CITIZEN: Planned Parenthood attempts to distance itself from racist and eugenic roots . . . but disproportionately eliminates minorities

July/August 2021 Issue

After decades of denial, Planned Parenthood (America’s largest abortion provider) is admitting that its founder, Margaret Sanger, was a white supremacist and eugenics advocate.

In a New York Times Op-Ed on April 17, 2021, the head of Planned Parenthood admits the following about the organization’s founding and founder:

“Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan at a rally in New Jersey to generate support for birth control.”

“[S]he 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.”

Planned Parenthood has a long way to go, if they desire to change course from the harm they admit causing “generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people.”

Planned Parenthood is still on the same course — Black babies account for nearly 36 percent of abortions in the U.S…. despite only making up 13 percent of the population.

On top of those troubling numbers, consider that Planned Parenthood is currently fighting against anti-eugenic laws in multiple states and media reports recently exposing Planned Parenthood employees as suffering a racist work environment.

If Planned Parenthood truly wants to put a stop to its institutional dehumanization of those with “undesirable” traits, they should start by immediately dropping legal challenges to state laws, like Kentucky’s, which prohibit the use of abortion to target an unborn child on the basis of the child’s sex, race, color, national origin, or disability.

Eliminating a life or preventing people with certain “undesirable” traits from reproducing is the very definition of eugenics, a discredited “science” that directly resulted in the Holocaust’s slaughter of millions of Jews (along with others) and continues to contribute to the estimated 62+ million unborn lives ended since Roe v. Wade discovered a constitutional “right” to abortion in 1973.

Critics cast doubt on Planned Parenthood’s authenticity in decrying the overt racism of its founder, pointing out that it simultaneously advocates for the legal right to perform abortions motivated by the child’s sex, race, color, national origin, or disability.

Eugenics and abortion—their history in the United States is long and inseparable (see above).

Add new technology and it is easier than ever to use abortion as a tool to facilitate what Margaret Sanger described as the “process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.” Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider.

That’s why Kentucky and other states enacted prenatal nondiscrimination acts, which prohibit someone from knowingly aborting an unborn child because of a characteristic.

Kentucky’s Human Rights of the Unborn Child and Anti-Discrimination Act, enacted in 2019, prohibits abortion on the basis of an unborn child’s sex, race, color, national origin, or diagnosis (or potential diagnosis) of a disability.

“Surely America’s largest abortion provider can’t expect us to take it seriously when it seeks to disavow its founding and legacy of racism in one breath, then advocates for the right to kill a preborn child because of the baby’s skin color or other characteristics in the next breath,” explained Michael Johnson, policy analyst for The Family Foundation.

PRENATAL NONDISCRIMINATION ACTS

— Down Syndrome Diagnosis —
Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah

— Genetic or Chromosomal Abnormality —
Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Oklahoma.

— Race —
Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.

— Biological Sex —
Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and South Dakota.

 

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Kentucky Citizen publication.

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