During his awful confirmation process, Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito Jr. was portrayed as everything from “anti-woman” to a racial bigot.

Of course, behind all of this were not Alito’s qualifications or fitness but the issue of abortion. Pro-abortion democrats fear that Alito — a pro-life Catholic — will push the Supreme Court in a direction that will begin chipping away at Roe v. Wade. The most intense opposition to Alito came from Planned Parenthood supporters — feminist groups, abortion-clinic workers, and certain U.S. senators. One could boil down this battle to a case of Alito vs. Planned Parenthood.

Such a case, however, could not exclude Margaret Sanger from the courtroom. A cross-examination of Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and an icon to abortion-rights advocates, offers an interesting contrast to Alito.

First, consider Sanger on abortion.

It will shock people, both pro-abortion and pro-life, to learn that the founder of Planned Parenthood publicly denounced abortion in the strongest terms. “It [abortion] is an alternative that I cannot too strongly condemn,” wrote Sanger in a piece titled, “The Pope’s Position on Birth Control,” in the Jan. 27, 1932 edition of The Nation (page 103), “the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious. … [S]ome ill-informed persons have the notion that when we speak of birth control we include abortion as a method. We certainly do not.”

Margaret Sanger said this? Why?

The answer is simple: For a very long time, abortion was widely viewed as beyond the pale. Even if Sanger privately favored legalized abortion, she knew better than to say so publicly. Anyone who admitted supporting something so hideous would have been seen as a monster. The fact is that the broad acceptance of abortion by so many Americans today is a completely contemporary phenomenon. When pro-abortion politicians likes Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., portray judges like Alito as extremist because they are pro-life, they seem to have no idea that they themselves are taking an extreme position, certainly historically speaking.

So, if Sanger wasn’t preaching legalized abortion, what was her goal?

The answer is not pretty.

Margaret Sanger wanted women to have the right to birth control, and for peculiar reasons. In her zeal to promote birth control, Sanger was at odds with Rome, and was not shy in saying so. Pope Pius XI, complained Sanger in her 1932 article, “instructs the faithful how to regulate their conjugal life without the benefit of science and according to theories written by St. Augustine, also a bachelor, who died 15 centuries ago.” Sanger picked apart — very condescendingly — Pius XI’s encyclical letter “Of Chaste Marriage.” She affirmed: “My own position is that the Catholic doctrine [on birth control] is illogical, not in accord with science and definitely against social welfare and race improvement.”

Ah, yes: “race improvement.” This was a central reason why Sanger supported birth control, and it is quite instructive, especially in light of the reckless allegation that Samuel Alito is a bigot.

Birth control was advantageous for society at-large, lectured Sanger, because it could racially refine America by eliminating lesser people. Sanger posed a question to the Pope: “Assuming that God does want an increasing number of worshipers of the Catholic faith, does he also want an increasing number of feeble-minded, insane, criminal, and diseased worshipers?” Without birth control, Sanger believed, that is what the Pope would get: the birth of more undesirables — mentally and physically — who would only pollute the race.

Of course, added Sanger, the Pope could not possibly know any of this. He simply sat there issuing pronouncements from “a tower set in splendor, surrounded by walls that shut out the world of broken homes, of sick and sorrow-laden mothers, poverty-stricken fathers, and pathetic, unwanted children. In that remote tower he sits comfortably, takes counsel from a pile of old books and from bachelor advisers, and then writes scolding sermons about the marriage problems of intelligent people. I wish he could come down into real life for a few weeks.”

What is frightening is the number of abortion proponents — the very people opposing Judge Alito today — who still advance this same sick line of reasoning. I get e-mails from them all the time (and will again as a result of this article).

Sanger ended her 1932 piece with these words: “The birth-control movement grows in strength and wisdom despite religious objections. … No philanthropic cause today offers the benefactor a finer opportunity for service which will at the same time relieve individual suffering, promote social welfare and tend to improve the race in America.”

Modern Democrats, who are usually vigilant in attacking racial prejudice, ought to be appalled at Sanger’s objectives. Yet, Sanger’s very candid goals have been sucked into a black hole, never to be mentioned at the editorial offices of The New York Times.

It is a surreal world when those at the highest levels of the U.S. government imply that someone like Samuel Alito is a heartless bigot while a group like Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood is granted the moral high ground.

Today’s proponents of legal abortion would be well served to take a close look at the thinking of their heroine before casting aspersions on others.

Paul Kengor is author of

God and Ronald Reagan.