The 1916 Project

Not Rated • Daily Wire

Margaret Sanger opened her first birth control center in 1916. It was located in the Brooklyn community of Brownsville, an impoverished neighborhood where many immigrants lived. Starting there, “the mother of the abortion movement”—an ironic turn of phrase—helped usher in a culture that regards ending a preborn child’s life as a woman’s basic right. The 1916 Project is a 75-minute documentary that tries to explain how Sanger’s influence helped create our sexually decadent, gender-confused society.

The film (not to be confused with the left-leaning 1619 Project) consists of interviews, monologues, and conversations. Seth Gruber, founder of an organization called The White Rose Resistance, and author and pastor (and WORLD contributor) George Grant stand in front of a row of chalkboards discussing how abortion progressed from 200-year-old theories about overpopulation to the widespread modern-day practice of “child sacrifice.” At least 65 million little girls and boys have been aborted in the U.S. since 1973.

The film presents excerpts from the writings of Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin, Havelock Ellis, and others in between and beyond, including sexologist Alfred Kinsey. In 1798, Malthus predicted Earth’s population would eventually exhaust the planet’s resources. Darwin likened people to animals, and his cousin Francis Galton founded the eugenics movement. It was Sanger who began mobilizing intellectuals, clergy, and medical professionals to apply eugenics. Sanger’s associates included numerous racists, eugenicists, and Nazis, and the film documents how the writings of Sanger and her friends inspired German Nazis to formulate their genocidal plans. The film also shows how Sanger’s barely disguised goal to “exterminate the Negro population” still infects some modern liberal institutions that claim to advocate for American blacks.

The worldview that devalues preborn babies’ lives produces a commoditization of all children. The 1916 Project examines Kinsey’s disturbing mid-20th century pseudo-research involving adult men sexually assaulting children. “Biologically, there is no form of [sexual] outlet which I will admit as abnormal,” Kinsey wrote. The film reports the so-called outlets Kinsey advocated included pedophilia, rape, bestiality, and homosexuality. Are Kinsey’s theories a thing of the past? Salon magazine published an article in 2013 titled “Children are sexual creatures.” Marketing gurus today have kept Kinsey’s message alive but whitewashed it: “Love is love.”

One small disappointment: The film starts off connecting the dots from abortion to transgender rights, which is a relatively new development and needs public airing, but then settles into reviewing the familiar abortion history that many pro-life productions have addressed before. (For an exhaustive study, see Angela Franks’ authoritative Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy.)

The 1916 Project ends with the inspirational story of Hans and Sophie Scholl, founders of the original White Rose group. They were young German Christians guillotined in 1943 for exposing Nazi crimes. As interviewee Eric Metaxas says, “God expects believers to stand against the madness.”