Did mother of free love urge selective breeding?
In addition to her marriages to socialist leader William Sanger and industrialist J. Noah Slee, biographers say she spent time in the company of a great many “voluntary mates.” She urged the “conscious, careful selection of a lover, that is the mate, if only for an hour, for a lifetime, maybe.” She practiced what she preached, contending that celibacy leads to “insanity, nervousness, sex perversion and homosexuality.” But it is her advocacy of selective parenthood for which she is best known. Sanger claimed to believe that the random production of children should be curtailed because it was antithetical to “the child’s right to be wanted.” That’s a very motherly, caring and catchy phrase, but the evidence suggests Sanger was pure social engineer, a “scientific socialist” itching to slam the throttle of her ideas full speed ahead. She despaired that, due to “haphazard methods of human reproduction,” children are not created through “scientific methods which have been successfully applie
