seems to imply that Ms. Sanger was as much an opponent of abortion as she was in favor of birth control, seeing abortion as one of the many evils to be ended by the widespread use of birth control.
Ms. Sanger seems to have been a genuine humanitarian concerned with ending human suffering. As a political activist, she was willing to appear to endorse the views of other popular movements of the time including eugenics which was quite popular in the US and far more widely applied legally in the US than in pre-Hitler Germany.
"But the main vehicle used to metamorphose this feminist liberator into a Nazi is Sanger?s limited and largely self-serving role in the short but spectacular rise of American eugenics -- a movement that sought to apply the principles of genetics to improving the human race. By lifting passages from Sanger?s writings on eugenics and sterilization while failing to provide the complete argument or proper context, and by linking her with notorious racists within the eugenics movement, debunkers of Sanger?s achievements have given her a fiendish make-over."
Ms. Sanger the patron saint of birth control, in fact the originator of the idea of the birth control pill and the initiator of the research that eventually produced a working birth control pill has become an embarrassment to abortion advocates and planned parenthood. She was against abortion, and she advocated Eugenics for entirely political reasons to advance public acceptance of birth control.
"What is, of course, overlooked is that Sanger used the popular eugenics movement to help promote birth control as a science-based remedy for overpopulation, poverty, disease and famine. Incorporating the rhetoric of the eugenics movement into her writings allowed Sanger to make a stronger biological argument that fertility control was necessary for the improvement and health of the entire human race, not only as a means to liberate women. Sanger did seek to discourage the reproduction of persons who were, in the terms of her day, ?unfit? or ?feebleminded,? those, it was believed, who would pass on mental disease or serious physical defect. And she did advocate sterilization in cases where the subject was unable to use birth control. This was a popular position espoused by many progressive medical leaders, scientists and health reformers of the day -- those groups who Sanger hoped to win over to the birth control fight."
All in all the URL above appears to present a balanced and thoughtful analysis of the evidence about Ms. Sanger and her real positions.
Ms. Sanger is not the only person to be subjected to this kind of an attack. On Book TV on CSpan this weekend a lot of authors discussed various books. One of the authors discussed the idea that IBM was the real architect of the Nazi Holocaust. He is a respected writer and researcher in the area. He went into detail about the IBM programming and systems used and showed that IBM was entirely aware of what the Nazis were using their computers for and entirely in favor of it.
He also mentioned the connection of Planned Parenthood to the Nazi party. He stated that they had admitted to being advocates of Nazi style eugenics policies during the period, admitted that they were wrong, and gotten past it. He said IBM had never done this.
Scientifically, Eugenics is based on early genetics. Historically, Mendelian genetics was the system which gave Darwin the edge over Lamarck and led to Darwinian evolution being accepted as the dominant scientific theory of evolution instead of Lamarck. Darwin was dismissed theoretically until Mendelian Genetics was widely accepted because his small incremental changes would not last. The idea was that each generation would dilute the change eventually eliminating it. Lamarck favored the idea of the heretibility of acquired traits.
Mendelian Genetics showed that heredity was passed on in small nondilutable packets called genes. Ergo, Darwin's theory would work. Given this, the biological vector or mechanism for the inheritance of acquired traits, Darwins theory replaced Lamarck's.
Both Darwin and Lamarck had solid, factual, empirical data for their theories. Lamarck had laboratory examples which seemed to prove the inheritance of acquired traits, some of which have never been successfully debunked. It was the discovery of a vector which showed Darwin's theory could work which led to the dominance of his theoretical approach.
Science always has unanswered questions. Newton could not publish his works on gravity until the Earth was measured accurately enough to give a good estimate of it as a source for gravity. Even at that point his celestial mechanics did not explain all the observable and measurable movements of Mercury. Mercury is close enough to the Sun and moves fast enough that effects only explainable through Relativity could be observed in its motion even in Newton's day. There are no perfect theories in science only the theories with the most elegant fit to the known facts.
Recent scientific discoveries in the area of epigenetics, the methylation of DNA have provided a vector by which acquired traits may be passed along to subsequent generations.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press/2002/November/epigenetics.htm "What is "imprinting?"
"Imprinted genes" don't rely on traditional laws of Mendelian genetics, which describe the inheritance of traits as either dominant or recessive. In Mendelian genetics, both parental copies are equally likely to contribute to the outcome. The impact of an imprinted gene copy, however, depends only on which parent it was inherited from. For some imprinted genes, the cell only uses the copy from the mother to make proteins, and for others only that from the father."
"How does imprinting get messed up?
Just as mutations in the sequence of DNA can be acquired as a cell copies its DNA, changes in a cell's epigenetics can be acquired as well, although how those errors occur isn't as well understood. Scientists do know that epigenetic alterations can be caused by environmental changes, such as the laboratory conditions used for growing cells, but the details are murky."
https://notes.utk.edu/Bio/greenberg.nsf/0/b360905554fdb7d985256ec5006a7755?OpenDocument "In another study, unrelated to the Hunger Winter, researchers correlated grandparents' prepubertal access to food with diabetes and heart disease.2 In other words, you are what your grandmother ate. But, wait, wouldn't that imply what every good biologist knows is practically scientific heresy: the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics?"
"The environmental lability of epigenetic inheritance may not necessarily bring to mind Lamarckian images of giraffes stretching their necks to reach the treetops (and then giving birth to progeny with similarly stretched necks), but it does give researchers reason to reconsider long-refuted notions about the inheritance of acquired characteristics."
The Eugenics movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were based on Mendelian Genetics coupled with Darwinian survival of the fittest. They did not have scientific measures or data to explain the strong role of environment in the phenotypal development of an organism, and even less understanding of the mechanisms by which environmentally induced changes to gene expression could become inheritable without any genetic changes. It was all very scientifically plausible at the time.
This was stolen by people, as science usually is, people who wanted an excuse to feel good about themselves and put others down. The result was not a real Eugenics program but a Racial Eugenics program. People have always believed in the superiority of their ingroup to other groups. In many tribal societies their word for themselves translates simply as people or the people, while all other humans are not considered true people in some way or another.
Given the science of her time, Ms. Sanger was quite a humanitarian. She was deeply opposed to racism and race eugenics, though she endorsed some forms of eugenics sterilization for various conditions then considered genetic she seems to have been unwilling to endorse Eugenics programs. Indeed, she felt that they were impracticable and believed that giving women reproductive freedom would work better in the long run. Probably she, being deeply concerned with ending human suffering could not embrace the kind of brutality needed for a real Eugenics program to be implemented.
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/sanger-hitler_equation.htm "Such dilemmas led Sanger to the strongly held belief that the best way to reduce human suffering was to first provide greater access to birth control. It was also necessary, she argued, to somehow regulate the procreation of those individuals likely to pass on physical or mental disease and disability who were incapable of using or denied access to contraception. But her writings on eugenics, including her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, argued that eugenic measures in and of themselves were not practicable. Instead, she concluded that women?s empowerment through birth control offered the only viable means of improving the human condition."
This kind of virulent attack on major figures from the past has become quite prevalent today. Lincoln is now condemned as a racist, Roosevelt as a totalitarian dictator. Name your hero and you can find this kind of an attack being made on him or her.
Now I was pro-choice up until I was 38 or so and suddenly had a sudden inspiration about the probable implications of evolutionary theory on the psychology of abortion. Years of discussing this on the web, checking sources, etc. has led me to understand that the situation is far, far worse than I initially imagined. Still it is worse in such an ironic way that I cannot help but find it more amusing than disturbing.
It is equally ironic that on this issue, being pro-birth control and anti-abortion I seem to have come to be in perfect agreement with the patron saint of birth control, Ms. Sanger.
One interesting development in this general area is a study done a few years ago by Steven J. Levitt "Donohue, John J., III and Levitt, Steven D. "Further Evidence that Legalized Abortion Lowered Crime: A Reply to Joyce." Journal of Human Resources, 2004, 39(1), pp. 29-49."
The basic study showed that abortion was primarily practiced in high potential crime areas. This eliminated lots of potential criminals from the population, thus lowering crime. The numbers are too big to ignore. It is not Eugenics. The factors involved in those children growing up to become criminals are largely considered environmental. The study, of course, was hailed by pro-choice groups.
Still, it is accidentally Eugenic in the old Nazi tradition of Eugenics. Abortion is being almost selectively pushed on what the Nazis called Untermensch.
Planned Parenthood is now, in point of fact, actively advancing one key plank of Nazi Eugenics, disregarding both Ms. Sanger's apparent dislike of abortion, and her virulent dislike of Nazi Racist dogma.
This, like many other things in this situation, is delightfully ironic.
These facts make it easy to call Planned Parenthood a covert racist Eugenics movement. People doing research in this area can easily find lots of historical facts which can make a quite plausible case for this idea.
Planned Parenthood was closely associated with Nazi Eugenics and American Eugenics in its early years. Today it continues to advance an agenda which violates the moral conscience of its founder in a manner which is consistent with Nazi policies.
As usual, human stupidity and passion are more likely the cause of this than any covert conspiracy with aging Nazi War Criminals.
The idea of Eugenics is not dead. Ms. Sanger's support for a non-race form of Eugenics eliminating certain heritable diseases and handicaps by forced sterilization would probably strike many as completely reasonable today.
However, Eugenics is probably going to die a natural death at the hands of the science which gave it birth. Modern discoveries about environment and epigenetics are continueing to weaken its originally strong links to real science.
Human society is probably naturally a combination of patriarchal and matrilineal kinship groups. A large patriarchal group composed of smaller groups based on matrilinear kinship. This is the pattern among Chimpanzees and Bonobo. It appears likely that it is close to natural human patterns.
This grouping by kin leads inevitably to a kind of racism. There is a natural tendency to assume that differences between peoples is inherited rather than cultural or environmental. This natural pattern of prejudice or bias will continue to fuel racist fantasies and ideas like Eugenics.
The partial picture provided by Mendelian Genetics reinforced and strengthened this pattern during the early 20th century. A more complete picture emerging now will hopefully work to weaken it.
