November 12, 1991
The president of New York City’s Planned Parenthood, Alexander Sanger, grandson of the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, spoke in the Villard Room in recognition of the 75th anniversary of the birth control movement in the United States on “Is Access To Birth Control Rights Unraveling?” Fifteen Poughkeepsie residents picketed Main Gate, protesting the presence of a pro-choice speaker on campus. “The American people have a great deal of common sense and want to protect women’s reproductive freedom,” commented Sanger about the protestors. “These people are here to restrict and censor that freedom.”
The Miscellany News
In the summer of 1926 Sanger’s grandmother participated by means of a radio address called “Racial Betterment” in the first Euthenics Institute at Vassar, creating a stir when she praised attempts to “close our gates to the so-called ‘undesirables’” and proposed efforts to “discourage or cut down on the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable at home,” by government-subsidized voluntary sterilization. Esther Katz, ed., The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, vol. 1 (2003)