Mike Wallace's Interview of Margaret Sanger, dated 9/21/57, is posted on the website of The University of Texas at Austin.
Mike Wallace precedes this 1957 interview of eugenecist and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger with an ad for Phillip Morris cigarrettes, touting them as "the best natural smoke you ever tasted" while he takes a puff. Wallace prefaces the interview telling the audience that he will question Sanger about "politics, divorce and God".
As they begin, Sanger admits her "opposition is mainly from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church". Wallace reads a reference to Sanger about her background and how Sanger and her siblings were referred 'children of the devil' in their town growing up, because of their athiest father, who was "sort of a village athiest who clashed with church authorities".
Wallace asks if her motivation is not based on opposition to the Church. Sanger's mother was Catholic from Ireland, and had 11 children. "The population question is a great concern today", Sanger opines.
They spend a great deal of time discussing the Catholic position on artificial birth control, in a very interesting interview the likes of which would probably not be aired on secular TV today. Wallace then focuses on Sanger's history of publicly opposing the church. As Wallace confronts Sanger on her past statements, she gets fidgety, blinking, rubbing her face, and darting out her tongue.
Wallace then reads from a Catholic pamphlet: "In forbidding birth control it says the following. It says 'the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children. When the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible, that is by birth control, it is used unethically and unnaturally'. Now what's wrong with that position?" Wallace asks,.
"Well it's very wrong. it's not normal. It's not.. it has the wrong attitude toward marriage, towards love, towards the relationships between men and women" Sanger replies.
Wallace counters, "well the natural law, they say, the primary function of sex in marrriage is to beget children. do you disagree with that?"
"I disagree with that 100 per cent", Sanger retorts.
Wallace: "Now you certainly can take no issue with the natural law as the Church regards it"
Sanger: "Well I certainly do and I think it's unnatural".
Wallace: "..you reject the principle Catholic arguement against birth control as being totally invalid. what do you think the reason, the motive of the church, in forbidding birth control?"
Sanger: "you'll have to ask a Catholic that. I dont know what their motive is".
Wallace then challenges Sanger and brings up some of her past comments when she did attribute motives to the church, and asks her why she won't repeat her position now. He then continues,
"earlier this week you said 'it's not only wrong, it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control, even among its own members'. In other words you would like to see the government legislate religious beliefs, in a certain sense!"
"Where these strange things come from that I said?!", a visibly uncomfortable Sanger responds, as Wallace continues to reads Sanger's quotes back to her, and how they are at variance with her current replies.
They then go on to discuss sin, if sin exists, divorce, etc.
I highly recommended watching this interview.
50 years later, Sanger's racist and eugenecist positions, and vehement anti Catholicism, have been well documented: "We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with
social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most
successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.
We don't want the 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's December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255
Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in
Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth
Control in America . New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.
In future articles I will outline how other so-called elites such as Henry Kissinger, George H W Bush, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have followed Sanger's lead, advocating abortion and worldwide population control.
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