To see a baby born is one of the greatest experiences that a human being can have. Birth to me has always been more awe-inspiring than death. As often as I have witnessed the miracle, held the perfect creature with its tiny hands and tiny feet, each time I have felt as though I were entering a cathedral with prayer in my heart.
Do you know who said this?
Margaret Sanger.
I’m reading through her autobiography that was published in 1938 and my jaw dropped when I read this. Margaret wrote this as a young woman in her early 20s serving as a nurse in a hospital. I was shocked.
It got me wondering.
What happened to this young woman in her journey?
What changed her heart that she became an advocate for eugenics?
Why didn’t she believe that the root cause of women’s health care could be addressed?
I don’t have all the answers. I’m on chapter 5 of her autobiography.
What I do know is this.
God made her unique and unrepeatable. She is not an intrinsically evil person. She made evil choices that harm women and harm children.
And, instead of seeking to find ways to help women experience the awe-inspiring nature of birth, she introduced death. She introduced harm. She introduced further challenges to women’s health care advancements.
While we might see hormonal contraception and abortion as advancements for women to pursue their careers, we introduced the idea that you can never hold space for both your motherhood & your dreams. We introduced the idea that in order to be successful, your womb must hold the possibility to become a tomb. We now choose isolation and we make sure women feel more alone in their choices and in their futures than ever before.
I want to know the Margaret who experienced birth as the most awe-inspiring experience she had ever experienced. I want to know the Margaret that desired a big family herself.
I’ll be digging deeper into the Margaret who witnessed something so beautiful and so powerful, she felt that it transcended her experiences and beliefs and even she felt a surge of the heart at such beauty.
While I don’t support decisions she made for women’s health care or her support of eugenics for moral & scientific reasons, I do want to understand – in her own words – what she thought and where these ideas came from. Who & what shaped her?
—
I’ll be sharing more, but to note: Margaret was not raised Catholic. She was raised in an atheist home and her father was a staunch socialist who firmly believed in the ideals of socialism and was always willing to help neighbors and strangers. Her mother was raised Catholic, but didn’t practice. And, in her book, Margaret shares about the love of her parents and how they deeply cared for each other. This is important to note as oftentimes I’ve seen commentary on her upbringing with nothing to back up the facts or claims.
