Despite being dead for 49 years, Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, has a way of turning up in the news. Her latest appearance came during remarks by Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson at a retirement center in Exeter, N.H.
Answering a question at RiverWoods Retirement Community, Carson said that "Planned Parenthood, as you know, was founded by Margaret Sanger. . . . Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. She believed that people like me should be eliminated, or kept under control."
At a press conference later, he specified what he meant by "people like me." He said he was "talking about the black race."
Claims like this have been examined by PolitiFact before. Back in March, New Hampshire Rep. William O’Brien claimed Sanger was an "an active participant in the Ku Klux Klan." That claim was rated false.
And in 2011, businessman and GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain said Planned Parenthood’s early mission was to "help kill black babies before they came into the world." That statement was rated Pants on Fire.
Carson’s statement pulls on the same threads.
Sanger was indeed a believer in eugenics, but the basic concept that humanity could be improved by selective breeding was an article of faith for many in the years before World War II. Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells all supported the movement. African-American leader W. E. B. Du Bois backed many of its principles as well.
Although the eugenics movement included some who had racist ideas, wanting to create some sort of master race, "only a minority of eugenicists" ever believed this, according to Ruth Engs, professor emerita at the Indiana University School of Public Health and an expert in the movement.
At the time that Sanger was active, Engs wrote, "the purpose of eugenics was to improve the human race by having people be more healthy through exercise, recreation in parks, marriage to someone free from sexually transmitted diseases, well-baby clinics, immunizations, clean food and water, proper nutrition, non-smoking and drinking."
It’s a far cry to equate eugenics with advocating the elimination of black people.
For Sanger, her ideas were a matter a public health. As late as 1957, she put her views this way in an interview with Mike Wallace: "I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world -- that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin -- that people can -- can commit."
Sanger was indeed a birth control activist, which means that she wanted women to be able to avoid unwanted pregnancies. She worked for women of all classes and races to have that choice, which she believed to be a right.