The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it

"I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world"

That's Margaret Sanger, in an interview with Mike Wallace.(at 2 minutes 35 seconds) Surprisingly, the left hasn't scrubbed this interview off of the internet, yet. I quoted this interview more fully here, when I dug into the eugenic history of Planned Parenthood.(PP) I made note of the pause, as well as the tense look on her face. This post will more fully explain that awkward moment.

In Sanger's 1920 book "Woman and The New Race", Margaret Sanger writes the following: (page 62-63)

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.

And of course, in typical Sanger fashion she ends up going back into the usual screed(down the page) of the feeble minded and defectives and all this other nasty stuff.

What's even more bothersome is progressive revisionism. Sanger said(wrote) downright evil things, if you're going to defend it, be honest in your defense. In searching for the quote and the source, it's impossible to miss this document on PP's website. It says this:

"The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

This statement is taken out of context from Margaret Sanger's Woman and the New Race (Sanger, 1920). Sanger was making an ironic comment - not a prescriptive one — about the horrifying rate of infant mortality among large families of early 20th-century urban America. The statement, as grim as the conditions that prompted Sanger to make it, accompanied this chart, illustrating the infant death rate in 1920:

The chart can be found on page 62 of the book. But as to this notion that Sanger has been somehow taken out of context, like hell she was! What PP is hoping you won't do is go and actually read the book, or at least that section to see what it is she really wrote. This gets right at why I believe having the original sources is so paramount.

They say she was taken out of context, here's a segment of what I quoted at the top:

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.

Old fashioned ideas, like having immoral large families.

I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world

Like I said the last time I quoted from that interview, this line, this first part of her response was the most honest part. Backed up by what's in her books, regarding the "immorality of large families". Which brings us back to PP's shameful document.

To be fair, Sanger is on record as being against the lethal chamber, and the way this segment above is written, PP is correct that it's not written prescriptively. But then again, PP doesn't more specifically enumerate what or whom they are replying to, so it could very well be the typical false progressive narrative, where they've set up two completely false choices.

She believed wholly in the immorality of large families. Chapter 5 of the book is titled "THE WICKEDNESS OF CREATING LARGE FAMILIES". (starting on page 57). She recommended an American Baby Code, she wrote openly of sterilizations, her magazine Birth Control Review is loaded with Malthusian operpopulation nonsense, and she even put forth her idea for the need of a Population Congress which would deal with all of these undesirables and so forth. She was clearly against large families.

Two notes in observation to point out. The publishing company(or one of) for Sanger's book "Woman and The New Race", was the Eugenics Publishing Company.

I recently wrote about the friendly relationship between fabian socialists and American progressives, in which I discussed both Sanger and Havelock Ellis. Ellis wrote the preface to "Woman and The New Race".