There has been a firestorm in the press recently regarding Planned Parenthood. According to Politifact, “Controversial videos released by an anti-abortion group have highlighted the murky guidelines for using fetal tissue for research purposes” saying further that “the Center for Medical Progress, has accused Planned Parenthood of selling aborted fetuses for a profit, a charge Planned Parenthood has denied”. The ensuing investigations have made certain quarters pretty nervous. Consider this headline from ThinkProgress that appeared on July 15th: “No, Planned Parenthood Isn’t Selling Aborted Baby Parts”.

Controversy has followed Planned Parenthood throughout its history. According to Wikipedia, “The origins of Planned Parenthood date to October 16, 1916, when Margaret Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York.” I attended public school in New York and was taught that Margaret Sanger was a civil rights activist who campaigned for women’s rights. It wasn’t until much later that I learned, with apologies to Paul Harvey, “the rest of the story”.

As Wikipedia notes, Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. Eugenics is an insidious form of racism - a social philosophy popular in the US in the early part of the 20th century and eventually adopted by the Nazis to promote their notion of the “master race”. The Nazi association is what panicked the Birth Control League into changing its image… and its name to Planned Parenthood.

Modern eugenics was developed by Frances Galton - a half-cousin of Charles Darwin - and advocated that “unfit” and “inferior” human beings should not be allowed to reproduce. It is a philosophy that has been used to justify atrocities and crimes against humanity. According to Sanger, “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.” In 1919, in an article called Birth Control and Racial Betterment, Sanger wrote, “Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.”

If that doesn’t give you pause, how about this excerpt from one of Sanger’s letters regarding her launch of the so-called “Negro Project” in 1939: “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

There are some that say that this quote has been taken out of context. However, there’s more. Sanger had numerous speaking engagements with the Ku Klux Klan and she courted their favor. Sanger appointed Lothrop Stoddard to the Board of the Birth Control League, the author of “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy”. That’s right, Stoddard was a white supremacist.

Here’s another quote from Sanger, “Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks— those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization”. Had enough?

Presidential candidate, former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, recently weighed in on the Planned Parenthood controversy. Said Carson, “I’m not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood. But you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people.” Adding, “And one of the reasons that you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a way to control that population.”

Writing for the Black Education Television website in April of 2013, Kellee Terrell wrote a commentary entitled, “Why Are Black Abortion Rates So High?” An interesting question coming from someone who is decidedly “pro-choice”. Writes Terrell, “A recent study about national abortion rates and African-American female teens has stirred a huge debate. According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion rates among Black women are much higher than we thought: They are four times the rate of white women…while Black women account for 13 percent of the female population, they accounted for 30 percent of all abortions”. Adding, “Yes, these high rates of abortion are alarming”. Interesting comment coming from a “pro-choicer”.

Then there’s an article that was published in the Washington Post a week after Terrell’s appeared on the BET website, entitled “Planned Parenthood Defending Infanticide”, where columnist Marc Thiessen reports, “Testifying against a Florida bill that would require abortionists to provide emergency medical care to an infant who survives an abortion, Planned Parenthood lobbyist Alisa LaPolt Snow was asked point blank: ‘If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?’ She replied: ‘We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician.’ “

“Jaws in the committee room dropped. Asked again, she repeated her answer.”

Thiessen goes on to report that “only after a firestorm erupted in the conservative media” did Planned Parenthood issue a clarifying statement to the effect that they would “provide appropriate care”. Thiessen then asks, “But if Planned Parenthood really does provide such care, why was it lobbying against a bill requiring such care in the first place?”
Finally, there’s the paper published in 2012 by Francesca Minerva and Alberto Giubilini two “ethicists” from Melbourne, Australia. As reported in the Washington Post, they make the case for what they call “after birth abortion”. In the article’s headline, reporter Mary C. Curtis asks, “Can they be serious?” Apparently they are. Curtis quotes Minerva and Giubilini, “We claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be”.  Really.

After the public outrage that ensued, the “ethicists” published a clarifying letter that said, “…however, we never meant to suggest that after-birth abortion should become legal. This was not made clear enough in the paper…we are not policy makers, we are philosophers, and we deal with concepts, not with legal policy”. Philosophers.

I hope you’re as relieved as I am that they’ve cleared that up. They’re philosophers who advocate “after birth abortion”. As Marc Thiessen might be quick to point out, another term for “after birth abortion” would be infanticide. So, here’s one more quote from Margaret Sanger, from her work Woman and the New Race, “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it”.

For the record, that’s another quote that Sanger’s defenders say is taken out of context. However, I can’t get my mind around it, but I’ll end with something that might provide some context. According to NPR, Planned Parenthood has an annual budget of $1.3 Billion, of which $528 Million or 40% comes from the government - in other words, the taxpayer.