In 1922 Margaret Sanger, the radical Eugenicist and Revolutionary who founded Planned Parenthood, chided social workers, philanthropists, and churchmen for perpetuating what she called "the cruelty of charity." She argued that organized attempts to help the poor were the "surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents." She went on to write that the most "insidiously injurious philanthropy" was the maternity care given to poor women. She concluded her diatribe by describing all those who refused to see the necessity of severely regulating the fertility of the working class as "benign imbeciles who encourage the defective and diseased elements of humanity in their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning."
Her alternative to charity was "to eliminate the stocks" that she felt were most detrimental "to the future of the race and the world." To that end, Planned Parenthood has always targeted minorities, the unwanted, and the disadvantaged for family limitation, contraception, abortion, and sterilization. "More children from the fit, less from the unfit," Sanger opined, "that is the chief issue of birth control."
By 1922 her fame was secure. She had won several key legal battles, had coordinated an international conference on birth control, and had gone on a very successful round-the-world lecture tour. Her name had become a household word and one of her numerous books had become an instant bestseller in spite of--or perhaps because of--the tremendous controversy it had caused.
Entitled The Pivot of Civilization, it was one of the first popularly written books to openly expound and extol Eugenic aims. Throughout its 284 pages, Sanger unashamedly called for the elimination of "human weeds," for the "cessation of charity," for the segregation of "morons, misfits, and the maladjusted" and for the coercive sterilization of "genetically inferior races." Published today, such a book would be denigrated as the basest sort of intolerant racism. But writing when she did, Margaret only gained more acclaim.
Because of her Eugenic connections, she had become closely associated with the scientists and theorists who put together Nazi Germany's "race purification" program. She had openly endorsed the euthanasia, sterilization, abortion, and infanticide programs of the early Reich. She published a number of articles in The Birth Control Review that mirrored Hitler's White Supremacist rhetoric. She even commissioned Dr. Ernst Rudin, the director of the Nazi Medical Experimentation program, to write for The Review himself.
Naturally, as the end of the Second World War neared and the grisly details of the Nazi programs began to come to light, Sanger was forced to backpedal her position and cover up her complicity. Charges of anti-Semitism had been aimed at her since her trial in 1917, but now that Auschwitz and Dachau had become very much a part of the public conscience, she realized she would have to do something, and quickly.
Her first step toward redeeming her public image was to change the name of her organization. "Planned Parenthood" was a name that had been proposed from within the birth control movement since at least 1938. One of the arguments for the new name was that it connoted a positive program and conveyed a clean, wholesome, family-oriented image. It diverted attention from the international and revolutionary intentions of the movement, focusing instead on the personal and individual dimensions of birth control.
Next, she embarked on an aggressive affiliation program that brought hundreds of local and regional birth control leagues under the umbrella of her national organization, and then dozens of national organizations from around the globe were brought under the aegesis of her international federation. This enabled Sanger to draw on the integrity and respectability of grassroots organizations, solidifying and securing her place at the top.
Finally, she initiated a massive propaganda blitz aimed at the war-weary, ready-for-prosperity middle class. Always careful to hide her illicit affairs and her radical political leanings, her campaign emphasized "patriotism" and "family values."
But, the horrific Eugenic agenda remained despite the niceties of Sanger's PR campaign. To this day, the thrust of Planned Parenthood's literature focuses on the terrible "burden" that the poor place on the rest of us. It continually reminds us of the costs that welfare mothers incur for taxpayers. It constantly devises new plans to penetrate Black, Hispanic, and ethnic communities with its crippling message of Eugenic racism.
When, for instance, Planned Parenthood shifted its focus from community-based clinics to school-based clinics, it reaffirmed Sanger's intentions: targeting inner-city minority neighborhoods. Of the more than 300 school-based clinics that have opened nationwide in the last decade, none have been at substantially all-White schools. None have been at suburban middle-class schools. All have been at Black, minority, or ethnic schools.
A racial analysis of abortion statistics is quite revealing in this regard. According to a Health and Human Services Administration report, as many as 43 percent of all abortions are performed on Blacks and another 10 percent on Hispanics. This, despite the fact that Blacks only make up eleven percent of the total U.S. population and Hispanics only about eight percent. A National Academy of Sciences investigation released more conservative--but no less telling--figures: thirty-two percent of all abortions are performed on minority mothers.
Planned Parenthood's crusade to eliminate all those "dysgenic stocks" that Margaret Sanger believed were a "dead weight of human waste" and a "menace to the race" has precipitated a wholesale slaughter. By 1975, a little more than one percent of the Black population had been aborted. By 1980 that figure had increased to nearly two and a half percent. By 1985, it had reached three percent. And by 1992 it had grown exponentially to a full four and a half percent. In most Black communities today abortions outstrip births by as much as three-to-one.
In order to realize Margaret Sanger's Eugenic ideal of eliminating the "masses of degenerate" and "good-for-nothing" races, Planned Parenthood has not only emphasized contraception and abortion, it has also carried the banner of sterilization. And, of course, that sterilization vendetta has been primarily leveled against minorities.
The sterilization rate among Blacks is forty-five percent higher than among whites. Among Hispanics the rate is thirty percent higher. As many as forty-two percent of all Amerind women and thirty-five percent of all Puerto Rican women have been sterilized.
Hardly a champion of choice, Sanger often sought mandatory population control measures--measures carefully designed to deny women the freedom to choose. In 1934, she recommended that the government launch a health care reform plan that would include "parenthood permits." The permits would only be issued to those couples "deemed Eugenically fit by public officials." According to her proposal "no woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, no man shall have the right to become a father" without such a permit. And the permits were "not to be valid for more than one birth."
Following in her footsteps, Planned Parenthood has proposed that our government implement similar draconian measures. For instance, the organization has recommended "compulsory abortion for out-of-wedlock pregnancies," federal entitlement"payments to encourage abortion," "compulsory sterilization for those who have already had two children," and "tax penalties" for existing large families.
And in China, Planned Parenthood helped the government launch a brutal, no-holds-barred, one-child-per-couple policy. Nearly 100 million forced abortions, mandatory sterilizations, and coercive infanticides later, Planned Parenthood literature maintains that the genocidal approach to population control is a "model of efficiency." It has fought to maintain United States tax subsidies for the Chinese operation, and has continued to increase its own funding and program support involvement despite the widespread reports of human rights atrocities.
