I have been reading Linda Royall’s 2023 book Sacrifice, in which the investigative journalist details Margaret Sanger’s deep and revolting entanglements with eugenics, racism, Nazi ideology, and population control. Royall also explains how Sanger biographer (and devoted follower) Lawrence Lader manipulated language to redirect abortion discussion from babies in the womb to abstractions such as rights, medical autonomy, and personal freedom. Sanger’s embrace of eugenics and Lader’s distortion of language are not just closely related. Contempt for those considered inferior, weak, or useless in society, and the refusal to acknowledge the humanity of unborn children, are really the same thing.

Sacrifice brings this truth into chilling focus. Margaret Sanger and those around her—Nazi ideologues, British and American upper-crust socialists, homegrown American white supremacists, and old-fashioned Malthusian population control fanatics—exuded hatred for those they regarded as beneath them. Non-Anglo-Saxons, people with disabilities, poor people, sick people, people without high-society educations—Sanger and her cronies could barely stand looking at “human weeds” (her words) such as these. In Sanger’s case, this might have been due in part to her own humble background, a past from which she spent her adult life fleeing. Highborn old-money socialites in Manhattan and London didn’t have this problem, but they did share Sanger’s disdain for those they considered less worthy than themselves.

Sanger promoted contraception to keep unwanted populations in check—and to avoid abortion. But when her dystopian eugenic crusade later came to include abortion as a method of culling the number of social inferiors, the key to selling this gruesome business was, again, the studied refusal to see weaker members of society as human. Lader, whom Royall describes as an admirer of propaganda master Edward Bernays, cloaked the humanity of the unborn child in now-familiar phrases like “blobs of tissue.” Lader sold these lies about abortion to the United States Supreme Court—so convincingly that the Court wrote off the humanity of in utero Americans in the 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions. Boasting of his work to mainstream abortion in America and around the world, Lader, Royall reports, wrote of having helped to “eliminate billions of undesirables globally.” Not “people” but “undesirables,” as though Lader could not bear to acknowledge that the little hands frantically fending off scalpels and suction tubes were human. “Don’t look upon the dismembered child,” one can almost hear Lader thinking, “lest one be forced to reckon with his or her humanity, thus jeopardizing the opportunity to live a life free of obligations to babies.”

Abortion supporters and apologists today exhibit the same pathological refusal to look at their victims. When prolifers were on trial in 2023 for rescue work at the hellish clinic of late-term abortionist Cesare Santangelo, the trial judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, forbade the jury from looking at images of the children whom Santangelo had mutilated and murdered. Likewise, Sanger’s racism is still largely ignored in most media coverage of the Planned Parenthood founder (though PP of New York did remove her name from its Manhattan Center building a few years ago). Notions that abortionists and abortion supporters not only want to, but do, disproportionately kill the children of non-white women and men are frequently dismissed as conspiracy theories. The insistence that life begins at conception and that babies are our fellow human beings is declared unscientific nonsense by those who occupy—thanks, perhaps, to abortion—the upper echelons of American society.

Like the eugenicist that Sanger was, the pro-choicer today depends on the two-pronged lie that his victims are not human, and his intention is not to use abortion (or contraception as Sanger did) to rid the world of those whom the rich and powerful see as hopelessly beneath them.