Now be fair, Sanger did want to give birth control to the “unfit” or “feeble minded,” and she did advocate sterilization if the person was incapable of taking birth control. As abhorrent as the thought is today it was very mainstream back in the day.
You also failed to point out that the The church was not against eugenics by isolation or other means it was the abortion and birth control they objected to.
You really don’t want to get into an “they did bad things” argument when you are on the side of the Catholic church.
Of COURSE the Catholic Church leadership would ban most means of birth control in the US if they had the power – they have a history of imposing their beliefs on others when they get the chance. But it’s a moot point: they don’t have the power and the odds of their getting such power go down every day. Not even Catholic women are interested in Catholic doctrine on birth control. That’s why it’s so freaking weird that the Republican leadership has a hard-on against contraception lately. It’s a freaking cliff, and they seem determined to charge over it. Well, wouldn’t be the first time.
I’d like to ad a voice to the chorus that this is absurd. When the Catholic Church had the temporal power it set people on fire in public.
Of course they’d ban birth control. They’d do anything the man in the pointy had says, because they don’t have any supernatural conduit to special wisdom.
Before it comes back I do want to clarify I am talking about the mentally ill people that Sanger was advocating involuntary sterilization for, I was in no way justifying their racist intents, the catholic church does tend to be better about race then the general public.
But I fail to see much of a difference in “evilness” between castrating the mentally ill because of some sick “cleansing dream” and castrating little boys so you can have sopranos in your choir.
They are both just evil. and the church had recently stopped doing so around the time Eugenics was on the rise.
I’m glad we are moving forward though, it is amazing how far we have come in what is a blink of the eye.