Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's a general accepted legal principle that the dead can't be libeled. WorldNetDaily takes full advantage of that in an unbylined March 24 article that simply makes up things about Margaret Sanger:
Barack Obama says a little girl wrote to him asking why there were no women’s faces on U.S. currency.
That started a movement by a group called Women on 20s, which is now conducting an Internet poll on which of 15 candidates should be the first to replace President Andrew Jackson, ironically the founder of Obama’s party.
But creating the biggest stir on the list of candidates is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, a eugenicist who advocated aborting as many black babies as possible for the benefit of society.
In Sanger’s book, “Pivot of Civilization,” she characterized African-Americans and immigrants as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders” and “spawning … human beings who never should have been born.”
WND's claim that Sanger "advocated aborting as many black babies as possible for the benefit of society" is an out-and-out lie, since Sanger never advocated abortion for anyone -- she considered it a "horror."
While Sanger held eugenicist views that were unfortunately popular in her day, those views were not racially driven. Planned Parenthood notes that Sanger's advocacy of family planning ran against the views of some eugenicists who believed that healthy and "fit" women should have as many children as possible.
Further, WND is simply making up quotes from Sanger's "Pivot of Civilization." The terms "human weeds" and "reckless breeders" appear nowhere in the book, and their approximate substitutes are taken out of context.
A search of the text of "Pivot of Civilization" shows that three of the four references to "weed" refers to child laborers removing weeds in beet fields. The fourth is a quote of another researcher highlighting " the ruthless struggle for existence in China" because of its poverty and high birth rate, adding that" Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined weaklings."
The book does attack "reckless" breeding, but Sanger does not specifically single out "African-Americans and immigrants" as such -- indded, there are two mentions of the word "Negro" (the preferred term at the time for African-Americans) in the entire book. And the word "immigrant" appears only once in the book,
By contrast, Sanger spends much more time fretting over native white Americans -- "pure American stock," as she quotes another writer calling them -- who aspire to nothing more than having children and working in farm fields.
Sanger's statement about "children who never should have been born," therefore, has nothing to do with blacks or immigrants. And the closest the word "spawning" appears to that direct phrase in the book is in chapters 3; the "children who never should have been born" phrase appears in chapter 4.
WND has simply decided to make up stuff about Sanger. But we're sadly used to WND making up stuff.
