050180 Commenting on TV Abortion propaganda  show Margaret Sanger--Portrait of a Rebel

To the Editor:

The recent TV program, Margaret Sanger--Portrait of a Rebel, was aired to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. The program was enlightening; it also revealed some inconsistencies in the thinking of present-day pro-abortionists. In carrying out her acts of rebellion, Margaret Sanger used picketing, sit-ins, and pamphleteering. In the current pro-abortion literature, pro-lifers are severely castigated for using these same tactics. Realizing that they are losing the abortion struggle, piece by piece, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) is developing a program which they have named Impact ^'80 in an attempt to assure the election in November of legislators who are pro-abortion, All kinds of tactics are being advocated including picketing, sit-ins, and pamphleteering, Why are these tactics glorified when used by pro-abortionists and termed unconscionable when used by those endeavoring to protect the lives of the innocent intrauterine children who have committed no crime warranting the death penalty?

The TV program attempted to create the impression that Margaret was a liberal woman whose campaign for birth control arose from concern and compassion for those faced with difficult decisions. Actually she held the poor in contempt, referring to them as "human weeds." She planned to get rid of them and also of racial and ethnic minorities, including Catholics and Jewish immigrants because of their relatively greater fertility than that of the rich and socially elite whom she rated as "good stock." Sanger considered "the African negro" as a sub-human and factory workers as sub-sub-men.

She drew up a blueprint for a regimented, repressive, racially-pure society. She proposed that illiterates, paupers, unemployables, and prostitutes be corralled on farms for the strengthening and development of their moral conduct.

She, herself, flouted all laws, ethical, moral, religious and civil. As was portrayed in the TV presentation, though not the wife of Havelock Ellis, she shared his bed when she visited him in England. This was only one of her many adulteries. She treated her husband shamefully. She neglected her children, flitting off with a over while her daughter, Peggy, lay ill with polio. She sent her sons to boarding school promising to visit them--promises that were never kept. She distributed diaphragms even though doing so was in contravention of the existing state laws. She sent contraceptive literature through the mails thus violating the postal regulations. She cajoled doctors into violating civil laws and the ethics of their profession.

That Mrs. Sanger knew that human life was present at fertilization is evident from a comment made on the TV presentation by one of her patients whom she had fitted with a diaphragm. She told me, "It would stop the little fish from turning the egg into a baby."

Toward the end of her life in 1966, Margaret fell victim to superstition and to drug-addiction. What the TV program failed to stress was that late in her life she objected strenuously to the movement to legalize abortion. She detested abortion as the waste and degradation of human life.

Since present-day pro-abortionists deny two truths that Margaret Sanger taught, 1) that a new baby is created at the exact moment of fertilization and 2) that abortion is "barbaric" and is, along with infanticide, "the killing of babies," one wonders what Planned Parenthood hoped to gain by celebrating the centenary of her birth.

Patrick H. McHugh