First published in The Plain Truth in 2019
Some media outlets portray pro-life advocates as racists, correlating them with “anti-blackness” and “white supremacists.”
But these outlets failed to note that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had a history of pro-eugenics comments and targeting black communities with birth control.
Sanger addressed members of the Ku Klux Klan, targeted southern black communities with birth control and discussed her enthusiasm for eliminating defective “human weeds” through eugenics.
Some media outlets portray pro-life advocates as racists, but Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had a history of pro-eugenics comments and targeting black communities with birth control.
Media Matters, Rewire News and The Nation ran 2020 stories with the headlines “Right-wing media and abortion opponents should confront the anti-blackness of their movement,” “March for Life Has an Anti-Blackness Problem” and “The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Links to White Supremacists.”
These stories portray the pro-life movement as dangerous to black communities, warn that racism is woven into the pro-life movement and say that the pro-life movement promotes anti-black rhetoric. (RELATED: ANALYSIS: Infanticide Is A Real Issue, Despite Establishment Media Narrative)
Yet these articles did not touch on questionably racist and pro-eugenics comments made by the founder of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Planned Parenthood credits Sanger with founding the organization in 1916 when she opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in New York City. Authorities raided the clinic nine days after it opened, shut it down, and charged Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne and activist Fania Mindell for sharing birth control information. Sanger reportedly spent 30 days in jail after refusing to pay her fine.
She opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in Manhattan in 1923 and incorporated the American Birth Control League, organizations that reportedly merged to form the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger Targeted Black Communities With Birth Control