Abortion, Genocide, and Planned Parenthood
Earth Talk: Abortion, Genocide, and Planned Parenthood
“If the city would line the streets with the babies aborted every day, no more abortions would happen. If people were forced to see the realities of abortion, nobody would be able to morally go through with it,” said Master Naba, a Dogon High priest from West Africa. Abortion is a very sensitive topic, and it often causes debate and disharmony between political parties, friends, siblings, mates, and genders. It is often the deciding factor for which political candidate one votes for or which church one attends, and for some, who one befriends or marries.
Yes, abortion is a divisive issue, and we all feel that we already have the information needed to make an intelligent decision, regardless of our position. We can all give hearty documentation of our chosen position on the abortion scale. We are all fairly firm in our position, and only a life-changing event or paradigm shift is likely to change our minds. Meanwhile, most Americans have not given a thought to Margaret Sanger, the woman who founded the American Birth Control League, which later became Planned Parenthood. Perhaps looking into the political positions of Sanger and thus Planned Parenthood) will open our eyes to another reality of the abortion issue.
BLACK ABORTION STATISTICS
"For every five African-American women who get pregnant, three have an abortion," Clenard Childress Jr., director of the Northeast Chapter of the Life Education And Resource Network, told the Cybercast News Service. "This is a horrific injustice to women, and it's decimating our communities."
While Blacks make up about 12 percent of the population in the United States, they account for 32 percent of the abortions performed in the country. About 1,450 black infants are aborted every day in the United States. Since 1973, more than twice as many blacks have died from abortion than from heart disease, cancer, accidents, violent crimes, and AIDS combined.
US News and World Report published an article dated August 12, 1996, that reported the results of abortion from the Alan Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood's research branch). According to this report, "Blacks who make up 14% of all childbearing women, have 31% of all abortions, and whites, who account for 81% of women of childbearing age, have 61%".
GENOCIDE AND ABORTION
Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 3,450 Blacks were lynched in the United States. Since 1973 (when the Supreme Court Decision Roe V. Wade removed restrictions on abortions during the first three months of pregnancy), over 13 million Black babies have been aborted.
The Black community neighborhoods are commonly known to contain predominantly two businesses: liquor stores and Detroit, a Black city. Of these eleven, nine (82%) are in Black neighborhoods. Additionally, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 94 percent of all abortion providers are located in metropolitan areas, which generally have high black populations.
Planned Parenthood is perhaps the most widely used and recognized abortion provider. Planned Parenthood has about 160 abortion facilities across the United States. When the community makeup of areas in which Planned Parenthood had an abortion facility was examined, the results showed that the percentage of the Black population in the communities that had an abortion clinic was higher than the average for the state as a whole. Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts, and Ohio all have Planned Parenthood abortion clinics in their Black cities, while Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming - all states with relatively low Black populations - do not have any Planned Parenthood abortion clinics. Why are there so many abortion clinics in Black neighborhoods? Money is one driving factor for abortion clinics being in Black areas. Abortions cost money, and performing them means profit. Since about 1/3 of abortions are done on Black women, Black areas are ideal places for clinics. Additionally, having clinics in cities will allow access to more women than having them in the suburbs or rural areas - this means that those who live in the cities are more prone to use the services than those who live elsewhere. It just so happens that many poor people (of all colors) live in cities and are thus more prone to utilizing the services than those who must travel large distances.
CULTURE AND ABORTION
Abortion has become widely accepted in modern culture and is no longer seen as "wrong" by many people. In fact, the image of a pro-life advocate now is a fundamentalist Christian who packs bibles in their bag and denounces those who do not share their views as "evil-doers" and "dark- sided". The infiltration of legalized abortion politics has already changed family structures and values, especially in families of color.
The Black family unit has changed. The image of a strong family that will help a young mother raise her baby while she finishes high school or college is fading, as is the strong inter-generational family unit that is of high value in traditional culture. A Black teenager or young adult who had a baby before she was ready was once confident in the fact that her parents would "adopt" the baby and raise it; today, however, these family values have been replaced by "choices", such as abortion or leaving a young girl to raise a child while she is a child herself.
Because so many women of color are choosing abortion, the children around them are learning that abortion is okay and normal. Abortion has indeed become just another birth control method and a way to get out of an unplanned, unwelcome, or un-ideal situation.
While abortion is not the typical dinnertime discussion, it is being discussed in the Black community. Usher, who has been number one on the charts, has a song about his being upset because his woman would not have an abortion. Other songs contain lyrics of a woman being punched to induce a miscarriage. Abortion is now considered a right for many young people, and it is often used as a last-resort birth control option without a second thought. It has embedded itself in the modern culture, and while many are fighting to get rid of the practice, others are fighting just as hard to keep it legal.
Meanwhile, abnormally high numbers of Black women are choosing to abort, and a disproportionate number of Black babies never make an appearance on Earth. Some activists claim that this fact has been carefully planned and executed by the system as a way to keep their power and keep the Black population from thriving. Before we write this idea off as just another "conspiracy theory", let's examine the evidence
MARGARET SANGER, FOUNDER OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD
Abortion as a solution for unwanted pregnancy began its political genesis during the 20th century, amidst the birth control movement and the women's movement. While women were struggling for social equality, they were also fighting for control over their reproductive rights. Margaret Sanger was one of the most influential people in birth control politics and is championed as the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Sanger was a birth control activist who felt that education and access to reproductive knowledge were necessary for all women. In a time when it was illegal to disseminate contraceptive information and devices (the Comstock Law of 1873), Sanger purposefully risked imprisonment by defying this law and distributing literature on women's issues. In 1916, she opened a family planning and birth control clinic in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn New York, which was quickly raided by the police. Sanger fled to Europe to avoid prosecution for violating the post office's obscenity laws, as she had sent birth control information by mail. After returning to the USA, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 with Lothrop Stoddard and CC Little. In 1923 she established the Clinical Research Bureau, the first legal birth control clinic in the USA. After resigning from the ABCL, she became president 1930 of the Birth Control International Informational Center. Sanger also launched two publications in 1937 called "The Birth Control Review" and "The Birth Control News" In 1942, the American Birth Control League was reorganized into Planned Parenthood, and from 1952 to 1959, Sanger served as the president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
For the modern woman, Sanger seems like the Queen Mother! She has paved the way to reproductive control and health and has enabled women to plan their pregnancies and control their destinies. Or so it may seem.
What was the American Birth Control League?
The National Birth Control League (renamed the American Birth Control League) was founded in 1916 and incorporated in New York on April 5, 1922. By 1924 there were 27,500 members and ten branches. At its founding, the ABCL declared its purpose was:
To enlighten and educate the American public on the various aspects of the dangers of uncontrolled procreation imperative necessity of a world program of birth control.
To correlate the findings of scientists, statisticians, investigators, and social agencies in all fields.
To organize and conduct clinics where the medical profession may give to mothers and potential mothers harmless, reliable methods of birth control.
To enlist the support and cooperation of legal advisors, statesmen, and legislators in effecting the removal of State and Federal statutes that encourage dysgenic breeding.
In addition to the founding purpose of the ABCL, Margaret Sanger listed the additional aims in her book "The Pivot of Civilization":
To collect the findings of scientists, concerning the relation of reckless breeding to the evils of delinquency, defect, and dependence and to derive from these scientifically ascertained facts and figures, conclusions which may aid all public health and social agencies in the study of problems of maternal and infant mortality, child-labor, mental and physical defects, and delinquency in relation to the practice of reckless breeding.
Sterilization of the insane and feebleminded and the encouragement of this upon those afflicted with inherited transmissible diseases, with the understanding that sterilization does not deprive the individual of his or her sex expression, but merely renders him incapable of producing children.
The enlightenment of the public at large, mainly through the education of leaders of thought and opinion - teachers, ministers, editors, and writers - to the moral and scientific soundness of the principles of birth control and the imperative necessity of its adoption as the basis of national and racial progress.
To enlist the support and cooperation of legal advisors, statesmen, and legislators in effecting the removal of state and federal statutes that encourage dysgenic breeding, increase the sum total of disease, misery, and poverty, and prevent the establishment of a policy of national health and strength.
To cooperate with similar organizations in other countries to study birth control in its relations to the world population problem, food supplies, and national and racial conflicts, and to urge upon all international bodies organized to promote world peace, the consideration of these aspects of international amity.
Wow. Suddenly, Sanger does not look like the Queen who has come to save and protect women. Sure, Sanger wishes to save and protect women, but only women of a certain race, intelligence, and class!
EUGENICS
Sanger was, to put it bluntly, a racist. Her motivations for supplying birth control information to women, especially poor women, were not ultimately altruistic - she had a very clear agenda. Her agenda was to "cleanse" humanity of "undesirable" types of people so that the planet could eventually be populated by only those who deserved to have a presence on Earth - white people.
Margaret Sanger believed firmly in eugenics. Eugenics is a "science" that aims to improve races through the control of hereditary factors - encouraging those with good genes to reproduce and preventing or discouraging those with bad genes to not having children. This view walks hand in hand with Robert Malthus's 19th-century view that "population will always grow faster than available food supply" ...people who believe in eugenics often fear that the food supply will be inadequate to feed the growing human population, so those with the good genes should get first dibs. Sanger's position on eugenics was clear: "Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying...demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism... [Philanthropists] encourage 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. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant... We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all." (Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, pages 116, 122, 189).
Sanger's cohorts and colleagues elitist racists. Lothrop Stoddard, an associate of Sanger, was the author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy and described the eugenic practices of the Nazi Third Reich as "scientific" and "humanitarian". Adolphus Knopf, a member of Sangers American Birth Control League, warned of the menace posed by "black" and "yellow" peril in a 1925 New York birth control gathering. Another board member, Dr. Harry Laughlin, often spoke of the need to purify America's human "breeding stock" and get rid of the "bad strains".
Just who is the "bad stock" of inferior human beings that should not procreate? In Sanger's own words: "Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native-born Americans"!
In fact, Sanger's racism cannot be denied when one learns that she organized her "Negro Project" in 1939. In this initiative, Sanger's goal was to re-educate the Black population and change their values, lifestyle, and culture by collectively changing their childbearing practices. Because having many children and large families is deeply rooted in the Black culture worldwide, Sanger developed an ingenious way of surpassing the strong cultural values. Sanger wrote "The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members".
Sanger's plan worked. Today, the abortion rate is higher in Black women than in any other portion of society. Many Black religious leaders are defending a woman's right to choose and are doing so publicly and loudly. Take, for example, Reverend Jesse Jackson - in 1977, Jackson gave a speech and said, "Abortion is Black genocide. What happens to the mind of a person and the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?" While Michael Jackson may be hailed as the King of Pop, perhaps Rev. Jesse Jackson should be hailed as the Black King of Flip-Flop, as he has drastically changed positions. In 1998, Jackson changed his position and said that abortion is acceptable because "it is not right to impose private, religious and moral positions on public policy."
BLACK POPULATIONS AFFECTED
Sanger's mission seems to have manifested, at least for Blacks in America. Abortion has become a normal way of life, and its use has resulted in a tremendous loss of life. Since 1973, over ten million abortions have been performed on Black women. Michael Novak, author, has calculated the consequence of abortion on the Black population. "Since the number of current living Blacks (in the USA) is 31 million, the missing 10 million represents an enormous loss for, without abortion, America's Black community would now number 41 million persons. It would be 35% larger than it is currently. Abortion has swept through the Black community cutting down every fourth member.”
Delores Grier, psychologist and President of American Black Women Against Abortion, says, "Since 1973, 78% of abortion centers have been located in Black and minority communities. Upper-middle-class White females are not reproducing and they are trying to keep other groups from reproducing so they can remain in the majority.”
Sharon Weston, a Member of the Louisiana State Legislature, said, "When we look at African Americans from a historical standpoint, you do not find abortion as an integral part of our history. The whole abortion issue can minimize the impact that African Americans can have as future leaders."
Condoms are being shipped to Africa. Programs are being put into place to educate women on family planning and birth control throughout the world". In other words, people of color are still being encouraged to decrease their procreation. One must look at the history and it will be clear how and why this movement began.
