Margaret Sanger

The New Eugenics – Heritage Foundation Project 2025 for Marriage and Increased Childbearing 

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Reading the opening lines of the Heritage Foundation Report – Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years – I was struck by a deja vue. Not just because the Report warms over the usual right-wing attacks on the 20th Century including reproductive rights, women’s rights and sexual rights, but some of the language about the rights of children were oddly reminiscent of statements made by my grandmother 100 years ago. I suspect the authors of this report were totally ignorant of this, so it’s worth a reminder.

The opening paragraph of the Report states: The first (truth) is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents.

In 1926, my grandmother wrote an article for Holland’s Magazine entitled “Passports for Babies.” As reported by the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, “Sanger fantasizes about parents being subjected to an interview by a prospective baby. The demanding child inquires whether the parents have paid for their last baby, how many other children they have, and whether or not the parents can supply a happy home, proper food, a sunny nursery, and love and affection. Summarizing the prospective parents’ responses, the baby exclaims: ‘Five children already? Two dark rooms in the slums? No! Thank you! I don’t care to be born at all if I cannot be well born. Good-bye!’”

God forbid that the Heritage Foundation would ever quote Margaret Sanger in support of its thesis, but their arguments are oddly similar … as far as they go. 

The Heritage Foundation chastizes much of modernity, global population trends, real world economic factors and the resulting changing social, cultural and mating environment where human reproductive strategies have been adapted for success. These adaptations include: more female education, fewer and later marriages, and fewer children. 

Women are decried as selfish: the opening paragraph of the Report continues: In contrast, the default in American culture today is to put the desires of adults over the needs of children. Children are too often called to sacrifice what is due to them—the presence of their mom and dad under the same roof for the entirety of their childhood.

The body of the Report goes on to cite the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence who were, quite literally, fathers: Fifty-four of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence married and had a total of 337 children among them—an average of six each.   

Available figures indicate that the average American woman in 1800 had over 7 children (there are no figures for 1776), so the Signers were apparently on the low side of the average (perhaps they weren’t finished, or rather their wives weren’t, having children). 

The Report somehow fails to cite what the Declaration of Independence actually said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”

Alas, we all know that the Founding Fathers didn’t “Remember the Ladies,” but not even the authors of the Heritage Report could bring themselves to assert that women have no right to Life, Liberty and Pursuit of happiness. Nor did the Framers talk of any children’s rights. 

For me and my grandmother, Women’s Rights and Feminism are included in the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. My grandmother said, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

She added: “A woman’s body belongs to herself alone. It is her body. It does not belong to the Church. It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other government on the face of the Earth. The first step toward getting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for any woman the serve decision whether or not she shall become a mother. Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.”

The Heritage Report fails to analyze why a declining birthrate is a worldwide phenomenon, including in so-called first world countries, and I would include Russia and China in them, in addition to Europe, Latin America and Asia. Much of the world now has a TFR less than 2.1, which is the replacement rate. The US is no outlier.

Contrary to the Heritage Report attacks on the lack of morality and the alleged disfavoring of religion in the US as drivers of reduced birthrates, smaller families also occurs in countries with a strong state religion and strict sexual morality and with no or little “Feminism”. For instance, Iran has 1.7, about the same as ours.

Fertility rates have been falling in some countries since the 18th Century – long before modern birth control or abortion, before “Feminism” and “Gender”, before the sexual revolution (there are arguments that the sexual revolution began with the advent of the automobile, not the Pill), before welfare and before internet pornography and dating. Analysts have looked at such factors as: the Industrial Revolution, medical advances for child survival, costs of raising a child – all this before much female education and women’s entry into the modern workforce and feminism.

Single motherhood proliferates worldwide but varies from culture to culture. It is higher than the United States in many countries in Western Europe and Scandinavia and in Latin America; it is far lower in East Asian countries. 

Wailing about smaller families is often a disguise about exactly who is having smaller families and who larger. In many countries there is concern with immigrants having a higher birth rate than those native born. This Great Replacement argument occurs not only in the United States, but in other western countries as well, hence Reports like the Heritage’s calling in coded language for greater native birthrates. 

The Heritage Foundation’s call for a Manhattan Project for babies uses an unfortunate metaphor – the population bomb was an inept metaphor used in the early 1970s for what was thought to be unbridled population growth. It seems that the Heritage Foundation wants unbridled baby growth.

There are the expected attacks on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and its welfare programs and on the Pill and the sexual revolution and feminism and gender. The ideal country in the Heritage view for a Baby Boom is Israel, which is quite different from the US and the rest of the Western World with its religiosity, uniform language and culture, not to mention a history of real and immediate threats from its neighbors. The authors fail to mention that Israel has available sex ed, birth control and abortion. Nor did it mention that Israel allegedly once gave long-acting birth control to immigrant Ethiopian Jews without their consent.

Some of the Heritage solutions for the US: a large family tax credit, home childcare tax credit, reducing education levels and establishing church-societal marital boot camps, discouraging on-line dating, promoting family education in schools, making divorce harder (they do not realize that doing so is a disincentive to marriage), and mandating a day of rest, i.e. Blue laws (I am writing this on Super Bowl Sunday) and reducing welfare and head start programs. The list goes on and on.

In contrast to the research cited in the Heritage Report about the single parent homes destroying children, the Annie E Casey Foundation, which has decades of research on the family, states: “Com­pared to kids in mar­ried-par­ent house­holds, chil­dren in sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­lies are more like­ly to expe­ri­ence poor out­comes. Research indi­cates that these dif­fer­ences in child well-being tend to be small, though, and can dis­ap­pear when adjust­ing for key fac­tors like pover­ty.  While the research is com­plex, some­times con­tra­dic­to­ry and evolv­ing, mount­ing evi­dence indi­cates that under­ly­ing fac­tors — such as strong and sta­ble rela­tion­ships, parental men­tal health, socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus and access to resources — have a greater impact on child suc­cess than does fam­i­ly struc­ture itself.

Chil­dren thrive when they have safe, sta­ble and nur­tur­ing envi­ron­ments and rela­tion­ships, and these con­di­tions and con­nec­tions can exist in any type of family.”

There has been much discussion of our modern mating system, if it can be called that. In the modern economy, with modern contraception, women are getting the education they need to survive and thrive on their own without relying on a husband. They have their children when they are ready and when their children have the best chance of survival and thriving. The Report calling for women to get less education and to be stay at home moms flies in the face of that reality. That genie isn’t going back in the bottle. 

What to do about men deserves more serious addressing than the Report does. The American male is not in great shape physically or educationally. My grandmother noted that during World War I 56% of American men were found unfit for military service. A recent study by the Defense Department found 77% of men unfit for service. Is it stricter guidelines or declining male health? Men attend college less then women. Antisocial behaviors are exhibited more by men than women. They are of declining marriageable material; hence women aren’t marrying them.

The Report’s proposals for family formation are targeted to benefit taxpayers, not those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes. The incentives are for the relatively well-to-do not the poor. Childbearing is to be encouraged for those who have, not those who have not. 

Finally, one of the drivers of infertility is undiagnosed sexually transmitted infections. The more well-to-do get reproductive health care from private physicians or clinics. The less well-to-do from Planned Parenthood. And what has the current administration done? Defunded Planned Parenthood, thereby leading to more undiagnosed STDs and thus infertility among the less well off, as well as more unintended pregnancies and more abortion, legal or illegal (illegal abortions can increase infertility). 

Eugenics by any other name. 

Arizona and 19th Century abortion laws

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Arizona was not alone in criminalizing abortion in the 19th Century, though the legislative history described in the press was perhaps unique. Other recent articles describe the influence of organized medicine in the efforts to criminalize abortion.

Below is an excerpt from my book, Beyond Choice, which gives the background to the campaign of Anthony Comstock, Arizona and the other states to criminalize abortion. Note the quote from a physician promise ent in this effort about the racial effects of a world with no restrictions on birth control or abortion. The white male saw their hegemony threatened. How better to remedy this than to restrict white women’s access to preventative measures.

From beyond Choice, Chapter 1

The Demise of Reproductive Freedom in the 19th Century

The birth control movement which my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, started in the early 20th century was a reaction to the 19th century pro-life movement that succeeded in reversing American and British law, which had permitted birth control and abortion, and in criminalizing them both almost entirely. The campaign to restrict reproductive freedom was not solely based on a respect for unborn life at its earliest stages. Rather it was a campaign founded upon the institutional imperatives of organized medicine, the Protestant reaction to Irish Catholic immigration, and the feminist and fundamentalist drive for social purity in sexual matters.

During the 19th century physicians began to unravel the mysteries of reproductive biology and fetal development.  The ovum was discovered, as was the process of fertilization. The 19th century was also the time when university-trained physicians sought to control the practice of medicine. In our overly regulated society it is hard to imagine a time when there were few if any restrictions on who could “practice medicine”. In fact, until university-trained physicians appeared on the scene, midwives and other non-university trained doctors called “irregulars”, as well as outright quacks, were the main practitioners of medicine. They not only diagnosed medical conditions but also distributed all kinds of homemade drugs to their patients. Medical potions and patent medicines were concocted and sold with virtually no regulation or oversight. While official records are skimpy, it seems that the first legislative restrictions on the practice of abortion were enacted as a result of efforts by “regular” physicians to protect the safety of women to whom dangerous abortifacient potions were being given by “irregulars”. There is some evidence that America’s first law, in Connecticut in 1821, which banned the giving of a “potion” to cause an abortion in a woman “quick” with child, came out of an effort by physicians to ban all home-made herbal remedies, whether for abortion or not, as simply being too dangerous. When New York enacted its ban on abortion in 1828, it banned abortion before or after quickening unless two physicians determined the abortion was necessary to save the woman’s life (a vastly broader category of cases than in current times).

University-trained physicians also had a financial motive to put their competition, the irregulars, midwives and quacks, out of business. These irregulars made a healthy part of their income by providing contraception and abortion, as well as childbirth services. As a result, regular physicians began to pressure legislatures to put the control of pregnancy prevention and termination in the hands of physicians only. Thus the early statutes, like in New York, permitted abortions only when two physicians agreed and other later abortion statutes allowed physicians to exercise their medical judgment and perform abortions when they thought it necessary. 

            The formation of the American Medical Association in 1841 by the physician-regulars accelerated the legislative process of putting medicine in general and reproduction in particular into physician hands. The AMA made it one of its first items of business as the trade association for physicians to put the irregulars out of business. Over the course of the next century as their medical expertise grew physicians took control of childbirth and largely succeeded in removing it from the home under the supervision of a midwife to the hospital under the supervision of a physician. With contraception and abortion physicians took a more drastic route—they sought to criminalize them both either entirely or if not done under a physician’s supervision.  They didn’t bother to hide their financial motive. James C. Mohr, in his book “Abortion in America”, relates that the Southern Michigan Medical Society in 1875 was reminded by one of its members: “Regular physicians are still losing patients, even long time patients, to competitors willing ‘to prevent an increase in their (patient’s) families’ by performing abortions.”

            On abortion this strategy dovetailed with new biological discoveries that pregnancy was a continuum from conception to birth and that quickening had no medical significance. Physicians began to agree with some religious leaders that pre-born life deserved their total respect and protection and that abortion should not be permitted except for therapeutic reasons. This belief was an historical part of their professional obligations, since the traditional Hippocratic Oath written by the Greek physician Hippocrates in about 400 BCE said: “I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion”. 

The AMA alone was not able to bring about the criminalization of abortion. At the beginning of their campaign in the 1840’s and 1850’s they allied themselves with the Know-Nothings, a fledging political party of nativists, whose main platform consisted of opposing Irish-Catholic immigration into America, which had begun to increase exponentially. The Know-Nothings wanted to preserve their control over the then mostly Anglo-Saxon, Protestant society. Their platform was a mixture of nativism, temperance and religious bigotry. The platform called for limits on immigration, for political offices being restricted to native-born Americans, and for a 21-year waiting period before an immigrant could vote. They sought to limit the sale of liquor, to require that all public-school teachers be Protestants, and to have the Protestant version of the Bible read daily to all students in public school. The Know-Nothings feared that they, the native-born Protestants, would soon be outnumbered and outvoted by the new Catholic immigrants. Their goal was to preserve the primacy of the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant religion, culture and political power. 

            It did not escape Protestant notice that immigrant Catholic women had large numbers of children, while native Protestant women were having fewer. Since few new birth control methods had been introduced at this time— although there was the beginnings of condom and diaphragm manufacturing— the Know-Nothings suspected that Protestant women were using abortion as their method of birth control. Physicians studying who were having abortions confirmed this suspicion. Hence, the Know-Nothing men readily joined the AMA crusade to criminalize abortion. As contraceptive options increased in the course of the 19th century, those who favored the white Protestant hegemony also supported the criminalization of contraception. 

            Racial fears were thus a major part of the impetus to control women’s fertility. As one prominent physician said in 1874: “The annual destruction of fetuses has become so truly appalling among native American (Protestant) women that the Puritanic blood of ’76 will be but sparingly represented in the approaching centenary.” 

            Even though men took the lead in advancing the medical, political and racial arguments for the criminalization of birth control and abortion, some women were also in favor of this legislation, as they were in favor of other “social purity” campaigns after the Civil War that sought to enact laws to restrict various immoral pursuits such as gambling, drinking and prostitution. In these campaigns the political odd bedfellows, the Know-Nothings and the regular physicians, were joined by some women’s rights activists. As Ellen Chesler, my grandmother’s biographer, described it: the native white Americans seeking to preserve their hegemony “were joined by religious fundamentalists, physicians looking to secure their status, and self-proclaimed feminists who believed they were promoting their own autonomy by regulating sexual behavior and by attacking pornography, alcohol and vice.” Into the vice category fell any expression of human sexuality other than between married couples for purposes of reproduction. 

Nineteenth century feminists, an admittedly small and relatively powerless group, supported what they called “voluntary motherhood”. Voluntary motherhood was to be achieved not by promoting birth control and abortion but rather by controlling male sexuality. Some feminists believed that birth control and abortion did more than enabling voluntary motherhood; they enabled their husbands to consort more freely with “other women”. Feminists believed that their own voluntary motherhood could be achieved by periodic abstinence and self-control, their own and their husband’s. 

            So Anthony Comstock, an official of the YWCA who headed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, found ready allies in some feminist circles for his social purity campaign to prevent the dissemination through the U.S. mails of obscene materials, which he defined to include any information on human sexuality, reproduction, birth control and abortion. Every publication or article “designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose” was banned. After Congress enacted the Comstock Laws in 1873 that banned sexuality, birth control and abortion information from the mails as contraband, individual states followed suit and criminalized the dissemination of contraceptive and abortion information and devices within their borders, though with some variations that permitted greater or lesser discretion to physicians. The result was that by the last quarter of the 19thcentury birth control and abortion had essentially been criminalized at both the state and federal levels. 

            The result was not that birth control and abortion were thereby eliminated from American society. Instead they largely went underground. Some forms of birth control methods remained available but were sold under euphemistic titles. Abortion potions were sold as a tonic for “female problems”, diaphragms were “womb supports”, and condoms were called “rubber goods”. Andrea Tone in “Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America” states: “…legal leniency, entrepreneurial savvy, and cross class consumer support enabled the black market in birth control to thrive.” It is difficult to estimate how widely contraception and abortion were used, whether the poor were able to afford them or how safe and effective they were. We can surmise that almost everyone in American society had access to either birth control or abortion because the birth rate continued its century long decline even after both were criminalized. 

Reproductive freedom was a threat to the power structure in 19th century America. It threatened physicians, who wanted to monopolize the practice of medicine; it threatened Anglo-Saxon Protestants who wanted to maintain their control over American society, culture and politics; and it threatened those men and women who viewed any expression of sexuality outside the home as a threat to marriage and decency. The campaign to criminalize birth control and abortion found many allies, and it succeeded. Anthony Comstock became one of the most powerful men in America.

Letters to the Editor: The lie that Planned Parenthood’s founder was a virulent racist

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Clyde W. Ford wrongly lumps my grandmother, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, with far-right immigration opponents.

Her version of eugenics was far different from that described by Ford. It sought to address the manner in which heredity and other biological factors, as well as environmental and cultural ones, affect human health, intelligence and opportunity. My grandmother hoped to locate birth control in a larger program of preventive social medicine to improve the condition of all people.

She spoke out against immigration acts and other measures that promoted racial or ethnic stereotypes. She worked for more than 50 years to provide reproductive autonomy to poor women, including women of color, because she saw it as an essential tool of individual liberation and social justice, not of social control.

Alexander Sanger

New York

The writer chairs the International Planned Parenthood Council.

With thanks to Ellen Chesler — she and I spend too much time rebutting these falsehoods.

Profile for my Princeton class

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His Past Became His Present, And His Future
by Brooke C. Stoddard ’69

Alex Sanger grew up in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., in Westchester County. His father was a surgeon, one of three children of renowned social reformer and feminist crusader Margaret Sanger. Alex’s mother was also a physician. Alex had three older brothers as well as a younger brother and younger sister. His father was Princeton Class of 1931 and rowed on the Lightweight Crew. The elder Sanger was a keen supporter of Princeton football and Princeton rowing, and, in fact, years later, the Princeton Rowing Association, when it began fostering women’s crews, named a shell for him — appropriately it became the boat of the women’s varsity.

On account of the elder Sanger’s interest in Princeton sports, the Sanger family often found itself on autumn Saturdays in Palmer Stadium rooting for the Tigers, impressions not lost on the young Alex.

After middle school, Alex went to Andover in Massachusetts and played “middling” hockey. An older brother was in the Princeton Class of 1965, so it’s no surprise Alex applied. He was accepted. He quickly set himself to Freshman and JV Hockey at Baker Rink and majored in History.

“I loved history,” Alex says. “I never felt the pull of another major.” A course that captivated him was James Ward Smith’s Philosophical Foundations of Democracy, which delved into the rights of individuals and their abilities to make their own decisions. At about the time he had to come up with a thesis topic, his legendary grandmother died, aged 87. At the time, Alex was abroad and learned much he had not known about Margaret Sanger from the obituary in The Times of London. “My father did not talk a great deal about her,” Alex says. “And for most of my growing up, my grandmother lived in Tucson. She’d come East to visit in the 1950s but cross-country travel was more troublesome then and generally we’d see her only once a year.”

But the obit in The Times had struck a chord. Alex suggested to the head of the History Department that he write his thesis on his grandmother. The notion met stiff headwinds. “This is history?” came the reply. “She died last year.” Barely beneath the surface was the view that women’s history was not quite History.

Deliberations ensued until the notion narrowed to researching Margaret Sanger’s efforts during 1910-1917, a formative period during which, despite distribution of contraception being illegal in many states and little discussed elsewhere, she established in Brooklyn the first Planned Parenthood office. Moreover, during this period, Margaret Sanger was connected to the Progressives and Radicals of the day.

But who to advise Alex? Eric Goldman, the Department’s only scholar of the 20th century, had just left to join the Lyndon Johnson administration. The Department head’s solution as articulated to Alex: “We have a new man. His period is the Civil War and Reconstruction. That’s about as close as I can get you.” This was James McPherson.

Alex did not often meet with Professor McPherson, who admitted to Alex that the Progressives were “a bit after my time.” But Alex strove on. “I think I was really one of the first persons to actually write women’s history,” he says now. “There was a ghosted ‘autobiography’ of my grandmother, but in a way, I was plowing new ground. There was no Women’s History. No one had really written on a progressive women’s movement.”

McPherson gave Alex a 1 on the thesis along with the compliment, “I learned so much from this.”

“The obituary and the thesis changed my life,” Alex says. Indeed it began a trajectory upon which Alex still remains. This includes a professional life dedicated to women’s rights not only in the United States but also around the world, and he is also working on a work based on his grandmother. Alex is weaving in material little known, indeed cloaked, during Margaret Sanger’s lifetime. For example, during the World War I era, when Margaret Sanger was working to establish offices for disseminating reproductive health information, she was also moving among persons who many were calling dangerous radicals, including Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Emma Goldman. She minimized these relationships so as not to jeopardize her work spreading education about contraception and family planning.

As graduation loomed, Alex felt the anxieties over the Vietnam conflict more than most — one of his older brothers had been killed in the fighting. Alex’s first move, though he knew his draft board had him in its sights, was to Washington, D. C., where he went to work for the Democratic National Committee. Hubert Humphrey had recently lost the election and the party was reeling from the riot-scarred ’68 convention in Chicago. The liberal wing of the party wanted a way of selecting delegates that better reflected the nation’s populations of women and minorities. “We were making significant change,” Alex recalls of his DNC days, “even rewriting state law to make the delegate selection process more inclusive.”


But there was little chance of outpacing the draft board. Alex joined the Air National Guard and served six months on active duty. Released, he was not settled on a career but nonetheless took the law and business boards. He scored well enough to be admitted to a joint JD-MBA program at Columbia, which he finished in four and a half years.

The degree led to a position in the Wall Street law firm White & Case, where Alex practiced trust and estate law. Working nights, he earned an advanced tax degree from NYU.

But in the 1980s, the long reach of Margaret Sanger and the women’s rights movements began to tell. Alex recalls a quote from Jane Austen: “Everything happens at parties.” Between acts at the Lincoln Center one night in 1984, Alex was introduced to Mimi Coleman, then the chair of Planned Parenthood of New York City (PPNYC). She persuaded Alex to serve on the board. He did for six years, upon which he was elected President and CEO.

Almost as soon as Alex took over PPNYC, it was involved in a Supreme Court case – Rust v. Sullivan – challenging the Bush Administration “gag rule,” which forbad counselors at federally supported clinics like Planned Parenthood from discussing abortion. The case went against the women’s rights groups 5-4. But in 1992, President Clinton overturned the order and invited Alex to the Oval Office as part of the recognition of the reversal.

Throughout the 1990s and as head of the largest Planned Parenthood affiliates in the United States, Alex traveled the nation to other affiliates. “Everywhere I went, I was impressed by the quality of the connection to the community and the devotion to the patients who came to the clinics. The women were treated not only professionally, but also with compassion and respect. I was very proud of our people.” Alex lobbied local, state and federal authorities. The work was not without foibles and rough patches. He debated anti-abortion advocates on Fox News – watching him on television one day during a debate, which could get graphic, his 10-year-old son asked his mother, “should I be watching this?” Alex was even known to be called away from family Sunday brunches by media reporters for commentary if a prominent clergy preached in the morning against abortion.

Alex retired from his directorship of PPNYC in 2000 but began volunteering full time for the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which promotes sexual and reproductive health around the world. “It’s fabulously rewarding and important work,” Alex says. He took time to write a book, Beyond Choice: Reproductive Freedom in the 21st Century and talked in a hundred cities on his book tour.

Even today Alex travels for IPPF, meeting staff and giving talks. But in 2012, new work cropped up. He was asked to join the board of a foundation established by Ohio businesswoman Virginia B. Toulmin founded the year before. The board determined that much good with the foundation’s money could be had increasing opportunities for women, and especially in the performing arts, where, outside of acting, women are woefully under-represented. For example, of classical symphonies performed by major U. S. orchestras in the 2014-5 season, only 1.8% were composed by women. Choreographers are most entirely men, as are living opera composers. Alex’s work with the Toulmin Foundation has offered seed and production money for women-written operas, symphonies, ballets and plays, including one in the works at the McCarter Theater. The last five years’ effort has been so prodigious that The Washington Post has run stories about it. One of the operas funded, As One by Laura Kaminsky, last year surpassed Turandot and Barber of Seville to be the 14th most produced opera in the United States. “The performing arts have a long way to go offering opportunity to women creators of ballet, plays, operas and symphonies,” says Alex. “We are trying to change the culture of how women are treated. This is such vital work, and I feel very blessed to be able to participate and help.”

Since the Weinstein Hollywood scandal broke in October, 2017, Alex’s work has been exceptionally timely. “It’s long overdue that women are treated more respectfully in this field and that men are called to account,” he says. “Women deserve the opportunity to excel and to work as professionals without harassment and hindrances. The Toulmin Foundation looks closely at the theaters, orchestras and others that are candidates for our funds. We look to see if they have policies for reporting and dealing with sexual harassment.”

Even with the Toulmin Foundation work (Alex says he has three jobs: the Toulmin Foundation; the IPPF; and an in-progress work based on Margaret Sanger), Planned Parenthood still looms large. Its centenary anniversary was 2016 (dating from the opening of the Brooklyn office). The reproductive rights organization founded by Margaret Sanger in the New York City borough now works in 171 countries. In many of these, it is not just a source of sexual and reproductive rights and health care, it is a major national provider of primary care, delivering the likes of inoculations, education, clinical work and more to children and men as well as to women.

“As is often said, ‘We have come a long way, but there is still a long way to go,'” Alex remarks.

As has been noted in various ways: “A good life is a life helping others.” You might say that many are indebted to Alex. But his parting words are, “Princeton set me on my path. My debt to the University is immeasurable.”

Below: PAW story about Alex

https://princeton1969.org/dynamic.asp?id=//pages/Catching_Up/Catching_Up/sanger_article