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Abortion (7)

The equally racist roots of Planned Parenthood

There is an extraordinary parallel between the racist, bigoted views of the woman who gave her name to the Marie Stopes organisation and the equally abhorrent views of the woman who laid the foundations for Planned Parenthood.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), commonly known simply as Planned Parenthood (PP), is the US member association of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. PPFA was formerly (until 1942) known as the American Birth Control League, an organisation founded by Margaret Sanger.

Back in 1963, Planned Parenthood was expressly against abortion. It produced a pamphlet in August 1963, on page one of which it asked "Is birth control abortion?” The answer given was “Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun”. The PP leaflet went on to warn that abortion “is dangerous to your life and health”. The leaflet also advised that abortion “may make you sterile”. All of the negative aspects of abortion were set against the alleged virtues of birth control which, according to the 1963 leaflet, “merely postpones the beginning of life".

In the intervening years, Planned Parenthood has become much less outspoken about the dangers of abortion. Certainly, it no longer cares to point out that “an abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun”. In 2007, PP carried out more than 300,000 abortions⁽¹⁾ in addition to providing more than 1.4 million “emergency contraception kits”. Those are figures for the USA alone, a small proportion of the overall worldwide numbers. The International Planned Parenthood Federation is one of the big international players in a global activity that kills more than 40 million unborn children each year.

The Planned Parenthood organisation claims to be “rooted in the courage and tenacity of American women and men willing to fight for women's health, rights, and equality”. It names Margaret Sanger as the founder of Planned Parenthood and describes her as “one of the movement's great heroes”⁽²⁾. The fact that Sanger is held up as a heroine speaks volumes about the underlying philosophies of the pro-choice movement.

Sanger was clearly in favour of eugenics (see appendix here) as a way of clearing society of people she thought of as undesirable so that society as a whole would become purer, the notion applied to most devastating effect by the Nazi regime. Sanger’s book The Pivot of Civilization included the following comments:

· “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over−fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

· “There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble−minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants.”

· “The philosophy of Birth Control points out that as long as civilized communities encourage unrestrained fecundity in the ‘normal’ members of the population – always of course under the cloak of decency and morality – and penalize every attempt to introduce the principle of discrimination and responsibility in parenthood, they will be faced with the ever−increasing problem of feeble−mindedness, that fertile parent of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism.”

· “Our statesmen are … ignoring the exigent problem of the elimination of the feeble−minded.”

· “We are brought face to face with another problem of infant mortality. Are we to check the infant mortality rate among the feeble−minded and aid the unfortunate offspring to grow up, a menace to the civilized community even when not actually certifiable as mentally defective or not obviously imbecile?”

· “There is sufficient evidence to lead us to believe that the so−called ‘borderline cases’ are a greater menace than the out−and−out ‘defective delinquents’ who can be supervised, controlled and prevented from procreating their kind.”

· “Surely it is an amazing and discouraging phenomenon that the very governments that have seen fit to interfere in practically every phase of the normal citizen's life, dare not attempt to restrain, either by force or persuasion, the moron and the imbecile from producing his large family of feeble−minded offspring.”

· “The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble−minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The male defectives are no less dangerous.”

· “We prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble−minded.”

· “We should not minimize the great outstanding service of Eugenics for critical and diagnostic investigations.”

· “Birth Control must be recognized, as the Neo−Malthusians pointed out long ago, not ‘merely as the key of the social position,’ and the only possible and practical method of human generation, but as the very pivot of civilization. Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by the most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.”

The appendix to Sanger’s book lists the aims of the American Birth Control League, including enforced sterilization of “the insane and feebleminded” and encouraged sterilization for “those afflicted with inherited or transmissible diseases, with the understanding that sterilization does not deprive the individual of his or her sex expression, but merely renders him incapable of producing children.”

A further aim refers to “the moral and scientific soundness of the principles of Birth Control and the imperative necessity of its adoption as the basis of national and racial progress”.

In her own journal, the Birth Control Review (Nov. 1921, page 2)⁽³⁾, Sanger wrote an article entitled “Birth Control – To create a race of thoroughbreds.”

In the 1932 edition of the same journal, under the heading of “Plan for Peace” she listed some of the desirable aims of a “Population Congress” which included:

· to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring;

· to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.

· to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.

She then proposed (still in “Plan for Peace”) that an inventory should be taken of various undesirables, including illiterates and paupers, so that they could be segregated “on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct”. It is not immediately apparent why paupers and illiterates were “undesirable” or why open spaces were likely to have any beneficial effect.

Sanger was so appalled by the poor and uneducated that she wrote in Women and the New Race that "the most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it" (Eugenics Publ. Co., 1920, 1923).

Sanger gradually became bolder in her views. According to the biography Killer Angel (page 73):

“As her organization grew in power and prestige, she began to target several other ‘ill-favored’ and ‘dysgenic races, including Blacks, Hispanics, Amerinds [the native American Indians], Fundamentalists, and Catholics’.”

According to that same book, Margaret Sanger – like Hitler – was a disciple of the Lucifer-worshipping religion known as theosophy and of its notorious founder Madame Blavatsky.

Another website⁽⁴⁾ explains how:

“Sanger became increasingly obsessed with occult beliefs and hostile to Christianity and the American precept of individual freedom. Her distaste for America is evident in her writings:

‘Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than Capitalism.’ ”

In summary, Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist and a racist, aiming to create a super-race through various means including enforced sterilisations. She was driven by an occultist belief, and was hostile both to Christianity and to the American way of life. This is the woman described by Planned Parenthood as its founder and as one of the great heroes of the abortion movement. The worldwide abortion industry (for such it is) was built on those foundations.

Sanger was also fundamentally mistaken in predicting the effects of her work. She believed that with freely available birth control, “there will be no killing of babies in the womb by abortion”⁽⁵⁾ (page 232). With the worldwide abortion rate at more than 5,000 abortions per hour, she could scarcely have been more wrong.

Notes

(1) See http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/AR08_vFinal.pdf).

(2) See http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/history-and-successes.htm.

(3) See http://library.lifedynamics.com/Birth%20Control%20Review/1921-11%20November.pdf.

(4) See http://www.khouse.org/articles/1997/93/#notes.

(5) See page 232 of her book Woman and the New Race at http://www.sacred-texts.com/wmn/wnr/wnr20.htm.

Introduction

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When human life begins