To accept Planned Parenthood’s account of its founder, Margaret Sanger, is to believe that a pioneering hero came on the scene and saved all of female humanity from a terrible fate of poverty and the bondage of childbirth. In reality, Sanger’s impact on women has been nothing short of devastating, no matter which way the abortion corporation likes to spin the rhetoric of its founder. A fact sheet heralds Sanger as a “trailblazer in the fight for reproductive rights” and a “hero.” Planned Parenthood claims Sanger was “[m]otivated by a deeply held compassion for the women and children whose homes she visited around the world,” because she “believed that universal access to birth control would result in several benefits.”
While those benefits sounds good on the surface, they are actually a mythical representation of what Planned Parenthood does approximately 900 times per day on average: kill preborn children. Taking a closer look at the contrast between the abortion giant’s spin on Sanger versus the reality of Sanger reveals the truth behind a few of those mythical assertions.
1. The myth:
Planned Parenthood hails Sanger’s work to “[r]educe the need for abortion — a common and dangerous method of family planning in her time.”
The truth:
Planned Parenthood’s work has actually increased abortion. In fact, since 1970, Planned Parenthood has killed over seven million babies. And as Live Action has shown, contrary to Planned Parenthood’s assertion that only three percent of its services are abortion, the truth is, Planned Parenthood does more abortions than any other single organization in the country, and has cornered about 35 percent of the abortion market.
In fact, Planned Parenthood has gone so far as to reward its affiliates who meet “abortion quotas.” And as Live Action News has reported, the abortion corporation itself has admitted to celebrating an increase in abortion services.
Awarding an increase in abortion visits is hardly a reflection of the claim that Sanger helped to “reduce the need for abortion.”
2. The myth:
Planned Parenthood’s fact sheet notes that Sanger worked to “[s]ave women’s and children’s lives.”
The truth:
It’s unfathomable how the abortion corporation can claim Sanger’s work has saved children’s lives since most children in the womb who enter Planned Parenthood leave via a vacuum aspirator. Unless they are talking about saving the body parts of those children to sell to the highest bidder in the fetal parts brokerage business, to say that Planned Parenthood saves lives is the biggest myth of them all.
And while about 330,00 babies die every year at Planned Parenthood, sometimes the baby’s mother does too. Sanger’s legacy is an organization that kills hundreds of thousands of preborn human beings each year, sells their body parts, and sometimes even sees the mother die from complications. In fact, Planned Parenthood has shown itself so unconcerned about women’s health that one of its affiliates, in St. Louis, sent its 65th patient to the hospital this year, resulting from abortion complications. This systemic problem gained the attention of lawmakers in a Missouri Senate report that condemned the abortion giant for its practice of prohibiting ambulance sirens in case of a abortion emergencies, thus endangering women’s lives. In fact, this year, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens called a special session to address this and other health and safety issues.
3. The myth:
[Sanger] “created access to birth control for… poor women, women of color, and immigrant women.”
The truth:
The statement about Sanger is technically true to some extent, but the depth of the statement is that it was part of her eugenic agenda, which she herself wrote in a 1919 article in Birth Control Review:
Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods.
Eugenists emphasize the mating of healthy couples for the conscious purpose of producing healthy children, the sterilization of the unfit to prevent their populating the world with their kind and they may, perhaps, agree with us that contraception is a necessary measure among the masses of the workers, where wages do not keep pace with the growth of the family and its necessities in the way of food, clothing, housing, medical attention, education and the like.
Thus, her access to birth control for the poor and minority populations was to achieve her eugenic goal to create a strong white race with a limited number of children.
To this day, “Planned Parenthood targets women of color for abortion by placing 79 percent of its surgical abortion facilities within walking distance of minority neighborhoods,” an investigation by the Life Issues Institute notes. Sanger was one of the most vocal eugenicists of the 20th century, and her legacy lives on in every Planned Parenthood affiliate in this nation.
4. The myth:
Planned Parenthood celebrates Sanger’s work to “[s]trengthen the nuclear family.”
The truth:
It’s unclear how Sanger heroically strengthens the nuclear family when her focus was to rid the populace of those she deemed “undesirables.” Sanger writes in 1920 book, Woman and the New Race:
Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.
No definition of a nuclear family includes a disclaimer that killing some members until only the perfect ones exist makes a family legitimate. In fact, Sanger’s work has proven instrumental in destroying the nuclear family. But her self-proclaimed eugenic agenda let her define the nuclear family so she could strengthen only her own definition of it: financially secure and without physical or mental problems.
5. The myth:
Finally, Planned Parenthood also asserts that Sanger worked to “[i]ncrease the good health and well-being of all individuals, families, and their communities.”
The truth:
Without question, Sanger’s abortion corporation has never been about increasing the health and well-being of “all” individuals; from its inception, Planned Parenthood has been about protecting the health and well-being of only certain people it deems worthy of existing. As Live Action has previously noted, Sanger wrote a contributing essay for a 1925 book, Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities:
Birth Control is not merely an individual problem; it is not merely a national question, it concerns the whole wide world, the ultimate destiny of the human race. In his last book, Mr. [H.G.] Wells speaks of the meaningless, aimless lives which cram this world of ours, hordes of people who are born, who live, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions. All that they have said has been said before; all that they have done has been done better before. Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.
Planned Parenthood’s declaration that Sanger worked to “increase the good health and well-being of all individuals,” contains zero evidence from Sanger herself.
Sanger left a legacy for future generations, but it was a legacy of death, destruction and deception. Sanger perched herself on the high horse of superiority and decided which human beings had a right to live and procreate, simply because she saw their existence as being worthy, rather than being “weeds.” What she calls “cultivating our garden” is a euphemism for destroying lives that are inconvenient or less than what she sees as valuable. Tragically, that’s a legacy Planned Parenthood has continued to this day. That’s why approximately 329,000 preborn babies every year never see life outside the womb, as reported in the abortion corporation’s own 2015-2016 annual report.
And that’s the legacy of the woman today’s Planned Parenthood labels a “reproductive rights trailblazer.” She did indeed blaze a trail… a trail of death.
