Some fascinating tidbits from an ancient interview Mike Wallace had with Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood...  Pretty radical stuff for the late 1950s... yet the truth is that her views have seemed to prevail among much of American culture and thinking and the "traditional" views on birth control, abortion, divorce, etc., have become rather radical...  You can read or listen to the whole thing here.

SANGER: ...and -- I naturally didn't want to see women take all the suffering of child-bearing and of pregnancies. 

WALLACE: Well let's look at the official Catholic position...opposition to Birth-Control. I read now from a church publication called "The Question Box" in forbidding Birth Control it says the following: It says the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children, when the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible--that is by Birth Control--it is used unethically and unnaturally. Now what's wrong with that position?

SANGER: Well, it's very wrong, it's not normal it's -- it has the wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.

WALLACE: Well the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. Do you disagree with that?

SANGER: I disagree with that a hundred percent.

WALLACE: Your feeling is what then?

SANGER: My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It's secondary. 

WALLACE: Mrs. Sanger, published in Red Book Magazine, in March of 1956.It says "Birth Control is a devastating social force, which tends to weaken the moral fibre of the community. Immunity from parenthood encourages promiscuity, particularly when unmarried persons can so easily avail themselves of the devices." Do you doubt that?

SANGER: I doubt it.

WALLACE: You do…--what do you mean by the smudginess connected with sex and why do you blame it on Christianity?

SANGER: Well, there's many reasons of course -- if we had more records of it to go on with Christianity and I think I was speaking of Havelock Ellis as having clarified the question of homosexuals...making the thing a --not exactly a perverted thing, but a thing that a person is born with different kinds of eyes, different kinds of structures and so forth...that he didn't make all homosexuals perverts--and I thought he helped clarify that to the medical profession and to the scientists of the world as perhaps one of the first ones to do that. That was one of things that I meant in that.

WALLACE: Do you believe in sin -- When I say believe I don't mean believe in committing sin do you believe there is such a thing as a sin?

SANGER: I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world--that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin -- that people can -- can commit..

WALLACE: Do you believe infidelity is a sin?

SANGER: Well, I'm not going to specify what I think is a sin. I stated what I think is the worst sin.

WALLACE: Yes, but then you asked me to say what--and I said what and ah--you refuse to answer me?

SANGER: I don't know about infidelity, that has many personalities to it--and what a person's own belief is--you can't, I couldn't generalize on any of those things as being sins.