Margaret Sanger Quotes

Whoever is not physically or mentally fit must not pass on his defects to his children. The state must take care that only the fit produce children. Conversely, it must be regarded as reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the state.

... in all cases of monstrosity at birth anaesthetics should be applied by doctors publicly appointed for that purpose... Every successive year would see fewer of the unfit born, and finally none. But, it may be urged, this is legalized infanticide. Assuredly it is; and it is urgently needed.

Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.

By all means, there should be no children when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders. In the case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble and pelvic deformities are also a serious bar to childbearing No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.

We're living in an age of genocide. ...And we do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, and the genocide that took place with the extermination of the Jews, but the whole program....of birth control and abortion is another form of genocide.... [T]hey claim the poor are bringing forth tremendous numbers of children and so the solution is to kill them off.

the practical means for cutting off the defective germ-plasm in the American population

Individual wishes are driving the possible emergence of eugenics, not the state, because people want children for whom they can be ambitious.

Freedom to breed Is intolerable…. People vary. Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The differences will be accentuated, generation by generation.

I see nothing wrong in sterilizing a man who has already brought eight or ten children into the world. Especially if it helps those eight or ten children to live better.

We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for critical and diagnostic investigations. It demonstrates ... that uncontrolled fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable traits.

More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control.

No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child without a permit for parenthood.

You should have to pass an IQ test before you breed. You have to take a driving test to operate vehicles and an SAT test to get into college. So why don’t you have to take some sort of test before you give birth to children? When I am President, that’s the first rule I will institute.

Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.

Eugenics, which had started long before my time, had once been defined as including free love and prevention of conception... Recently it had cropped up again in the form of selective breeding.

Birth control is nothing more or less than...weeding out the unfit.

On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else.

We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.

One of the conveniences in life is to have less children.

The general program of the eugenicist is clear—it is to improve the race by inducing young people to make a more reasonable selection of marriage mates; to fall in love intelligently. It also includes the control by the state of the propagation of the mentally incompetent. It does not imply the destruction of the unfit either before or after birth.

Prevent the procreation of persons socially inadequate from defective inheritance, by authorizing and providing for eugenical sterilization of certain potential parents carrying degenerate hereditary qualities.

The question of regulating birth rates is highly complex and that any standardized, dogmatic solution "for all time and all peoples" would be wrong.

The time to talk about it in schools and churches and magazines and debate societies is now. If you wait, five years from now the gene doctor will be hanging out the MAKE A SMARTER BABY sign down the street.

Children when irregularly produced are a cause of great inconvenience.