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Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone.

Margaret Sanger

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Margaret Sanger
Age: 86 †
Born: 1879
Born: September 14
Died: 1966
Died: September 6
Activist
Feminist
Film Director
Nurse
Sex Columnist
Trade Unionist
Corning
New York
Margaret Higgins
Margaret Higgins Sanger
Margaret Hennessy Higgins
Mother
Regardless
Problem
Fundamental
Women
Fundamentals
May
Attitude
Many
Alone
Must
Whether
Children
Freedom
Men
Woman
Choosing

More quotes by Margaret Sanger

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The greatest issue is to raise the question of birth control out of the gutter of obscenity ... into the light of intelligence and human understanding.
Margaret Sanger
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Very early in my childhood I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jail with large families.
Margaret Sanger
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While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.
Margaret Sanger
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There is only one reply to a request for a higher birthrate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take the burden of the insane and feeble-minded from your back. [Mandatory] sterilization for these is the answer.
Margaret Sanger
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The most successful educational approach to the Negro is throgh a religious appeal. 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 to any of their more rebellious members.
Margaret Sanger
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Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to earthly paradise.
Margaret Sanger
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The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.
Margaret Sanger
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I resolved that women should have knowledge of contraception. They have every right to know about their own bodies. I would strikeout--I would scream from the housetops. I would tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard. No matter what it should cost. I would be heard.
Margaret Sanger
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No one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable but they will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. This is the only cure for abortions.
Margaret Sanger
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Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.
Margaret Sanger
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Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.
Margaret Sanger
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I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance to be a human being, practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin - that people can - can commit.
Margaret Sanger
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The procreation of [the diseased, the feeble-minded and paupers] should be stopped.
Margaret Sanger
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How are we to breed a race of human thoroughbreds unless we follow the same plan? We must make this country into a garden of children instead of a disorderly back lot overrun with human weeds.
Margaret Sanger
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The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.
Margaret Sanger
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The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.
Margaret Sanger
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Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.
Margaret Sanger
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Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans.
Margaret Sanger
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On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.
Margaret Sanger
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The masses of Negroes...particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disasterously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.
Margaret Sanger