"The Negro Project"

Outright murder wouldn't sell. But wrapping it under the egalitarian cloak of "women's health" -- and adorning it with the moral authority of black churches -- would. Sanger and Gamble called their deadly campaign "The Negro Project."

In other writings, historian Mike Perry found, Sanger attacked programs that provided "medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers" because they "facilitate the function of maternity" when "the absolute necessity is to discourage it." In an essay included in her writing collection held by the Library of Congress, Sanger urged her abortion clinic colleagues to "breed a race of thoroughbreds." Nationwide "birth control bureaus" would propagate the proper "science of breeding" to stop impoverished, non-white women from "breeding like weeds."

The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses.