A novel about the life of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger is being developed and produced as a film just as the abortion provider brings its centennial anniversary year to a close.
Deadline Hollywood says that Ellen Feldman’s novel Terrible Virtue will be brought to the big screen by Black Bicycle Entertainment and producer Justine Ciarrochhi.
Deadline reports:
Terrible Virtue focuses on Sanger as the daughter of a hard-drinking, smooth-tongued free thinker and mother worn down by 13 children, who vowed her life would be different. Following Sanger’s training as a nurse, her work alongside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists and other progressives and eventually her devotion to the cause of legalizing contraception, the film examines the risks she took and the impact she had that lasts to the present day.
The back cover of the book, published by Harper Collins, says about Sanger:
This complex, enigmatic revolutionary was at once vain and charismatic, generous and ruthless, sexually impulsive and coolly calculating—a competitive, self-centered woman who championed all women, a conflicted mother who suffered the worst tragedy a parent can experience. From opening the first illegal birth control clinic in America in 1916 through the founding of Planned Parenthood to the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s, Margaret Sanger sacrificed two husbands, three children, and scores of lovers in her fight for sexual equality and freedom.
The organization Sanger founded – which now takes in more than $500 million in taxpayer funding annually – has grown to perform some 300,000 abortions per year in the United States.
According to the 2010 census, 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of black or Hispanic neighborhoods.
Some 59 million abortions have been performed in the country since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, nearly 18 million of them on black babies. As Breitbart News has reported, the Alan Guttmacher Institute also provided data showing that about 30 percent of all abortions in the U.S. are performed on black women, with another 25 percent performed on Hispanic women.
Perhaps the most stirring statistic comes from New York City, where more black babies are aborted than are born.
Eugenicist Sanger, who began the Negro Project in 1939 and worked to bring birth control to blacks in an effort to reduce their population, joined with elite and well known African-Americans Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.
The Negro Project was sold as a solution to poverty and high birth rates among the black community. At the same time Sanger promoted her theory of “eliminating the unfit,” she also condemned charitable organizations that she believed were elevating the very population that needed to be weeded out.
More prominent members of the black community have recently come forward to speak out about the disproportionate number of black babies aborted in Planned Parenthood clinics.
Baltimore Ravens tight end Ben Watson commented on Sanger’s bigotry in August.
“I do know that blacks kind of represent a large portion of the abortions,” Watson told TurningPointFriends.org, “and I do know that honestly the whole idea with Planned Parenthood and [founder Margaret] Sanger in the past was to exterminate blacks, and it’s kind of ironic that it’s working.”
Retired NFL Super Bowl champion Burgess Owens supported Watson.
“Sanger looked at blacks as ‘weeds,’” he told Breitbart News, adding:
The NAACP was not a black-run, black-originated organization. It was run by 21 white, socialist, atheist, Marxist Democrats. It was the antithesis of Rev. Martin Luther King Sr.’s community at that time, which was capitalist, Christian, very pro-life, and pro-America. So, these 21 white people began to put a message through to the black community that Democrats were good, liberalism was good, and they subscribed to the same philosophy that Margaret Sanger believed of blacks at that time.
“If you wonder why urban, young, black women are allowing themselves to be victimized by Planned Parenthood, look at BET [Black Entertainment Television], which is owned by very wealthy white Democrats,” Owens urged. “Look at the 15 years of messaging that has been gotten through to our urban black communities: anti-white, anti-police, anti-family, and pro-abortion.”
“Forty percent of black babies have been given to the altar of abortion,” he observed. “In any other society, that would be considered genocide. Today, we put a nice name to it and, at the same time, have convinced our own mothers that their babies are no more than an inconvenience or a profit.”
Deadline, however, takes the leftwing view of Sanger as “an icon and hero to progressives and feminists but a greatly reviled figure to the anti-abortion movement, which frequently has taken comments by Sanger about overpopulation out of context to imply racist intent.”
The film’s producers indicate they will be portraying Sanger as a bold hero to women and abortion as a “basic human right.”
“Margaret’s story as an advocate who led the battle for birth control and eventually founding Planned Parenthood is so relevant given our recent election and today’s climate as we are once again forced to deal with basic human rights,” said Erika Olde of Black Bicycle. “I share a mutual passion of the subject with Justine and look forward to bringing this topic and heroic individual to the forefront.”
“The scope of Sanger’s complexity, both as a revolutionary and human being, is extraordinary,” said Ciarrocchi. “I blew through Feldman’s novel with such urgency, struck by the nuance, transparency and daring of her portrait. Her story explores the often brutal nature of activism and, most audaciously, the plight of the female soul.”
The Deadline report continues that the novel is being brought to the big screen as “abortion and birth control opponents look to make significant gains with the election of Donald Trump.” Trump has vowed to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding if the organization continues to provide abortions, and to appoint pro-life Supreme Court justices.
The Senate Judiciary Committee announced this week it will be referring Planned Parenthood to both the FBI and the Justice Department for investigation and possible prosecution.
That announcement comes following an investigation into allegations the abortion chain and its partners in biomedical procurement have been harvesting the body parts of aborted babies and selling them for a profit.
Similarly, two weeks ago, the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives referred Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast for criminal prosecution by the Texas Attorney General.