(Mercator) Women’s influence on humanity cannot be overstated. Somewhat ironically, Margaret Sanger—feminist, birth control pioneer, and founder of the entity that became Planned Parenthood—preached this very thing.
In her book, The Pivot of Civilization, Margaret Sanger says women occupy the “supreme position in civilization.” She says women must come to realize their “inalienable, supreme, pivotal power” and then exercise it to save the world.
What Sanger is referring to is the power of the woman to create life, or more specifically, not to create life. Sanger does not waste time dwelling on the weighty power of creation. She says that the woman can wield her greatest power by refusing to create life. She says: “Woman’s power can only be expressed and make itself felt when she refuses the task of bringing unwanted children into the world to be exploited in industry and slaughtered in wars.”
What’s best for children
Sanger makes her version of woman power sound noble, and she couches her arguments in what is “best for the children.” But what she is unequivocally saying is that not creating children is superior to creating them. She’s saying that not having children is what’s best for children. She’s saying that preventing the birth of people is better than giving people life and teaching them (or simply allowing them) to live boldly and nobly regardless of their circumstances. Sanger refers repeatedly to “those who should never have been born,” essentially putting herself in the position of deciding that some people should live and others should not.
What most people do not know is that in this same chapter of her book, Sanger promotes contraception on grounds that it can prevent “the crime of abortion.” Yes, at least during this portion of her life and perhaps more broadly, Margaret Sanger—founder of Planned Parenthood—called abortion a “crime.
And yet, the deadly fruits of her philosophy (that not living is better than living) and the empire that was erected upon it, has become an abortion machine that has taken the lives of millions upon millions of people. It now touts abortion not as a crime, but as one of womankind’s most dignified and fiercely pursued “rights.”
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The world-crushing power of women
In a very real way, Margaret Sanger was right. Women’s power is so weighty that it can indeed annihilate the entire world. If women refused to conceive, bear, and attentively raise children, their power would be undeniably manifest. Societies would buckle and collapse in the most fantastic and irreparable manner.
This is precisely what is happening now, as is being noted here, here, and everywhere with increasing alarm. As the populations of nations shrink in consequence of women bearing fewer and fewer children and as the economies of shrinking nations are beginning to list perilously toward collapse, we are witnessing and beginning to understand the true power of women.
So Margaret Sanger was right about one grand thing: Women can stop people from being “exploited in industry and slaughtered in wars” by stopping people from being created at all.
But how tightly would we have to restrict the population of the earth to ensure that no one would ever be exploited or slaughtered? The population now stands above eight billion people. Would a reduction to one billion do the trick? Well, did exploitation and slaughter exist when there were only one billion people on earth? What about 100 million? What about a million? What about 100?
The fact is, there is no stranglehold on the population that could guarantee that no one would ever be exploited or slaughtered. The slaughter of human beings began within one generation of their inception. Adam and Eve had a son and that son killed their other son. So it appears that in order for exploitation and slaughter not to have entered the world, Eve would have had to refuse to have any children at all. Or at least stopped before she had Cain; but how was she to know which one of her children would be the bad apple? To avoid catastrophe, she’d just have to assume they would all be bad apples and refuse to birth any of them.
But if she had refused to birth anyone, we wouldn’t have Beethoven or Gandhi or Elvis or Joan of Arc or Robin Williams or Shakespeare or Socrates or Steve Jobs or Queen Elizabeth II or Da Vinci or Jesus Christ or you or me. And we wouldn’t have any of the things that any of these people contributed to the world.
So it seems that in order for people to exist, there has to be the possibility of evil people existing. If we want Jesus, we have to allow for the possibility of Judas.
God Himself
I suppose God himself could have put a stop to all struggle and hardship and exploitation and war in the world if he would have just declined to create the world and declined to put two people on it who started the whole wretched thing in the first place. But God didn’t decline to create the world—because that’s what a Creator does: He creates. To cease to create would be to cease to be God. God created the world knowing (because if he is omniscient, then he had to have known) that some of the people born in it would be bad. Or rather, they would choose badness, including exploitation, slaughter, and war.
God not only created the world anyway, but he arranged things in such a way that every person ever born is born to a mother. In other words, he positioned women as “the pivot of civilization,” as Sanger puts it. I can only imagine he did so because he believed women would fill that position most nobly.
And by and large, they have. Mothers have, in cooperation with fathers, not only filled the world with people, they have filled it with beauty and goodness and love. Then again, you could also say they have filled it with war, exploitation, and slaughter. I suppose the way you perceive it is key.
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The pivot of civilization
The world’s population is declining now for many reasons. But perhaps a key reason is that large numbers of women have been persuaded to believe two lethal ideas.
First, that the risks involved in having children (they could be disabled, poor, evil, or they might ruin my life and ruin the planet) outweigh the benefits of having children (they might be capable, affluent, noble, enrich my life, and help preserve the earth).
And second, the lethal idea that mothers do not actually occupy the position of greatest power but rather that bearing and raising humanity is a demoralizing, unnecessary position of oppression that amounts to nothing more than “unpaid care work.“
Both of these worldviews permeate global culture, and both are lethal to the core. If one believes, as Margaret Sanger did, that woman’s most noble role is to stop suffering by stopping the creation of human beings, then there is no rational end to that argument other than death—or lack of life—for all people. This is global annihilation in the name of compassion. As for the second point, if mothers believe they are unnecessary to their children and to the survival of the civilized world, then the world will cease to be civilized and will likely cease to exist.
If global annihilation is ever to be reversed, women must re-embrace the great truth that the joys and benefits of life itself outweigh the risks, and that mothers are not subjugated humans, but are the key players—the very “pivot of civilization.”
Editor's note: Kimberly Ells is the author of The Invincible Family. Follow her at Invincible Family Substack. This article was published by Mercator and is reprinted with permission.
