Opinion

Nancy Pelosi receives Planned Parenthood award named after eugenicist Margaret Sanger

Marjorie Dannenfelser President, Susan B. Anthony List
Font Size:

One of the darkest shadows in American history is the role of federal and state governments in perpetrating human rights abuses against an estimated 60,000 Americans in the name of the pseudo-science of eugenics.

Eugenicists believe they can improve human genetic stock through controlled breeding and by thwarting those with “undesirable traits” — including lower intelligence, criminality, and a history of promiscuity — from reproducing. In the early part of the 20th century 30 states legalized state-sponsored forced sterilization of those who were considered “unfit.” From 1927 until 1974, Americans could be forcibly sterilized under the law of these states and with the approval of the Supreme Court, granted in Buck v. Bell. These policies overwhelmingly targeted society’s poor and marginalized.

It was only last year that North Carolina provided compensation to those few still-living victims of its eugenics program – becoming the first state to do so. Recently Virginia’s House of Delegates put forward a bipartisan bill to compensate victims in their state as well.

Today eugenic policies, even if compensation remains slow in coming, are almost universally viewed as monstrous. The victims’ anguish speaks to the horror they endured. A century ago, however, eugenics was seen as a “progressive” cause. And one of its champions – right until the bitter end – was Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.

This week House Minority Leader and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is set to receive the Margaret Sanger Award, the top honor given each year by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

It is no secret that Nancy Pelosi stands with Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion business. It has been a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship. Pelosi has steadfastly defended Planned Parenthood’s interests in Congress (more than $540 million in taxpayer dollars annually) despite a series of scandals including whistleblower-exposed incidents of fraud, incidents of health and safety violations, allegations of sex trafficking and child sex abuse cover-ups, and the 2012 death of abortion patient Tonya Reaves. Pelosi and Planned Parenthood share an ideology and the belief that abortion is “sacred ground.”

However, in accepting the Sanger award, Pelosi takes her bond with Planned Parenthood to a new level. The award aligns Pelosi not only with the interests of the abortion enterprise but, perhaps unconsciously, with its founder, a self-avowed devotee of negative eugenics.

While Planned Parenthood tries to gloss over Sanger’s involvement in the eugenics movement, facts are very stubborn things. Sanger was an ardent and outspoken advocate of the movement and all that it entailed – including the segregation and forced sterilization of those she deemed “unfit.” Her words speak for themselves:

“Nature eliminates the weeds but we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce.”

“[The government needs to] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” 

“Give dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”

Not only did Sanger help to form and nurture the eugenics movement in the United States – through her writing and public speaking – but she preached the eugenic gospel of decrying charitable efforts on behalf of the poor as a form of “cruelty,” because such efforts helped them breed more of their kind and drain resources and attention from the well-born.  Naturally, social forces that favored such philanthropy, mainly religious entities offering homes and shelters for unwed mothers, became objects of her severe scorn.

While there were many in the early part of the 20th century who blindly believed the faux science of eugenics, Sanger never backed away from her eugenic convictions.  Towards the end of her career she remained resolute. In a 1957 television interview with Mike Wallace, Sanger remarked, “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.”

Nancy Pelosi is surely not embracing the anti-human ideology of Margaret Sanger through her acceptance of this award. However, as states now wrestle with how to administer justice to those whose lives were torn apart, the failure to acknowledge the history of eugenics, and its relationship to Planned Parenthood’s still-esteemed founder, shows a marked insensitivity by the Congresswoman from California. After all, it was California that led the nation in forced eugenic sterilizations.

The fact that Planned Parenthood cannot distance itself from Sanger’s past does not excuse today’s political leaders from doing so. The powerful prejudices of eugenics are still with us. Today’s new reproductive sciences, combined with rampant abortion, provide those prejudices with an avenue to success the early eugenists could scarcely have imagined. If any of this disturbs Nancy Pelosi, now is the time for her to say so loud and clear.

Marjorie Dannenfelser is the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a nationwide network of more than 365,000 Americans dedicated to pursuing policies and electing candidates who will reduce and ultimately end abortion.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel