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  • 2015-07-31 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Margaret Sanger Decry Slavs and Jews as 'Human Weeds'? (en)
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  • A July 2015 controversy involving women's healthcare provider Planned Parenthood (concerning the purported sale of fetal tissue) triggered a number of social media conversations about reproductive health; among them, inevitably, were several quotes attributed to early family planning advocate Margaret Sanger. In her lifetime, Margaret Sanger's vocal support of birth control and women's reproductive agency was deeply controversial, though she is widely credited as a galvanizing force in women's healthcare. Sanger's legacy has been similarly fraught with suspicion and accusation due to her advocacy of birth control and selective family planning, and a number of dubious quotations attributed to her spiked in social media popularity during the 2015 Planned Parenthood controversy. One such quote is featured on an image meme, claiming that in 1922 Sanger said the following: Tracing the origins of the quote above proved difficult as many primary iterations of it have since been deleted from the web (though some are cached); the earliest versions we were able to locate didn't appear until sometime between 2008 and 2009 (primarily on blogs and forums). All of those initial iterations cited a now-deleted page on a crisis pregnancy center's website (a cache of which can be viewed here). The page was titled RACIST AND EUGENICIST STATEMENTS BY MARGARET SANGER, THE FOUNDER OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD, and that iteration of the quote suggested (via the creative use of bracketed paraphrasing) Sanger's words had been somewhat creatively interpreted: A scanned copy of the April 1933 Birth Control Review is available online [archived here]; Sanger was neither credited as the author of any of its articles nor mentioned in any of them. The closest quotation to the one cited in the meme we could turn up came from an 8 April 1923 New York Times article attributed to Sanger in which she used the word weeds in a somewhat similar manner, but didn't attach it to any particular race or ethnicity: In his 1992 book American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others, author John George writes that this quote was evidently concocted in the late 1980s for the purpose of trying to make the early birth control advocate seem a racist and anti-Semite and that this fabrication has been kept in circulation by antiabortion and anti-birth control groups. (en)
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