Planned Parenthood Founder on Abortion: ‘No Matter How Early...It Was Taking Life’

CNSNews.com) – Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in her autobiography that an abortion at any stage is the taking of a human life.

“To each group we explained simply what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life," wrote Sanger.

Planned Parenthood, which is now the leading abortion provider in America, will this week give House Minority Nancy Pelosi, its Margaret Sanger Award. Planned Parenthood says Pelosi has earned the honor through her “leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement over the course of her career.”

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According to its website, Planned Parenthood traces its origins to 1916 when Sanger opened a birth control office in Brooklyn, N.Y.  In 1922, she incorporated the American Birth Control League to address issues such as "world population growth, disarmament, and world famine," and in 1923, Sanger opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in Manhattan to provide contraceptives to women.

The American Birth Control League subsequently merged with the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), in an essay written in 1931, sought to distinguish between contraceptive measures that prevent a sperm from fertilizing a woman’s egg and post-conception measures that would destroy a fertilized egg, an embryo.  She wrote the article in response to then-Pope Pius XI’s encyclical letter Casti Connubii, or Chaste Wedlock, issued on Dec. 31, 1930.

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In the essay, “Birth Control Advances: A Reply to the Pope,” Sanger wrote: “Abortion destroys the already fertilized ovum or the embryo; contraception, as I have carefully explained, prevents the fertilizing of the ovum by keeping the male cells away. Thus it prevents the beginning of life.”

Sanger also wrote that the Pope’s encyclical “aims to regulate the conjugal affairs of Catholic men and women,” and argued that control should come in the form of contraceptives.

The essay further states that abortion is not a contraceptive.

Under the sub-headline “Birth Control Does Not Mean Abortion,” Sanger wrote: “’The real alternative to birth control is abortion,’ wrote Dean Inge, in his article already quoted [in the essay]. It is an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn.

“Although abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

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