Margaret Sanger was a married woman with three children, but that was nothing to her in the summer of 1913. Adultery with Walter Roberts was on her mind, and he would become her first recorded extramarital lover.1 The setting was Provincetown, Massachusetts, where New York City’s cultural and artistic elite were prone to vacation. Husband Bill Sanger shuttled to and from New York, and Margaret found good occasion to put into practice the perspectives she had chosen back in the city. She and Bill had joined the Socialist Party Local 5 and found themselves in the company of radicals, including anarchist Emma Goldman, famous for “refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc.”2

These “liberated” folks would gather in the lower Fifth Avenue apartment of Mabel Dodge to toss around ideas. Many of those ideas were licentious. Bill Sanger called this Greenwich Village atmosphere a “hellhole of free love, promiscuity and prostitution masquerading under the mantle of revolution,”—“If Revolution means promiscuity, they can call me a conservative and make the most of it.”3

Margaret, though, was quite keen on promiscuity, and her life course was set. Though she was too cunning to campaign under the banner of free love and freedom from the burden of children, that was her heartbeat. She chose contraception as her cause and was heralded for efforts in “family planning,” even though her personal life betrayed her true contempt for the family.4

Margaret was little concerned for the well-being of her own children, Stuart, Grant, Margaret, and Peggy. In a 1911 letter, Bill urged Margaret to seek care for Peggy’s “little limb,” weakened and shortened by polio; even though Peggy was walking with a limp and needed a brace, Margaret was otherwise engaged in Provincetown. Four years later, Margaret, then in Paris, missed the last year of Peggy’s life, the little girl dying of pneumonia in the company of her Aunt Ethel.5

Her true love was the American Birth Control League, which became Planned Parenthood. Like the latter, the ABCL was no stranger to abortion. They simply kept things under wraps, fearing a public relations disaster. Staffers would secretly refer their counselees to doctors (such as a “Dr. Seigal”)6 who would do the dirty work. Eventually, “Christian” ministers joined her in promoting abortion.7

Margaret’s enthusiasm for ridding the world of “undesirables” was also reflected in her interest in eugenics. She was heard to bemoan “the burden of the ‘unfit’ on the productive members of the community,” to tie birth control to the creation of “a race of thoroughbreds,” and to promote a “bonus” or “incentive” program for sterilization directed at couples with “defective heredity.”8

Margaret had a penchant for the occult and frequently consulted psychics and astrologers.9 She rejected Christianity,10 and late in life, suffering from heart disease, she enrolled in a Rosicrucian mail-order course for “spiritual insight and first-hand spiritual experience.”11 Nevertheless, when she died on September 6, 1966, she received a Christian burial, with pastoral eulogies, first from Rev. George Ferguson of St. Phillips-in-the-Hills Episcopal Church in Tucson12 and then, at a memorial service, from the rector at St. George’s Church on Stuyvesant Square in New York.13

One marvels at clergy who enable the schemes and honor of the legacy of those who, like Margaret Sanger, are clearly anti-Christian. They empty Church ceremony of gospel meaning and send dangerous signals to a world which has lost its way. Only when the Church refuses to be party to such delusion will the culture begin to understand its high calling on behalf of life—life protected, sanctified, abundant, and eternal.

Footnotes:
1 Over the next four decades, Roberts would be followed by Lorenzo Portet, Havelock Ellis, Billy Williams, Hugh de Selincourt, Harold Child, H.G. Wells, Noah Slee, Angus McDonald, and Hobson Pittman. These are documented in Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 92, 108, 118, 173, 183, 184, 186, 244, 349, 406.
2 Ibid., 85-86.
3 Ibid., 91-92.
4 Janet de Selincourt, Catherine Wells, and Mary Slee, whose husbands Margaret bedded, could testify to this.
5 Ibid., 93, 133.
6 Ibid., 301.
7 “Between 1967 and 1970, in the final years before New York’s restrictive abortion law was repealed, the clinic would cooperate with the New York Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, founded at the nearby Judson Memorial Baptist Church in Greenwich Village.” Ibid., 302.
8 Ibid., 216, 417.
9 Ibid., 221.
10 “I have outgrown the need of church by my interest in philosophy, psychology & humanity. Very often I find the church narrows & limits the mental horizon of a person when in reality it should broaden and deepen . . .” Ibid., 252-53.
11 Chesler, 418.
12 “[H]e did not ignore Margaret’s achievements on behalf of humanity but remembered her more for the marvelous sense of fun she brought to Tucson . . . with her lively interests, festive parties, and essential joy in living.” Ibid., 467.
13 Ibid.

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