Abortion and the culture of death

How did we get to become a culture that celebrates the choice to kill pre-born babies?

This article comes from Seth Gruber who researched this topic in a documentary, The 1916 project. This is a study of the past in order to understand what’s happening now.

Over 65 million unborn children have been murdered (aborted) in the USA since 1973. What bred this culture of death that is targeting our families?

It didn’t happen suddenly. Things happen gradually. It takes a long time to go from a few intellectuals believing some bad ideas to bringing those ideas into the culture more and more until they bear fruit. The parallels to how Germany got to where it was in the rise of the Nazis to where we are now is unavoidable. The excuses that church leaders gave for their silence in the 1930s are the same as many church leaders today. God expects His church to be the conscience of the state. He expects believers to stand against the madness. If believers can be lulled into a sense of complacency or into a sense of fatalism, we’ve abdicated that role. And that’s how we got to where we are now.

Ideas have consequences. And bad ideas have victims. This culture has been intentionally created by a set of Marxist, socialist, totalitarian revolutionaries who were engaging in a proxy war against Christianity and the American family.

The patron saint of feminism is Margaret Sanger, the founder of the American Birth Control League (now known as Planned Parenthood – see Appendix).

The Bible says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (Isa. 5:20NIV). We are in a day when evil is now being called good. Truth has been turned on its head. The left does a good job of making things that are evil (like abortion) sound good. Instead of saying that you are killing your baby they say that the mother has the right to have a choice. Choice to do what? Choice to murder.

Cultural and political revolutionaries who influenced Margaret Sanger had a more robust commitment to their philosophy and “religion” than most Christians have today. Every radical revolution from the French revolution, the radical Jacobians, the revolutions of 1948, they all failed. But Margaret Sanger said if you can change the culture you can usher in the revolution. And she has.

Thomas Malthus, 1766-1834

In 1798 Thomas Malthus wrote “An essay on the principle of population”. He thought that because population grows exponentially but natural resources grow arithmetically, then there was a population bomb about to occur. Because population growth would eventually outstrip our ability to provide food. So, he came up with this vision of eliminating unwanted aspects of the population.

This idea was promoted in “The population bomb” by Paul R Ehrlich in 1968 and in “The limits to growth” by the Club of Rome in 1972. Ehrlich’s solutions included population control, such as “various forms of coercion” such as eliminating “tax benefits for having additional children”. And neo-Malthusianism continues to promote population control today.

Charles Darwin, 1809-1882

Charles Darwin read Malthus’s work and began to think about the origin of species. He published “The origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life” in 1859. His idea was that natural selection would result in the “survival of the fittest”. The strong will survive and the weak will die. Like in the animal kingdom, the strong will live and the weak will die. So, humanity is viewed as only an animal.

Francis Galton, 1822-1911

Charles Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton took the ideas of Darwin one step further. He realized that survival of the fittest implied the elimination of the unfit. The strong must survive by killing the weak. He coined the term “eugenics” and was the father of the modern eugenics movement where Darwinian evolution was applied to human populations.

Eugenics is the idea that selective breeding for desired heritable characteristics could improve future generations of humans. This was popular in the early 20th century, but later it was debunked. The Nazis used eugenics to support the extermination of entire races.

Havelock Ellis, 1859-1939

Francis Galton mentored Havelock Ellis who was an English equivalent of Alfred Kinsey.  Ellis studied the psychology of sex. He claimed that the most important aspect of sexuality was not human reproduction but the exploration of the innate soul. Ellis was a eugenicist and a sexual deviant. He promoted these ideas evangelistically and influenced many other radicals. The purpose behind this was to overturn western civilization – no gods, no masters. By this time Marxism had been discredited as a political movement. But the notion behind Marxism of replacing the old Christendom was something fresh and new and very much alive. And now instead of economics and politics it’s being driven by human sexuality, morality and the transformation of the family.

Emma Goldman, 1869-1940

Emma Goldman was a famous anarchist who established Mother Earth magazine in 1906. She became very influential because she came to the USA and began to mentor a group of Greenwich Village radicals. A part of her vision was that if you are going to change the culture you’ve got to approach it culturally.

Margaret Sanger, 1879-1966

Havelock Ellis was the main political and sexual influence and mentor to Margaret Sanger.

Between 1912-14 in Greenwich Village Margaret Sanger and group of revolutionary leftists would gather in an apartment to host speakers (anarchists, communists, members of the Socialist Party and the New York Labor movement) and discuss leftist revolutionary tactics. Margaret Sanger would gather here with her friends Emma Goldman and the communist Bill Haywood and Roger Baldwin the cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union. The secular moral revolutionaries were carefully planning the culture of death that we see unfolding in the 21 century. Much of what is plaguing the American family and the social fabric in America today happened and started in Greenwich Village New York at this time.

When Margaret Sanger was radicalized she started to write pamphlets that ran afoul of the Post Master General’s anti-obscenity laws to protect the mail. Her first magazine was titled “Woman rebel”, with the slogan “No gods no masters” [atheist, anarchist]. She advocated birth control “to create a race of thoroughbreds”. She was arrested. So she fled to England. In England she planned how to push forward the revolution by freeing the libido. Freeing women from the consequences of that libido by birth control.

When she returned to USA she decided to take action when in 1916 she founded the first illegal birth control clinic in Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. This is when Sanger put her ideas into practice. But why start in Brownsville? It was a poverty-stricken neighborhood largely comprised of immigrants – black, Slaves, Italians and Jews. The specific people that Sanger defined as unfit to reproduce. Those who she thought were a threat to the gene pool. She was seeking to create the perfect human race. It was here that it all started. Then she launched the publication that would guide her ideology for the next 20 years. It was called “The birth control review”. She invited her eugenicist friends from around the world, some of them serving Hitler’s third Reich, to publish articles on eugenics in her magazine. So she coined the term “birth control” and set the stage for the deeply racist eugenic ideology that resulted in the billion-dollar organization today known as Planned Parenthood (see Appendix).

In 1917 Sanger published the first “Birth Control Review” magazine. In 1925 the American birth control league hosted their neo-Malthusian birth control conference in New York. They planned to bring the eugenics ideology on to the world stage. However, in the 1920s their ideas were not popular.

Her next project was the application of all her Darwinian ideas in “the negro project”. She wanted to eliminate from the USA the unfit including backs and those who were defective and had disabilities. This project was a manipulative attempt to get blacks to cooperate in their own elimination. And tragically that operation was largely successful. Its genocidal intentions were carefully camouflaged beneath several layers of condescending service rhetoric and organizational expertise. This revolution assumed that Darwin was right. It was based on his slogan, “survival of the fittest” – the strong will survive while the weak will die.

This revolution and culture of death spread across the world. And eugenics was responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions of innocent human beings in the 20^th century alone. Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao se Dong, and Margaret Sanger would shed more innocent blood in the 20^th century alone than all the murderers, tyrants and warlords of human history in all the years before 1900 combined. This is what we mean by the culture of death.

Sanger endorsed the 1927 Buck v Bell decision, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that states could forcibly sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent. Over 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized in 1927-1937. Sanger said that “Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house built upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit”.

Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenicist totalitarian revolutionary who hated anyone who had “bad genes” who was unfit to reproduce. She opened the first birth control clinic in 1916. She thought that “the greatest sin in the world was brining children into the world that have disease from their parents and have no chance in the world to be a human being practically, delinquents, prisoners and all sorts of things just marked when they’re born”.

One Marxist concept in particular resonated with Sanger, “Moral people tend to be immune to revolutionary thoughts. Therefore, society will only change if sexual and social mores (customs) are destroyed. The social revolution must begin with a sexual revolution”. This is a revolution without guns. She blazed a trail where none existed. Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner (founder of Playboy magazine) followed this trail.

Her intentional attack and assault on the family in USA explains our current culture of death and upside-down world we are living in today.

Maddison Grant, 1865-1937

In 1916 Maddison Grant wrote “The passing of the great race”. Adolf Hitler called this book his bible. Grant was the founder of the American Eugenics Society. He was a radical politician. The American Eugenics Society shared offices with the American Birth Control League when it formed in 1921.

Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) and Nazi Germany

In 1920 Lothrop Stoddard published “The rising tide of color against white world supremacy”. This was a horrific eugenic screed. He did a PhD at Harvard University on “Shall the negro be encouraged to seek culture equality? – Has the negro the same intellectual possibilities as other races?” And he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And in 1921 he was a founding member of the American Birth Control League. At this time Margaret Sanger was the President of the League. This was later renamed Planned Parenthood.

In 1920 two German Jewish scholars Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche wrote “Allowing the destruction of life unworthy of life – Its measure and form”. This was a moral justification for the slaughter of the undesirable masses.

The Nazi party chief racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg used the word “under-man” from Stoddard’s book “The revolt against civilization – The menace of the under man”. The “under-man” were those of the population who were unfit. And Stoddard met with Hitler in Germany in 1939. Stoddard’s two books become the blueprint for Hitler’s “final solution”. The Nazi’s got the word “sub-human” from Stoddard’s book and from Binding and Hoche, who were in communication with Stoddard. They used the term “sub-human” to refer to the Jews.

In 1934 in a book “The racial elements of European history” a German race anthropologist Hans Gunter refers to Stoddard and Madison Grant as the spiritual fathers of Nazi Germany.

Leon Whitney of the American Eugenics Society wrote an article for Sanger called “Selective sterilization” praising the Third Reich’s pre-holocaust purification program. He said that Adolf Hitler was “one of the greatest statesmen and social planners in the world”. He believed that it was important for the government to step in and mandate selective sterilization as a birth control measure enforced on the human weeds – those undesirable peoples. Whitney said “while we were pussy-footing around, reluctant to admit even that insanity of certain sorts that runs in families, the Germans were calling a spade a spade”.

Grant, Stoddard and Whitney wrote articles for Sanger’s magazine the “Birth Control Review”. This guided her ideological foundation for the next 30 years. And they were speakers at her first big eugenics conference in New York. She called this a “Neo-Malthusian and birth control conference”. Sanger had already been attending eugenics conferences including the second one in 1921.

The international federation of eugenics organizations was led by Ernest Rudin who was a personal adviser to Margaret Sanger and a guest writer for her magazine. One of his articles was “Eugenic sterilization: An urgent need”. He designed Hitler’s euthanasia program which eliminated many “defectives”- people with disabilities and gypsies and eventually morphed into the final solution. He had an early role in organizing the Nazi society for racial hygiene.

Hitler and Sanger were both operating off the same eugenic beliefs that the unfit and the undesirable do not have the right to live. Today Hitler and Nazi Germany are universally hated and condemned for their genocide against the Jews and other minorities in the 1930s and 1940s. Sanger and Planned Parenthood have been responsible for the genocide of tens of millions of the most vulnerable and marginalized people group in the world; unborn children. Two genocides both the result of the same bad ideas and the same movement that has resulted in such deadly consequences and countless victims.

But one of these genocides continues today, while the other one ended because good people did the right thing. Nazi concentration camps show what happens when bad ideas are taken to their logical conclusion. Evil has no limiting principles. If evil declares someone to be unfit or undesirable, then who’s to say who shall live and who shall die? Adolf Hitler was reported as saying, “Now that we know the laws of heredity it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world”. And then he said, “I had studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning the prevention of reproduction of people whose progeny would in all likelihood be of no value or be injurious to the racial stack”. He was reading the writings of the American eugenicists mentioned above.

Thankfully evil did not go wholly unchecked inside Nazi Germany. And today many people are aware of the brave stories of Corrie ten Boom hiding Jews and Oscar Schindler’s saving of Jews and the bold leadership of Deitrich Bonhoffer who was hung naked for his resistance against the Third Reich.

Alfred Kinsey, 1894-1956

Alfred Kinsey was the father of the sexual revolution. Through a process of sexual abuse, child pornography, rape, and immoral sexual acts he claimed to establish that there is a separation between the body and the soul (or the true identity). This was a bizarre cultic Gnosticism that leads eventually to the gender revolution.

He treated sex as just a physiological response. The moral dimension and spiritual dimension and the social dimension, marriage and family, love and commitment – none of that mattered. Because of that it was the same no matter what context it was in. Whether it was marriage. Whether it was prostitution. Whether it was two men or two women. Whether it was adult and child. Whether it was human and animal. The physiological response is the same. Therefore, for him all sexual outlets are the same. By the way, that is where “Love is love” comes from. This is the slogan of the sexual rights movement.

Mary Calderone, 1904-1998

In 1964 the medical director of Planned Parenthood, Mary Calderone, left Planned Parenthood to establish the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). This was funded by Hugh Hefner (of Playboy fame). It led to radical pornographic sex education in public schools. This is driven by and became a revenue stream for Planned Parenthood.

Kinsey was part of the movement to say that children are sexual beings and therefore they have the right to sexual expression. Mary Calderone popularized the phrase “all children are sexual” and therefore we need to treat them as sexual beings from the beginning. What that meant for her was to give them explicit sexual education. She thought that sexuality would be the means of producing “the new man”. Today we might say transhumanism. She also believed that if we could liberate people from their sexual hangups and constraints and any moral guardrails that we would create “the new man” who would be the next stage of evolution.

Gnosticism

Christians tend to try to make arguments for individual issues like abortion and sex education. The trouble is that they are not effective when they are divided up like that. There is an underlying world view under all of the secular issues that we are facing. And if we master that world view it becomes much easier. There is no major secular bioethicist today who denies that life begins at conception. So how do they get around that to support abortion? Well they say that the fetus is human but not a person. And then personhood is defined in terms of mental ability. They don’t call it a person until its earned the right to personhood in the sense of acquiring a certain level of cognitive functioning and self-awareness. When does that happen? Notice how fundamental this is. Being human is no longer enough for human rights – because they acknowledge that the fetus is human. But still don’t acknowledge that it has human rights.

And that’s why people are calling it Gnosticism. The early church faced Gnosticism. Some books of the New Testament were written against Gnosticism. They denigrated the body as the prison of the soul. Today we see that Gnosticism most clearly in the transgender movement. Transgender activists argue explicitly that your gender identity has nothing to do with your biological sex (or your body). Here’s the logic, if a body is the product of blind purposeless material forces, then they have no intrinsic purpose that we are morally obligated to respect. They give no clue to identity. They have no moral message. So we do with them as we see fit. In her article on “The woman rebel”, Margaret Sanger’s motto was “No gods, no masters”.

But what does the Bible say? The world was created for a purpose. It’s evident by observation that living structures are created for a purpose. That eyes are for seeing. That ears are for hearing. Wings are for flying and fins are for swimming. In fact, the development of the whole organism is driven by an inbuilt plan or blueprint – the DNA code. So, science is on our side. It tells us that we were created for a purpose. That there is a plan, an order, a design. What Christians are saying is that if we live in harmony with that plan we will be happier and healthier.

Discussion

Abortion is an abomination to God. Some ancient societies offered children to pagan gods (Lev. 20:1-5). The greatness of a nation is how it treats its most vulnerable, which includes infants and the elderly. In this article we have looked at how the unborn can suffer abortion. Today we also see that the elderly can suffer euthanasia.

We don’t obey governments blindly. But we obey government with our Bible open and our heads and our hearts aware of what God has told us through His word. In law silence equals consent. And I believe that God is pushing us to the point where people are given the choice of speaking up or not. We are in a spiritual war (2 Cor. 10:3-5). Paul confronted his enemies with the truths of the Bible. God’s purpose is that the local church confronts the enemy with the Bible as its weapon. God’s truth can defeat the schemes of mankind. We can take human philosophies captive by God’s power.

The sons of Issachar understood the times they lived in, so they “knew what Israel should do” (1 Chr. 12:32). With an understanding of the times you live in comes a responsibility and duty to act in accordance with what you know. To push back against evil. To stand for righteousness against the silent but more deadly holocaust of abortion. Let’s build Christian resistance. It’s time to wake up. Every human being is a person and every person has the right to be born.

Your eyes have now been opened to a sinister evil wicked master plan spanning decades. This cultural revolution has swept across the western world. If not you, who? If not now, when?

Conclusion

There are historical links between Darwinian evolution, eugenics, racism, the sexual revolution, birth control, abortion, Nazi Germany, and transgenderism in the cultural revolution in western society. It is a pro-death culture that has largely replaced the pro-life Christian culture.

Abortion comes from the sexual revolution, which is part of the Socialist cultural revolution that undermines families and societies. Instead, let’s protect babies, rebuild the family and change the culture.

Appendix: Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood is:
– The largest abortion provider in the world. Their homepage says, “Need an abortion? We’re here to help.”
– The second largest provider of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for America’s gender confused youth, and
– The largest provider of the pornographic comprehensive obscene sexuality education in America’s Public Schools that’s bringing a lot of angry parents to school board meetings.

Acknowledgement

This article comes from  Seth Gruber who researched this topic in a documentary, The 1916 project.

Posted, January 2025