Motherhood Quote by Margaret Sanger

A promise dressed up as biology: if motherhood is chosen, the future gets “better.” Sanger’s line works because it flatters individual desire while smuggling in a collective program. “Deep yearning” sounds tender, intimate, almost spiritual. Against it she sets “ignorance or accident,” a bracingly moral contrast that turns unplanned pregnancy into a civic problem. The pivot is “its children”: once reproduction is framed as intentional, children become not just family members but raw material for social redesign.

The phrase “foundation of a new race” reveals the real engine under the sentimentality. It’s not only about women’s autonomy; it’s about population management, a Progressive Era faith that modern tools can perfect society. “New race” doesn’t have to be read as literal white-supremacist fantasy to land with eugenic charge in Sanger’s context, when “race” often functioned as a catchall for national stock, fitness, and inheritance. The subtext is triage: some births are implicitly welcome, others are treated as preventable mistakes.

Historically, Sanger was building a public argument for birth control at a time when contraception was criminalized and poverty was routinely pathologized. To win, she fused liberation rhetoric with the era’s obsession with efficiency and improvement. That’s why the sentence has a double aftertaste today. It can be read as a defense of reproductive choice, yet it also suggests that choice is valuable mainly because it produces socially approved children. The line’s power is its sleight of hand: a private “yearning” becomes permission to imagine, and police, a redesigned society.