by Frank Holmes, reporter
After decades of defending its racist founder, the nation’s leading abortion provider, Planned Parenthood is throwing founder Margaret Sanger under the bus.
Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on Saturday titled, “I’m the Head of Planned Parenthood. We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder.”
There’s never been any doubt that Margaret Sanger was a wildly racist advocate of eugenics and population control who associated with the Ku Klux Klan and reprinted Nazi propaganda.
Sanger spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Klan in New Jersey in 1926—and, she bragged in her autobiography that the KKK liked her speech so much that she received “a dozen invitations to speak to similar groups.”
It’s no wonder when you consider her views.
She said birth control should be used for the “cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks,” which she called “human weeds.”
She hired black spokespeople to convince other black Americans to get sterilized or take birth control—because, she wrote, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”
Sanger wrote that the government should “give dysgenic groups”—groups she claimed had bad genes—“in our population their choice of segregation or (compulsory) sterilization.” Compulsory sterilization? That’s not exactly pro-choice.
“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need,” she said.
Sanger was so racist that her magazine, Birth Control Review, published an article by Ernst Rudin, who pioneered the Nazis’ campaign to sterilize the minority population, and reprinted a pamphlet Rudin wrote, as well.
“Sanger’s first clinic, opened in 1916, was in Brooklyn in a neighborhood called Brownsville, which was 80 percent to 85 percent Jewish in 1910 and 1920,” Factcheck.org stated.
And she tested early birth control pills on Puerto Rican women, without telling them it was experimental and could cause serious—and potentially deadly—side effects.
Despite the record of her controversial and prejudiced statements, Planned Parenthood spent decades defending its founder.
“Up until now, Planned Parenthood has failed to own the impact of our founder’s actions,” Johnson admitted. Instead, the abortion provider has spent decades “excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate ‘product of her time.’”
And the media swallowed their message hook, line, and sinker.
The self-appointed media gatekeepers said that anyone who criticized Sanger’s anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic, eugenicist views was spreading misinformation.
Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, tweeted a series of “fact-checks” that covered up Planned Parenthood’s racist roots and called Margaret Sanger a pioneer for racial justice.”
Ironically, Snopes quoted an author who linked Sanger’s pro-life critics to “Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen.”
Factcheck.org recycled a Planned Parenthood press release that said, “Margaret Sanger worked for social and racial justice at a time when segregation was the law of the land.”
Politifact claimed that “Sanger actually opposed prejudice.”
And NPR quoted an article from The Washington Post saying that Sanger “would likely be considered to have advanced views on race relations.”
But in an age of “racial reckoning,” Planned Parenthood can no longer stand the negative PR associated with Sanger’s racist words and actions.
It’s time for Planned Parenthood to “take responsibility for the harm that Sanger caused to generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson said Planned Parenthood plans to make Margaret Sanger “less prominent in our present and future”—but she “will not be erased.”
If there’s one thing Planned Parenthood knows how to do, it’s cut people off.
But Sanger’s racist legacy lives on in Planned Parenthood’s work. 79 percent of Planned Parenthood offices are within walking distance of a minority neighborhood, according to one estimate.
Black women are only 13 percent of the population but account for almost four out of every 10 abortions in the United States.
Racist is as racist does.
“If Planned Parenthood is truly serious about eradicating Sanger’s sordid legacy, it must abandon abortion,” wrote John Stonestreet and Roberto Rivera at Breakpoint.org.
Otherwise, Johnson’s article “is little more than posturing and public relations, which, I suspect, would please its founder.”
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”