A Fantastic Little Corner

Ahh. I remember having a difficult time with the font choice on that one... 70,000,000 is such a long number; difficult to fit in a 100 x 100 pixil space. (There's a joke in there somewhere. One I can't really laugh at...)

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regularamanda.livejournal.com

Your 13, 14, and 15 icons made me absolutely sick to my stomach. Arg. I'm reminded why I'm pro-life. :P

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Yes. I about see red when some hapless libbie starts elevating Sanger as some American hero. Usually, I just have to keep my mouth shut in order to be a good Christian.

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Being a good Christian doesn't mean staying quiet. It means countering lies and ignorance with the truth.

I didn't know much of the history of PP until a few years ago. I could barely believe what I was reading! I'd bet a lot of people don't know either.

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Of course. :) But I get so angry when they say those things... I don't even know where to begin, and by the time that I have figured it out, well... It's not very Christ-like, so I'll part with maybe a barb to google her + eugenics and walk away. I'm not one to walk away from a fight, but those ones... They can ruin friendships.

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This progressive is delighted to see y'all taking on Mao and Che. Bonehead lefties who invoke them without knowing what they're talking about burn me.

But icons 13 & 14 misrepresent Margaret Sanger by quoting her out of context. And icon 16 is misleading advice, as there are many websites which not only quote Ms Sanger out of context, but fabricate false quotations and other bogus information.

Yes, like a lot of people of the 1920s, Sanger was undeniably a eugenicist, who hoped to see the human species improved through stronger, healthier, smarter people having more children and weaker, sicker, less intelligent people having less. Today, we rightly find that thinking disturbing, because we are more open-eyed about the racism et cetera implicated in judgments about who is “fit” to have children, and because we have seen eugenic thinking entangled with the horrific genocides of the 20th century. It is right and proper to reject eugenics, and to criticize Sanger for her allegiance with that school of thought. Lefties who know enough to know about Sanger also know enough to know this.

But all that said, Sanger was emphatically not sympathetic to racism or genocide, as googling her might lead you to think. Her core principle was reproductive freedom, that all people had the right to effective contraception or to bear children as they chose for themselves in their own circumstances. This frequently brought her into conflict with her allies at that time, but she was principled on this point.

Here's the context (http://www.bartleby.com/1013/5.html) for quote #14:

Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live twelve months.

This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five.

Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that the child who must struggle for health in competition with other members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted for.

Sanger is clearly invoking an irony, as though given the problems faced by children in large families, as though their high rate of mortality ranks least among many problems.

Here's the context (http://womensspace.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/planned-parenthoods-statement-on-margaret-sanger/) for quote #13:

It seems to me from my experience . . . in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table.
....
The minister's work is also important, and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation, as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. 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.

She is clearly saying that she does not want a false impression to circulate, not saying that her true intent must be kept secret.

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regularamanda.livejournal.com

That's all well and good, but I was just stating my own opinion on my friend's journal entry. :)

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Being pro-life is your opinion, and I'm respectfully not commenting on that.

Being sickened by deceitful quotations from Sanger is in a different category. You've implicitly expressed an interest in what she said. I'm telling you more.

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regularamanda.livejournal.com

You forgot that I was not the one that made the deceitful quotations on the icons.

You should have told the person in a new comment, not to someone who was commenting on a friend's artwork.

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I was counting on the original poster seeing all comments.

Since you said that you were struck by these particular items, and I was commenting on those same items, I presumed that my comments were relevant to you.

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hbpen.livejournal.com

Any thing that brings any person to say, "If you love a member of your family, you should kill him/her" is INSANE. Period.

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That is crazy. It's not what she said.

She said that large families, as institutions, are so ill-equipped to support their children that many of those children die, and we can infer from that death rate that those children who do survive suffer poor health and live lives in poverty so severe that we might suggest that it's a mercy that those who die do not experience those misfortunes.

You may well disagree with that sentiment, but it is nowhere near a suggestion that parents should murder their children.

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hbpen.livejournal.com

She had reasons which brought her to say it, but yes. She said it. It's right there in your own quote.

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I think that's a clear misreading of the quote. I'm confident that other liberals will agree with me. The statement you attribute to her—advocacy for parents killing their children—would be reprehensible in my eyes, and I'm confident that other liberals will agree with me on that as well.

I hope that, convinced as you are that I am wrong about her meaning, you can accept that my reading is sincere, as is my moral rejection of the murderous philosophy which you attribute to her. Our moral calculus is perhaps chillier and more pragmatic than yours, but please do not exaggerate what it includes.

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Don't you have anything better to do than to troll conservative communities and now individual people's journals?

The book that the quote in #14 is taken from is online. There's nothing out of context. Here's the full chapter:

http://www.bartleby.com/1013/5.html

Please take your lies elsewhere. I am sick of seeing them.

***

And wow, reading her own words is chilling. What an inhumane woman this was.

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The Planned Parenthood ones are especially horrifying. If people only knew what they are REALLY supporting!

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Yeah. I'm trying to commit the quotes to memory; that way, I can just spout them off.

It's terrible, because I've never, ever thought of grafitti for anything else, but if it wasn't wrong, I'd write them on the windows of the Planned Parenthoods I pass. Because people should KNOW.

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fishphile.livejournal.com

People assume that pro-choicers don't know the history of Planned Parenthood. I know the history and still support the organization and a woman's right to choose.

Just because the founder had some horrible ideas does not mean the current organization operates with those ideas in mind OR that the women who go to the organization are too weak willed to make their own decisions regarding their own reproductive rights.

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