29 quotes
The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.
Birth Control Review (1918)
It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide.
Woman and the New Race (1922)
Let us not confuse the sexual impulse with love, for it alone is not love, but merely a necessary quality for the growth of love.
What Every Girl Should Know (1913)
I cannot respect the law as it exists today.
1916 flyer for Sanger's first clinic, stating "Do not kill, do not take life, but prevent."
Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.
Birth Control Review (1918)
Our laws force women into celibacy on the one hand, or abortion on the other. [npg] Both conditions are declared by eminent medical authorities to be injurious to health.
Birth Control Review (1918)
Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.
Birth Control Review (1918)
Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.
Birth Control Review (1918)
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: An Autobiography (1938)
While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.
Woman and the New Race (1922)
All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral.
Birth Control Review (1918)
Usually this desire [for family limitation] has been laid to economic pressure... It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion.
Woman and the New Race (1922)
Discrimination is a world-wide thing. It has to be opposed everywhere. That is why I feel the Negro’s plight here is linked with that of the oppressed around the globe.
The Chicago Defender Interview with Earl Conrad (1945)
It is a noteworthy fact that not one of the women to whom I have spoken so far believes in abortion as a practice; but it is principle for which they are standing. They also believe that the complete abolition of the abortion law will shortly do away with abortions, as nothing else will.
Birth Control Review (1918)
Society, too, condemns the natural expression of Woman's emotion, save under certain prescribed conditions. In consequence of this, women suppress their maternal desires and today direct this great force into other channels, participating in the bigger and broader movements and activities in which they are active today.
What Every Girl Should Know (1913)
Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes.
The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
Woman and the New Race (1922)
A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she has no response, it should not take place. This is an act of prostitution and is degrading to the woman’s finer sensibility, all the marriage certificates on earth to the contrary notwithstanding.
Family Limitations (1917)
Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.
Misattributed