January 7, 2023
IT ALL BEGINS WITH HATING HUMANS:
Humbug to Scrooge & Sanger: The Constitution & the "Surplus Population" (Tyler Graham, January 6th, 2023, Imaginative Conservative)
[I]s this Malthusian principle also linked to Planned Parenthood? According to George Grant, a biographer of Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood), the answer is unambiguously yes. Detailing her escape from the US during a time when her publications may have put her in federal prison for breaking the Comstock laws, Sanger found herself in England.Grant writes, "As soon as she came ashore, Margaret began to make contact with the various radical groups of Britain. She began attending socialist lectures on Nietzsche'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 close ties with the Malthusians."[7]Grant explains how the path could go from Malthus's pen to the neo-Malthusian world of Sanger. "Malthus's disciples--the Malthusians and the NeoMalthusians-believed that if Western civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to somehow be suppressed and isolated perhaps even eliminated. And while Malthus was forthright in recommending plague, pestilence, and petrification, his disciples felt that the subtler and more 'scientific' approaches of education, contraception, sterilization, and abortion were more practical and acceptable ways to ease the pressures of the supposed overpopulation."[8]And Margaret Sanger was "all in," as they say.Not surprisingly, Margaret immediately got on the Malthusian bandwagon. She was not philosophically inclined, nor was she particularly adept at political, social, or economic theory, but she did recognize in the Malthusians a kindred spirit and a tremendous opportunity. She was also shrewd enough to realize that her notions of radical socialism and sexual liberation would never have the popular support necessary to usher in the revolution without some appeal to altruism and intellectualism. She needed somehow to capture the moral and academic "high ground." Malthusianism, she thought, just might be the key to that ethical and intellectual posture. If she could argue for birth control using the scientifically verified threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension, and overpopulation as its backdrop, then she would have a much better chance of making her case. So she began to absorb as much of the Malthusian dogma as she could. Margaret also immersed herself in the teachings of each of the Malthusian offshoots. If a little bit of something is a good thing, then a lot is even better. There was phrenology, Binetism, and Craniometricism. There was Oneidianism, Polygenesis, Recapitulationism, Lambrosianism, Hereditarianism, Freudianism, and Neotenism. From each group she picked Up a few popular slogans and concepts that would permanently shape her crusade. . But Eugenics left the most lasting impression on the malleable mold of her nascent worldview of radicalism. Eugenics was perhaps the most revolutionary of the pseudo-sciences spawned by Malthusianism.[9]Thus, the "birth" of Planned Parenthood stems from the exact same theoretical framework as Scrooge: it stems from the thought of Thomas Malthus.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 7, 2023 7:11 PM
