Over the weekend, the president of Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times, formally criticizing her institution’s infamous founder, Margaret Sanger.
The article’s title announced, “We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder,” and the subheading indicated that the group is ready to “reckon with Margaret Sanger’s association with white supremacist groups and eugenics.”
Planned Parenthood is remarkably late to acknowledge what the rest of us have been saying for quite some time: Sanger was a foremost proponent of the eugenics movement in the U.S., motivated especially by her particular animus toward poor nonwhites. Her crusade to legalize birth control was motivated in large part by her desire to prevent the “unfit” and “feeble-minded” from reproducing.
Sanger’s goal was not primarily to liberate American women by legalizing birth control; rather, it was “to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy.”
The sudden effort to disentangle Planned Parenthood from its founder’s role in the racially motivated eugenics movement of the 20th century is too little, too late, even by the Left’s own standards. Last July, amidst racial tension and riots across the country, Planned Parenthood’s affiliate in New York City removed Sanger’s name from its flagship clinic, labeling her “a racist, white woman” and accusing the organization of “institutional racism.”
Yet the national organization didn’t say a word about it. Now, almost a year later, the group’s leadership has finally managed to workshop a careful way of attempting to guard its legacy while disavowing its founder.
“We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate ‘product of her time,’” Johnson writes.
That it took until 2021 for Planned Parenthood to condemn Sanger’s racism and support for eugenics is unsurprising, considering that the institution’s modern-day work is well in line with her hideous views. Far from being a victory for women, the last half-century of legalized abortion has deepened the effects of racial inequality in the U.S. — and Planned Parenthood profits from that reality.
Nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are located within walking distance of neighborhoods occupied predominantly by black and Hispanic residents. Despite constituting only 13 percent of the female population, black women represent more than one-third of all abortions in the U.S. each year. Black women are five times more likely than white women to obtain an abortion, and abortions are highly concentrated among low-income women. In recent years in New York City, more black babies were aborted than were born alive….
The above comes from an April 19 story in National Review.
Founded by a racist eugenicist, this group kills babies. That’s all you need to know.
Why do leftist Democrats give Sanger a pass but Washington, Jefferson, Disney movies, The Muppets, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and scores of others don’t get understandingly excused as “products of their time”?
Because the leftists always have an agenda, and they will craft a narrative to suit their agenda. They will lie to suit their agenda. They will ignore facts to suit their agenda.
Being on the left means habitually lying.
Defund the most racist entity in the United States, Planned Parenthood. An organization founded
for the sole purpose of murdering the unborn. Margaret Sanger hated Catholics, Hispanics, Blacks and the disabled. Planned Parenthood is the epitome of institutional and systemic racism and not a penny of tax payer money should ever go to it.
So Planned Parenthood makes the bold and perhaps late admission as to its founder’s original intent. Good for the them! Now they can focus on their primary mission: provide health care to many women who would not receive it otherwise (and yes, that includes birth control and abortion). I find it interesting that the same voices that decry Sanger’s motives and that clinics are located in socio-economically disadvantaged areas are sometimes rather moot when it comes to providing good health care to those same areas. One ponders if their reasons are less than saintly… A question for thought: given Clinton’s comment above, if Planned Parenthood were suddenly funded solely by non-governmental grants and private donations, does that mean that the church can cease its incessant profiling of the people who benefit from their services? Kevin suggests that people (specifically those on the left) have agendas, will lie to cover up or to promote their narrative. I agree that some on both the right and left do this, but let’s be careful of that log in one’s eye, Kevin, else the pedophile priest scenario will become the one both sides will point at as an example of the church’s own similar doings.
What an exercise in euphemisms and denial and implied racism by Michael.
Let me address this. Margaret Sanger was a racist. She hated Blacks and other People of Color. Clearly. But Planned Parenthood is not a racist institution. Especially by providing services to the poorest communities, which overwhelmingly consist of People of Color, PP is serving those communities underserved by a white supremacist health care system.
You are an abortion supporter, and since black babies are killed at higher percentages than all other unborn babies, you are a racist too.
Kris…What is it over 80% of all Planned Parenthood Abortion/death camps are located in poor and minority neighborhoods? So guess what they are advocating…more from the fit, less from the unfit, Margaret Sanger’s dream agenda. The real white supremacists are the liberals and Dems who had as the minority and majority leader KKK Robert Byrd who was the head of the KKK at one time. Today’s white supremacists are those advocating aborting Black and minority babies in their killing centers at Planned Parenthood. As for the health care system, Obamacare which forces people of faith to pay for abortions/abortifacients like birth control to eliminate people of color, confirms to me that it’s really the Democrats who push that the white supremacists agenda.
PP and Sanger are only “bad” because the God of Skin is greater than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.