Margert Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, is evil. She is obviously evil. Her worldview means only those deemed strong and healthy have the privilege to exist, and everyone else is an obstacle for civilization’s advancement. Charity for the poor is cruel, Sanger said, because feeding them only means they will breed more. People should be banned from having babies.
While couching her metastatic views in nice terms and talk of advancing society, Sanger and others in the eugenics movement were so blinded by ideology that their ideas turned into a homicidal menace that devastated civilization. No amount of good intentions can excuse the reality of so many lives taken in service of advancing civilization.
In the past, Planned Parenthood tried to white-wash her problematic legacy. However, with the general direction of politics these days, Sanger’s history has become too problematic even for them. And so in recent years, Planned Parenthood has moved to distance itself from Sanger.
On Saturday, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson wrote an article in the New York Times begrudgingly criticizing Sanger:
Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan at a rally in New Jersey to generate support for birth control. And even though she eventually distanced herself from the eugenics movement because of its hard turn to explicit racism, she endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1927 decision in Buck v. Bell, which allowed states to sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge—a ruling that led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of people in the 20th century.
The first human trials of the birth control pill—a project that was Sanger’s passion later in her life—were conducted with her backing in Puerto Rico, where as many as 1,500 women were not told that the drug was experimental or that they might experience dangerous side effects.
While that’s good, the fact remains that Planned Parenthood HAS KILLED MILLIONS OF BABIES, and they still call it good. These days, they want women to “shout” their abortion stories. Ironically, Planned Parenthood used to work hard to not conflate abortion with birth control. In a brochure, they once said abortion “kills the life of a baby after it has begun. It is dangerous to your life and health.” That changed when Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher (also vice-president of the American Eugenics Society) moved them officially into providing abortions in 1970. Even Guttmacher expressed hesitancy at embracing abortion-on-demand for any reason.
Abortion supporters may be tempted to believe that dropping eugenics and supporting abortion now is evidence of Planned Parenthood’s moral evolution. However, they continue serving Sanger’s cause more than ever today.
Since 1973, there have been more Black abortions than every other cause of death combined in the Black community. According to numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and the Guttmacher Institute, there have been more than 13 million Black deaths of all causes since 1973, versus an estimated 20 million Black abortions.. Even if you attributed every death in the Black community to some overt or covert act of racism, it doesn’t come close to the number of abortions. Planned Parenthood is well aware of those statistics, but never talks about it.
Sanger believed the poor were genetically flawed and doomed to eternal immorality. Today, academics argue abortion helped reduce the crime rate by eliminating poor people, who are more likely to commit crimes. There’s a certain malevolent logic to that claim: criminals can’t commit crimes if you kill them in childhood.
Sex-selection abortions are the cause of millions of missing women around the globe. Planned Parenthood can’t condemn it, because one of their core values is never questioning any reason for any abortion at any point in pregnancy.
Abortion does more to advance the cause of eugenics today than actual explicit pro-eugenics materials. Media outlets speak about countries exterminating people with Down syndrome as if it’s a public health advance.
Want to see an otherwise sane and calm person who speaks so eloquently about marginalized people degenerate into a seething fury? Start talking about the human value of disabled babies in the context of the abortion issue. Their basic argument often becomes, “how dare you force a parent to care for a baby whose life isn’t worth living anyway!”
A life not worth living? It’s the same guiding principle behind Sanger’s push for eugenics in the early 20th century, that culminated in Germany’s eugenics and euthanasia programs in the 1930s: Lebensunwertes Leben, literally meaning life unworthy of life. It’s the same guiding principle today for far too many doctors and genetics counselors when the ultrasound reveals a potentially bad diagnosis today, or euthanasia activists when talking about the sick and disabled.
A culture that lectures people on an hourly basis about equity, fairness, ageism, ableism, and all sorts of other “isms” remains utterly blind to the reality that every day, thousands of babies have their lives cruelly and violently taken from them, many simply because they have a disability or are deemed not worth allowing to live—because they’ll grow up poor in an inner city. It takes a lot of intellectual pride to be able to declare whether or not someone else’s life is worth living or not.
Perhaps today’s young abortion advocates don’t want to part of a movement birthed by a lady who gave educational talks to the Ku Klux Klan or argued that people with mental handicaps should be forcibly sterilized. That’s understandable. Yet, they are still blithely carrying out Margaret Sanger’s legacy today.
Hiding behind the words “reproductive choice” are programs to exterminate the disabled from the face of the earth. Hiding behind “autonomy for black and indigenous people of color” are practices that take more BIPOC lives than cancer. Hiding behind “compassionate healthcare” are violent practices that involve poisoning or ripping limbs off millions of human beings.
Like everyone perpetrating gross injustices in history, the victims are dehumanized to justify taking everything away from them. Babies with fully formed bodies become just worthless “clumps of tissue”—even as they claim their functioning organs are so needed for medical research.
It’s good Planned Parenthood is willing to question their past. However, those words are pathetically empty until they question the violence perpetrated every day in their facilities to advance Margaret Sanger’s mission of getting rid of society’s “biological and racial mistakes.”
No human being is ever a mistake.