You’d think that the outcry would be great. Surely society would vehemently protest an industry disproportionately killing minorities at a startling rate. Surely the societal outcry would be enormous if such an industry was making money directly from the deaths of the poor and disadvantaged. Perhaps in a different society or in a different world, there would be.
Many people know by now that Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, a woman who believed strongly in eugenics — the weeding out of the “unfit” or “undesirables,” even endorsing forced sterilization. But so many have tried to honor Sanger’s work while claiming the organization no longer has any racist or eugenicist tendencies… that those things were merely a product of the time in which Planned Parenthood was birthed.
Unfortunately, we know that racism is like a cancer that never truly goes away. As Live Action News’ Danny David wrote, “Even in times of quiet, white supremacy survives in the shadows. As people who believe in the value of all human beings, it is our duty to call out the evil of white supremacy and fight it until it is no more.”
But sometimes, racism doesn’t stay in the shadows. Sometimes it comes out in public and says exactly what it thinks.
This past week, Bethany Janzen, Rocky Mountain Regional Coordinator for Students for Life of America, shared a story about an interaction at a SLFA pro-life protest in Colorado between Kimberly, a participant in the protest, and a Planned Parenthood-supporting man. Jansen writes:
On Saturday, August 19th… [t]en pro-life high school, college, and young professionals stood peacefully outside of Dona Laurita Art and Photography which [wa]s hosting a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in Louisville, Colorado. But many Planned Parenthood supporters did not respond in a similarly respectful demeanor.
One of these was a middle-aged white man who stopped with his family, inquiring why Kimberly, a minority graduate of a local university, was holding a “We Don’t Need Planned Parenthood” sign. Kimberly explained that Planned Parenthood does abortions which end an innocent human life. His response? Abortion is good because the crime rate has lowered since the 60’s due to a reduction in black crime.
Confused, Kimberly told him that about 66% of black children are aborted. The man responded this is why the crime rate went down.
“I asked him if less black people meant less crime and he said that’s exactly what he meant,” Kimberly stated.
While this might be one of the more recent examples of this kind of racist thinking among abortion supporters, it’s by no means the only one.
North Carolina abortionist Ron Virmani got into some hot water in 2012 when someone exposed his racist comments to the world. Live Action News’ Cassy Fiano wrote at the time that Virmani “claim[ed] that he doesn’t want to force taxpayers to pay for ‘those babies,’ that he doesn’t want them ‘to be born and brought up and kill those people in Colorado,’ and he asks if the people he’s talking to [would be willing to] adopt ‘those ugly black babies.'” Virmani later issued a video apology and condemned the person who recorded his comments.
Sadly, Virmani’s not alone in his opinion. As Live Action News’ Sarah Terzo reported, abortionist Edward Allred once told a news outlet that he found the “influx of Hispanic immigrants” and “their lack of respect for democracy and social order” to be “frightening.” “Population control is too important to be stopped by some right wing pro-life types,” Allred said. “I’d set up a clinic in Mexico for free if I could … When a sullen black woman of 17 or 18 can decide to have a baby and get welfare and food stamps and become a burden to all of us, it’s time to stop.”
Planned Parenthood’s apple doesn’t seem to fall very far from the tree of its founder’s eugenicist views. The organization was caught in a Live Action investigation, willingly accepting donations to abort Black babies, specifically. As stated on Live Action’s web page, “The caller clearly expresses a racist agenda of wanting to ‘lower the number of blacks in America,’ but that did not discourage Planned Parenthood staff from accepting the money”:
As Live Action News’ Carole Novielli reported previously, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger told fellow eugenics proponent Katharine Dexter McCormick in 1950, “I believe that now, immediately, there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.” And indeed, some states in the U.S. sadly did enlist such policies, mutilating impoverished minority women, sterilizing them against their wills. Though compulsory sterilization in the United States has finally been recognized as a grave injustice, many believe that abortion is now being used as a tool to inhibit the growth of minority populations.
New York City alone has staggering statistics: Just a few short years ago, 78 percent of all abortions in NYC were of Black and Hispanic babies. Nationally, writes Live Action News’ Luke Faulkner, “‘Blacks account for roughly 38 percent of all abortions in the country’ though they only represent ’13 percent of the population.'”
And apparently, if you’re a racist Planned Parenthood supporter, this is good news. But to the rest of us, it’s a tragedy.
