Psychology Commons^™

The Use Of The Birth Control Movement As A Eugenics Weapon, 1920'S-1960'S, Peyton P. Holstein

Young Historians Conference

While Margaret Sanger made great strides in the crusade for legalization and open access to birth control for women, groups paired her work with ideologies such as Social Darwinism to arm the eugenics movement throughout the Twentieth-century. The eugenics movement was a culmination of racism and newly found scientific theories which led a crusade to purify the American population through reproductive cherry-picking on the basis of race. One of the primary ways that this group attempted to weed out “undesirable” races within the American population was through birth control as well as sterilization. These two movements - birth control and …