Hillary Clinton celebrated the opening of the first Planned Parenthood clinic in America 99 years ago, when the U.S.’s largest abortion provider began its long career in the open pursuit of eugenics.
The Democrat 2016 candidate tweeted out her congratulations and support of the organization that is currently under several congressional investigations following the release of videos exposing its apparent practices of harvesting the body parts of unborn babies for sale:
As pro-life group Live Action notes, Margaret Sanger — Planned Parenthood’s founder – held firmly to eugenics – the philosophy that the human race can be improved by controlled and selective breeding. Sanger promoted the sterilization and use of birth control for those – mainly minorities – with qualities she considered less desirable for the human race.
In Pivot of Civilization, Sanger’s philosophy of breeding the ideal human race comes forward:
Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease…Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks [of people] that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.
For Sanger, helping low-income mothers through charity “encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste.”
Birth control, in the eyes of the Planned Parenthood founder, would bring about a “cleaner race” and prevent the birth of more individuals she saw as unfit for humanity. She writes in “Morality and Birth Control:”
All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class, and if morality is to mean anything at all to us, we must regard all the changes which tend toward the uplift and survival of the human race as moral.
Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.
Sanger’s philosophy has continued to this day. The Guttmacher Institute reported black women are five times more likely to undergo an abortion than white women. Similarly, last year, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Office released a report that revealed more black babies are aborted than are born in that city. Yet New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio pledged to partner with Planned Parenthood to expand his city’s abortion businesses and to wipe out pro-life pregnancy centers.
Additionally, a study released last year demonstrates the obvious racial disparity where abortion is concerned in the United States. Dr. James Studnicki at the University of North Carolina and his colleagues found that for whites, abortions in 2008 contributed to 59% of total years of potential life lost while, for blacks, abortions contributed 76% of the same. The researchers concluded that “induced abortion is the overwhelmingly predominant contributing cause of preventable potential lives lost in North Carolina,” and blacks are disproportionately affected.
Clinton, however, and feminists of her generation cling to Sanger’s elevation of birth control as somewhat of a “sacrament” of the feminist movement. Sanger wrote:
We now know that there never can be a free humanity until woman is freed from ignorance, and we know, too, that woman can never call herself free until she is mistress of her own body. Just so long as man dictates and controls the standards of sex morality, just so long will man control the world.
Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.
More recently, however, black pro-life leaders and Republican members of Congress have demanded that Sanger’s bust be removed from a “Struggle for Justice” exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery where it is displayed.
In a letter sent to the director of the gallery, Ministers Taking a Stand, led by president Bishop E.W. Jackson, stated:
Perhaps the Gallery is unaware that Ms. Sanger supported black eugenics, a racist attitude toward black and other minority babies; an elitist attitude toward those she regarded as “the feeble minded;” speaking at rallies of Ku Klux Klan women; and communications with Hitler sympathizers. Also, the notorious “Negro Project” which sought to limit, if not eliminate, black births, was her brainchild. Despite these well-documented facts of history, her bust sits proudly in your gallery as a hero of justice. The obvious incongruity is staggering!
In an interview with Breitbart News, Jackson said his group received a response from the gallery that referred to Sanger as a person who struggled for justice because she tried to make birth control and reproductive freedom available to poor women.
“We responded back that this was not Sanger’s motivation,” Jackson asserted. “Her motivation was stopping people whom she considered ‘defective’ from having what she would call ‘defective children.’”
“She thought that black people needed to be stopped from propagating and growing their population, and other people she called ‘feeble-minded,’” he added. Jackson said the fact Sanger is held in high esteem is “outrageous.”
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