Political support was also growing outside the South. The motivation for
this can be seen in the different attitudes toward birth control held by
the two Roosevelts (distant cousins) who have been President. In 1905
Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive Republican, alarmed feminists by
blasting birth control as "criminal against the race." Almost exactly
forty years later, in March of 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, a liberal
Democrat, expressed a far different view, though one with the same goal
in mind. The historian Christopher Thorne described it this way:
Subjects to do with breeding and race seem, indeed, to
have held a certain fascination for the President...
Roosevelt felt it in order to talk, jokingly, of dealing
with Puerto Rico's excessive birth rate by employing,
in his own words, "the methods which Hitler used
effectively." He said to Charles Taussig and William
Hassett, as the former recorded it, "that it is all very
simple and painless. You have people pass through a
narrow passage and then there is a brrrrr of an electrical
apparatus. They stay there for twenty seconds and from
then on they are sterile."[29]
full: http://www.ewtn.com/library/prolife/pphistry.txt
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