Should pro-lifers keep citing Margaret Sanger’s scathingly racist statements, and her program of eugenics — which directly influenced Hitler, and led to laws in a dozen or so American states forcibly sterilizing or even castrating thousands of the “unfit” who flunked primitive I.Q. tests? All of those things are true, but how much traction do they have in persuading people?

In my own long experience in the pro-life movement, citing these facts is useful. Given that “racism” is one of the few things that modern people are willing to admit is evil, showing how Planned Parenthood was conceived in that sin provides an opening to people confused about abortion. If that part of Planned Parenthood is evil, how much of the rest of the organization is also corrupt and wicked? (The answer, of course, is all of it.)

But there’s only a limited power in Sanger’s racist positions. Not because a host of other Americans held onto crackpot eugenicist theories in her day. Indeed, she was one of the main figures helping to spread such ideas. Far from a passive recipient of a tainted cultural commonplace, Sanger crusaded to inform American WASPs of the “genetic threat” posed by Southern Europeans, Jews, blacks, and other races.

No, the problem is that most people realize that racial eugenics aren’t really at the heart of what Planned Parenthood does today. It is true that the group builds its clinics mostly in poor neighborhoods and that its tiny victims are disproportionately black and Latino. And it’s true that some loathsome Alt-Right racialists today want to to keep abortion legal for just that reason. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said something shockingly similar recently:

“Frankly I had thought that at the time [Roe v. Wade] was decided,” Ginsburg told her interviewer, Emily Bazelon, “there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

But the heart of Planned Parenthood’s mission today isn’t racial genocide, but grubbing government money to enable promiscuity. And promiscuity, lots of it, is what Sanger cared about most — even more than racism or eugenics.

Free “Love”

As Robert G. Marshall and Charles A. Donovan document in their definitive history of the birth control movement, Blessed Are the Barren, Sanger began as a sexual radical and libertine, a close associate of early sexologist Havelock Ellis. A wife who abandoned her husband and young children to travel Europe and conduct a series of casual affairs, Sanger was an apostle of “free love” before the term was even invented. Her philosophical inspiration was not Houston Stuart Chamberlain, but the Marquis de Sade.

Sanger had campaigned for sexual license for years before she discovered the handy “wedge” issue of Anglo anxiety over immigration and differential birth rates. A savvy political activist, she trumped up a minor panic over “dysgenic” births and “hereditary” criminality in order to break down the social taboo against even discussing birth control which prevailed among most Protestants before the Anglican Council of Lambeth offered the first tentative approval of contraception in Christian history. As Blessed Are the Barren shows in exhausting detail, Sanger used the tribal fear of displacement on the part of Protestant elites to undermine their theological position.

Odd as it sounds today, Sanger used racism to make birth control respectable. Well, times sure do change, don’t they?

The Population Bubble, Which Popped

Of course, given the numbers of Croatian peasants like my grandfather who were arriving every day, Anglo Protestants had good reason to fear displacement. Instead of anti-human measures like sterilization, they could have looked to immigration control — and so Congress did, in 1926. Americans had (and have) a perfect right to enact such laws if they choose, on whatever grounds seem prudent to them. The fear of being displaced is plenty good reason to tighten up the border — but not to sterilize human beings like cattle. Equating such measures (as Sanger did, and the modern Left does) is nonsense on stilts.

And Sanger abandoned the race issue pretty readily, too. As the Nazi crimes against humanity were exposed after World War II, Sanger dropped her Klan hood like last year’s hat, and donned the white coat of a futurist; she “discovered” that the reason why birth control was so urgently important was not the swelling ranks of dusky Sicilians and blacks, but rather the “population explosion.”

Without missing a beat, her organization shifted its rhetoric, and provoked another panic. Experts like Paul Erhlich appeared on Johnny Carson predicting mass famines throughout the 1970s, and the collapse of civilization. Their warnings never came true — but what did it matter? The “meme” had taken root, and pushed forward Planned Parenthood’s agenda; indeed, it was the Rockefeller Commission’s infamous report on population that helped sway Justice Blackmun to change his position on abortion, and write the decision in Roe v. Wade.

All of this is not to say that there is literally no limit to human population, or that no response was necessary to the happy collapse in infant mortality that marked the late 19th century. (My grandmother was an exception — bearing 11 kids, of whom only 5 lived to adulthood. But that was the norm before the late 19th century.)

Ironically, the Catholic Church moved to accommodate this reality by the mid-20th century, approving the use of a method of family planning that worked within the natural law, and relied on occasional self-denial rather than hormones and surgery. Doctrine often develops in response to heresies; we wouldn’t have the Nicene Creed without the Arians who denied the divinity of Christ. Sadly, too few Christians bother to think about the moral implications of technologically interfering with fertility — and in doing so, they align themselves with the likes of Sanger against the Fathers (and Reformers) of their own churches.

Lose the Virtues, and You Must Grow the Nanny State

The fact is that Sanger and her followers cynically exploited racial anxieties for almost 30 years to promote their agenda of sexual liberation — before changing tactics. If we can cite those old disgraceful pamphlets to teach our contemporaries not to trust this organization, I don’t see why we shouldn’t. But we ought not to expect too much.

There’s a deeper issue buried beneath all the filth of racism, lies and promiscuity in which Planned Parenthood sank its roots, and it is this: The “invisible hand” of the free market can help generate wealth, but it does not produce “spontaneous order” in society; in fact, without the constraints of deep religious piety and common cultural codes, competitors in the market economy resemble less the Bees of Mandeville’s fable than the termites that eat away the load-bearing walls of your house. When Western elites began to apply the implications of their own individualist ideology to matters of the heart, the result was a historic attack on the family. As the decadence that infected coteries like Margaret Sanger’s and Alfred Kinsey’s filtered down into the middle classes, and then into the poor, the results should have been catastrophic.

By the middle 1960s (see Moynihan’s report on the black family) reality began to kick down the door. Urban pathologies, funded and made possible by a judgment-free welfare state, began to make the best American cities unliveable. In embracing attitudes toward sex that erode any self-restraint and demean the sanctity of marriage, Western elites had unleashed social problems that would haunt their grand-children — an epidemic of illegitimacy and a massive dependent underclass that bred habitual criminals, and middle class people whose shattered families bred children afraid of commitment, who in turn would fail to reproduce themselves.

The blithe rejection at once of biology and morality that underlay Sanger’s call for “liberation” of “the sex instinct” was incompatible with a free society. I think that on some level she knew this — which is why she was more than willing to use the coercive power of the State to neuter, control and selectively breed the unruly poor. All this was in service of her squalid, upper-middle class dream — which was dramatized best by the dreary, wife-swapping couples of Ang Lee’s brilliant, miserable The Ice Storm. Their children can be seen, come of age, in Lena Dunham’s depressing series Girls.

Some libertarians profess puzzlement that prosperous leftists support at once social libertinism and a pervasive bureaucratic, Nanny State — seeing here philosophical inconsistency. Maybe so. But in cold hard fact, a state without the private virtues can only survive through the continual growth of an all-knowing, all-seeing State. And that’s the key to Margaret Sanger’s venereal creed.

The column is adapted from one that appeared at Takimag, and appeared in The Bad Catholic’s Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins.