It’s always good to remember the bullet we dodged by not having former senator, secretary of State, first lady, and all-around general dirtbag Hillary Rodham Clinton as our 44th or 45th president.
Or really any other president, for that matter — but those are the only times she ran, so that’s what we’re judging her on. Twice she went into an election as the undisputed favorite — 2008 and 2016 — and twice she left with everyone wondering what the heck happened.
Perhaps they should have been listening in on March 27, 2009, when she called one of the women whose mission it was to kill as many unborn as possible — especially if she saw them as being of inferior breeding — as a woman of “courage,” “tenacity,” and “vision,” one who spent her time “taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions.” She even went as far as to say that she was “in awe of her.”
This was Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and the author of the words, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population” when talking about her so-called “Negro Project.” Sounds great today, doesn’t it?
Yet, back when she was the newly minted secretary of State under Barack Obama’s administration, Clinton was given the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America for advancing the cause of abortion. And, as her remarks show, she couldn’t be more effusive in her praise of Sanger.
From a State Department archived version of the remarks:
Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. Another of my great friends, Ellen Chesler, is here, who wrote a magnificent biography of Margaret Sanger called Woman of Valor. And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her. …
The 20th century reproductive rights movement, really embodied in the life and leadership of Margaret Sanger, was one of the most transformational in the entire history of the human race. It has changed the lives of tens of millions of women. It has changed attitudes and perceptions about women and our roles in society. It ushered in demographic and social changes that have brought us closer to gender equality than at any time.
Yet we know that Margaret Sanger’s work here in the United States and certainly across our globe is not done. Here at home, there are still too many women who are denied their rights because of income, because of opposition, because of attitudes that they harbor. But around the world, too many women are denied even the opportunity to know about how to plan and space their families. They’re denied the power to do anything about the most intimate of decisions.
And the derivative inequities that result from all of that are evident in the fact that women and girls are still the majority of the world’s poor, unschooled, unhealthy, and underfed. This is and has been for many years a matter of personal and professional importance to me, and I want to assure you that reproductive rights and the umbrella issue of women’s rights and empowerment will be a key to the foreign policy of this administration.
This garnered applause — which doesn’t sound so good a decade-and-a-half down the line, since Sanger’s most infamous quotes have been a constant source of fact checkers trying to recontextualize them without much luck.
Take The Washington Post, which used them as a cudgel when the late businessman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain brought up the quote.
Starting in 1916, Sanger’s clinics at first were aimed mainly at poor immigrant women; a Harlem clinic was opened in the 1930s. In the late 1930s, Sanger began an effort to bring the clinics to the rural south, in what was called “The Negro Project.”
Sanger recruited a who’s who of black leaders to support the effort and, in letters to the project’s director, urged that white men who were outsiders should not run the clinics. She said the effort would gain more credibility with greater community involvement, given natural suspicions.
“The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach,” Sanger wrote in a letter in 1939. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
Oh, phew. I feel significantly better now. The Post said that Sanger’s sentiments, “while inartfully written,” did not back up the claim that Sanger wanted to target minority children with abortion. (Calling that quote “inartfully written,” it’s worth noting, presaged the WaPo’s infamous “austere religious scholar” by the better part of a decade.)
However, even Sanger’s biographer, Ellen Chesler, noted that there was “no denying that [Sanger] allowed herself to become caught up in the eugenic zeal of the day and occasionally used language open to far less laudable interpretations.”
Indeed they were — and, as religious outlet Catholic Answers pointed out in 2020, this wasn’t the only time she engaged in talk of eugenics, either.
“Feeblemindedness is the more serious of the problems, because it is an absolute dead weight on the race … as it is inheritable, it renders it a deteriorating poison and depreciates the whole quality of a people,” she once wrote.
Take another problematic quote of Sanger’s: “Birth Control is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated,” Sanger said. “Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.”
“In case of refusal [to use birth control] such persons should have a choice of sterilization or isolation. Under no circumstances should the state allow such parents to cast their diseased and demented progeny upon society for the normal and fit to provide for,” she continued.
By the way, those drastic methods? Forced sterilization, naturally. And, as the outlet noted, several states complied — one of them being North Carolina, where roughly 7,000 forced sterilizations took place between 1929 and 1976, 65 percent of them on black women.
And just listen to Clinton’s own words: She talks about “too many women who are denied their rights because of income, because of opposition, because of attitudes that they harbor.” Can we be any more blunt about it? She means women of color — not rich white libs like herself, but everyone else. That’s who she wants to expand the “right” of abortion to. Just listen to a leftist long enough, they’ll tell you what they believe while telling you the other side believes it.
Not that Barack Obama was any great shaker for pro-lifers, mind you — but it’s worth noting that there were few people who would be more injurious to our cause than Hillary Clinton was. She was already bad enough on so many fronts. Why on earth would we wanted her to appoint Supreme Court justices and deal with abortion policy in the White House?
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