Is a human body due an appropriate level of respect, even after death? Or does it merely become meaningless matter, to be carved up and done with as anyone wishes?
Culturally, the answer is clear: human beings should receive respectful burials, and other post-death processes, like organ donation or donations to medical science, should only take place with previous consent given by the deceased. Yet time and time again, both historically and in the present day, medical organizations fail to give the bodies of deceased human beings proper respect. However, this only seems to be framed as unethical under certain circumstances.
A recent investigation from the Washington Post delved into the collection of human bodies and body parts held by the Smithsonian Institution, noting that their collection is one of the largest in the world.
And according to the report, it wasn’t obtained ethically.
“The remains are the unreconciled legacy of a grisly practice in which body parts were scavenged from graveyards, battlefields, hospitals and morgues in more than 80 countries,” the Post writes. “Most of the remains appear to have been gathered without consent from the individuals or their families, by researchers preying on people who were hospitalized, poor, or lacked immediate relatives to identify or bury them. In other cases, collectors, anthropologists and scientists dug up burial grounds and looted graves.”
An anthropologist would pay for bones and body parts, often from Indigenous or minority communities — if they weren’t outright stolen. This practice is repeatedly condemned by officials who spoke to the Washington Post, and rightly so.
But what about the body parts of other human beings?
Trafficking body parts
The abortion industry is known for its disrespectful disposal methods for the bodies of the preborn children they kill. The bodies are frequently dumped into landfills, flushed down sewers, or burned in bonfires. Other abortion facilities have been caught keeping the bodies in freezers, or even displaying them as trophies.
Still others, however, use the bodies of their victims as an opportunity to make a profit… as the Center for Medical Progress’ (CMP) groundbreaking undercover investigation exposed. Yet once the information came to light, the media did not rush to condemn Planned Parenthood or other abortion industry giants. Instead, they criticized and condemned CMP for exposing the potentially illegal acts — much as previous authorities covered for Smithsonian officials who stole the bodies of poor, Indigenous, and minority peoples.
CNN described CMP’s videos as “heavily edited” and “discredited,” using Planned Parenthood as their source for these claims. Politifact described the videos as “false,” as did FactCheck.org. NPR claimed there was no evidence that Planned Parenthood was actually trafficking fetal body parts. The Washington Post reported that CMP “manipulated documents,” and heavily quoted people within the abortion industry to support their claims, like Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation (NAF).
Overwhelmingly, the media seemed happy to take Planned Parenthood’s word that they weren’t selling fetal body parts, and put in no effort at all toward further investigating CMP’s discovery. CMP’s undercover journalists did the job the media should have done, and they have been dragged through the courts for several years now as a result.
The notion of abusing a human being’s body is held to be unethical and wrong in the Smithsonian investigation, but in the Planned Parenthood/abortion industry investigation, the public is instructed to take the potential abuser’s word at face value.
The fact that one investigation has to do with uncovering potentially damning information about the nation’s most powerful and profitable abortion provider is the reason the media covered its eyes and ears and simply parroted Planned Parenthood’s own talking points.
Racism, bodies, and abortion
The Washington Post’s investigation likewise pointed out that racism played a very heavy role in amassing the Smithsonian’s collection of bodies and body parts. The anthropologist responsible for much of the collection, Ales Hrdlicka, reportedly wanted to study the bodies to prove that minorities (and Black people in particular) were inferior to white people — an outdated, offensive point of view that today is widely viewed as racist nonsense.
One of Hrdlicka’s victims was a woman named Mary Sara, a member of the Sámi people, who are indigenous to areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Mary’s family was not told that her brain had been taken and was still being kept by the Smithsonian until they were contacted by reporters for the Post. ”
Relatives said they were stunned that the institution never contacted them and are now seeking to have her brain returned,” the Post said. “‘It’s a violation against our family and against our people,’ said Fred Jack, the husband to one of Sara’s cousins. ‘It’s kind of like an open wound. … We want to have peace and we’ll have no peace because we know this exists, until it’s corrected.'”
The largest group victimized by Hrdlicka was the Black community, with the Post noting, “Black people also stood out nationwide: Of the 77 brains taken within the United States that have race recorded, Black people represent the largest racial group, with 57 brains taken.”
In addition to wanting to study supposed racial differences in human bodies, Hrdlicka was a strong believer in eugenics.
“A 1926 pamphlet showed he was an advisory member of the American Eugenics Society,” the Post wrote. “A 1930 letter among Hrdlicka’s personal papers advised an official in the eugenics society how to gain support from doctors for forced sterilization, which the Supreme Court had legalized in 1927. The letter, which was unsigned but probably written by Hrdlicka, instructed the official to focus on sterilization of those who are ‘beyond restoration to the normal in mentality,’ apparently a reference to people with mental illness.”
“With such individuals the scientific sterilization of every individual will be a distinct and undeniable service to humankind,” he wrote. “If only this could be achieved it would be a great step forward in the right direction.”
Yet again, the media is all too eager to cover up Planned Parenthood’s racist, eugenicist history… and even the corporation’s current racist practices today.
In 2015, NPR denied that famous avowed eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, sought to control the Black population and prevent them from reproducing. Reuters said that a quote from Sanger talking about exterminating the Black population was “taken out of context,” as if there is an acceptable context to speak about eliminating an entire race of people. The Star-Tribune argued that, yes, Sanger was racist, but Planned Parenthood itself today is not. Politifact downplayed some of Sanger’s more atrocious statements, and the fact that she spoke to the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan — and was subsequently invited to speak at “a dozen” more meetings.
The Washington Post not only downplayed Sanger’s racism, but even referred to her as a “racial pioneer,” though the Post later claimed to regret that choice of words. Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker for the Post, blithely said, “We thought the full sentence in our column made it clear that we were trying to place her racial attitudes into the context of her age, but it still was a poor choice of words that some readers found objectionable.”
Yet the racism within Planned Parenthood, both in its founding and in the present day, cannot be overstated.
It is undisputed by virtually anyone that Sanger was a eugenicist, but her views went far beyond that. The people she surrounded herself with in the founding of Planned Parenthood were likewise eugenicists and racists. Lothrop Stoddard, who was the Exalted Cyclops of the Massachusetts chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, served on the board of Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL) — the organization that would later become Planned Parenthood. Stoddard believed that “non-white races must be excluded from America.” Clarence Gamble, heir of the Procter and Gamble company fortune, served as a director of both Sanger’s ABCL and Planned Parenthood boards, and was also a eugenicist, supporting laws mandating the sterilization of the disabled. In a letter discussing the notorious Negro Project with Margaret Sanger, he said:
The mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.
As for Sanger, she supported experimental testing of birth control on Puerto Rican women without their knowledge or consent and was in favor of the Buck v. Bell Supreme Court decision, allowing anyone deemed “unfit” to be sterilized without their consent.
She also described “undesirables” — minorities, the poor, the disabled, and the mentally ill — as “human weeds” who shouldn’t be allowed to “breed”:
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.
In the present day, racism at Planned Parenthood continues to flourish. In recent years, hundreds of employees have come forward, claiming systemic racism takes place within numerous affiliates, with over two dozen lawsuits filed. Black women have said they received pressure to be sterilized by Planned Parenthood staffers, while other staffers admitted to promoting the use of long-term contraceptives, like IUDs, to children in minority schools.
Yet the media is all too happy to look the other way at the racist roots of America’s largest abortion chain. Like with the trafficking of body parts, it’s clear: these issues are just not problematic enough to point out when they’re coming from within the abortion industry.
