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.

The following is from Kairos Journal. I have come to believe that Planned Parenthood is one of the most dishonest, greedy, and destructive forces at work in our culture. Under the guise of helping women and families and with lots of warm and caring language, Planned Parenthood exerts a powerful influence toward ungodliness and is the principle voice for the continuation of abortion.

Those who work for Planned Parenthood, or for abortion in our culture must neither be demonized nor hated. They must be loved, prayed for AND fought against. Planned Parenthood must be fought. Part of that fight is knowing its history. Here’s part of that battle.

Enabling a “Liberated” Woman

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 wasProvincetown, 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

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