As I mentioned a few weeks ago in my weekly column, the global war against baby girls is not just a phenomenon found abroad. In the United States sex ratios at birth for the Chinese-American population, the Japanese-American population, and the Filipino-American population, and for the Asian-American population as a whole are out of kilter.
Few government officials even admit there is a problem, much less attempt to protect these vulnerable children. But Arizona is taking a stand:
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on Tuesday signed into law a controversial bill that makes the state the first in the nation to outlaw abortions performed on the basis of the race or gender of the fetus.
The move comes as anti-abortion groups across the nation try to seize on gains made by political conservatives during the November elections, seeking enactment of new state laws to further restrict abortions.
Under the new Arizona statute, doctors and other medical professionals would face felony charges if they could be shown to have performed abortions for the purposes of helping parents select their offspring on the basis of gender or race.
The women having such abortions would not be penalized.
State legislators have said no such law exists anywhere else in the nation.
The practical effect will likely be negligible—few parents will openly admit that they are aborting a child because of its gender or race—but it’s a symbolic victory for the pro-life cause. Good for Arizona.
Oh, and you can probably guess who would be against such a law: The organization that was founded by the minority-despising eugenicist Margaret Sanger.
March 31st, 2011 | 10:13 am
There is something repellent about the constant trashing of Margaret Sanger by some pro-lifers. She was, after all, opposed to abortion. She did not decide Roe v Wade. She does not run Planned Parenthood, nor are her views on race the guiding principles of the organization (no matter how much some insist that abortion is a genocidal plot). It is rather depressing to think that shared contempt for a woman who has been dead 45 years is one of the things pro-lifers use to bond with one another.
I think most people who classify themselves as pro-choice are probably opposed to abortion for sex selection. I certainly am. But you’re not going to build consensus on the issue by engaging in pointless, poisonous rhetoric about what a “minority-despising eugenicist” Margaret Sanger was. She’s irrelevant now. Let go of your hatred.
March 31st, 2011 | 10:54 am
David, is Hitler also irrelevant now? How about Stalin, or Pol Pot? Since they are dead, have their lies no power? Just want all my facts straight so I can stop my opposition to the evil that is, according to you, so pointless and poisonous. The opposition, that is… since the evil is in your version of reality dead and buried with their advocates.
Wow.
March 31st, 2011 | 11:44 am
“In the United States sex ratios at birth for the Chinese-American population, the Japanese-American population, and the Filipino-American population, and for the Asian-American population as a whole are out of kilter.”
Can you provide a reliable citation for this? Bonus points if it’s specific to Arizona. Because I did some searching around when this legislation was first proposed, and can find nothing linking abortion to sex ratios for live birth in the US. If anything, there have been fewer boys being born than girls vs previous decades, and that’s chalked up to all sorts of reasons, including but not limited to the chemicals in our environment.
March 31st, 2011 | 11:47 am
Sorry, to clarify my last comment, it seems that the sex ratio is typically <1000 boys born as compared to 1000 girls and that's normal, but more recently the "<" for boys has been decreasing.
March 31st, 2011 | 11:50 am
Fresh Iced Tea – Is Protestantism a bad thing because Martin Luther was a near-rabid anti-Semite?
March 31st, 2011 | 11:53 am
ugh again. the “”. Coffee.
March 31st, 2011 | 12:22 pm
Hello, David Nickol,
You wrote:
“But you’re not going to build consensus on the issue by engaging in pointless, poisonous rhetoric about what a “minority-despising eugenicist” Margaret Sanger was. She’s irrelevant now. Let go of your hatred.”
There was one who pointed out that you could judge something by its fruit.
I don’t know anyone who hates Margaret Sanger. I don’t attempt to judge her personal culpability for the unholy, lethal juggernaut she unleashed upon mankind, which was the fruit of her efforts to impose her sick beliefs on others. I can’t judge her. I don’t have to. God has done that perfectly. But unleash it she did and it has taken the lives of millions of innocent human beings.
There will always be those as lost as Sanger was – people who just won’t be able to see what the problem is. There can never be a consensus among those who see the problem and those whose bigotry prevents them from seeing it. If the bigoted could see what everyone else does they wouldn’t be bigots. As it is they live in spiritual darkness, irritated and annoyed at the reaction of others to what they simply cannot see.
March 31st, 2011 | 12:40 pm
If you want to understand Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood, or the role of racism or eugenics in the promotion of contraception and abortion, the best place to start is Linda Gordon’s “The Moral Property of Women.”
Gordon’s a feminist who supports both contraception and abortion, but she’s a solid scholar, and she clarifies the changing rationales and adherents for both. After reading her work, you will understand, for example, the extent to which Sanger was racist and allied to eugenics, but you won’t be able to call her simply a racist or a eugenicist. The reality is more complicated and interesting. It also provides a surer guide to what we face in the present. Anyone who believes that racists and eugenicists currently lead either Planned Parenthood or the reproductive rights movement is sorely mistaken.
March 31st, 2011 | 1:17 pm
“She does not run Planned Parenthood, nor are her views on race the guiding principles of the organization (no matter how much some insist that abortion is a genocidal plot). ”
You mean like Dr. Alveda King?
“I think most people who classify themselves as pro-choice are probably opposed to abortion for sex selection. I certainly am.”
Why? What reasons for destroying unborn children do you find acceptable?
March 31st, 2011 | 1:18 pm
Fresh Iced Tea,
You ask if Hitler is irrelevant now. I would say that most of the time Hitler is brought up (especially in discussions like this on the Internet), he is irrelevant to the discussion. Margaret Sanger was opposed to abortion, and I think she is irrelevant to the discussion of abortion and even of Planned Parenthood.
March 31st, 2011 | 1:22 pm
After reading her work, you will understand, for example, the extent to which Sanger was racist and allied to eugenics, but you won’t be able to call her simply a racist or a eugenicist. The reality is more complicated and interesting.
Sure I will.
I don’t really care why she was a racist or a eugenicist.
She doesn’t deserve any more consideration than any other bloody-handed white supremacist.
March 31st, 2011 | 1:34 pm
Brian English,
To whatever extent Alveda King views abortion as a genocidal plot, she is wrong. Blacks and Hispanics, who have the most abortions, are also growing as a percentage of the population. The reason for the high abortion rate among blacks is that black woman have a much higher rate of unintended or unwanted pregnancies than white women. Put simply, black women conceive many more babies than they want, abort some, and still give birth to enough children to be increasing as a proportion of the population.
You ask: “What reasons for destroying unborn children do you find acceptable?”
It is interesting that you don’t see me as an ally in opposition to abortion for the purpose of sex selection. You apparently aren’t interested in finding areas of agreement to possibly curtail the number of abortions. You just want to pick a fight in the areas where we may disagree.
March 31st, 2011 | 1:38 pm
To make such a law meaningful, you would have to prevent doctors from identifying the gender of the child before birth. It would also be prudent to collect post-abortion data on the gender mix of aborted children. The mix had better reflect a natural balance or something is wrong. Not unlike Title IX, the data defines guilt.
carl
March 31st, 2011 | 1:44 pm
Blake,
Margaret Sanger promoted contraception, not abortion. In what way was she “bloody handed”? Are you sure she was any more of a white supremacist than, say, Abraham Lincoln? She certainly didn’t own slaves, like Thomas Jefferson.
March 31st, 2011 | 2:18 pm
Hello, David Nickol,
You wrote:
“The reason for the high abortion rate among blacks is that black woman have a much higher rate of unintended or unwanted pregnancies than white women. Put simply, black women conceive many more babies than they want, abort some, and still give birth to enough children to be increasing as a proportion of the population.”
To this day, the majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are in minority neighborhoods. So, if your explanation is really as simple as you think it is (which I doubt), an increase in minority populations is still in spite of the best efforts of PP to implement the eugenics-based policies of their founder, Margaret Sanger. Are the Blacks and Hispanics targeted by PP supposed to “not mind” being targeted because PP hasn’t been as successful as was intended by their founder?
I am sure many employed by PP have no idea of its racist-eugenics roots. That doesn’t mean those roots aren’t verifiable. They are. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t evident that those roots drive the policies of the organization to this day. It is evident to anyone who takes the time to look into the matter.
March 31st, 2011 | 3:11 pm
“The reason for the high abortion rate among blacks is that black woman have a much higher rate of unintended or unwanted pregnancies than white women.”
So that’s the entire explanation for why blacks make up 12% of the population but have about 33% of the abortions? And are the locations of Planned Parenthood clinics just a result of being able to get great deals on real estate in minority areas?
“It is interesting that you don’t see me as an ally in opposition to abortion for the purpose of sex selection. You apparently aren’t interested in finding areas of agreement to possibly curtail the number of abortions. You just want to pick a fight in the areas where we may disagree.”
On what basis can pro-choicers object to sex-selection abortions? If the mother’s choice is all that matters, what business is it of yours what reasoning she used in making her choice?
March 31st, 2011 | 3:32 pm
Blake,
“I don’t really care why she was a racist or a eugenicist. She doesn’t deserve any more consideration than any other bloody-handed white supremacist”
To some extent, most white Americans are racists, and that was even truer in Sanger’s day than ours. There’s a significant difference among kinds of racism: The Klan might be the poster child of racism but Citizens’ Councils are a softer version. And as David points out, Lincoln and Jefferson were also racists but of a much softer type. So, too, were Kennedy and LBJ. Strom Thurmond was obviously of a harder type, except in bed.
Sanger had black friends and allies and reviled abortion, so her racism and eugenics were not simple white supremacy. Her positions were more complicated than that.
Planned Parenthood has addressed some common claims concerning Sanger here (http://www.plannedparenthoodnj.org/library/topic/contraception/margaret_sanger). I haven’t checked all of them out, but the ones I have are solid.
—
Harry,
“To this day, the majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are in minority neighborhoods.”
A study in January found that 63% of their clinics are located where most residents are non-Hispanic white, 12% where most are Hispanic, and 9% where most are black. Most of their clientele is uninsured, and most go there for pap smears, contraception, etc. They serve the poor. Something like 60% of all women having abortions already have a child.
“I am sure many employed by PP have no idea of its racist-eugenics roots. That doesn’t mean those roots aren’t verifiable. They are. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t evident that those roots drive the policies of the organization to this day.”
I encourage you to read Gordon’s book. She describes the changing rationales and driving forces.
The pro-life movement needs to make sure we’re arguing against the right thing and not distorting the opposition. It doesn’t make any sense for us to claim that Planned Parenthood is racist if it isn’t true. The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in order to protect slavery, but I wouldn’t claim that Southern Baptists are racist or that the racism that gave birth to it still drives the organization today.
March 31st, 2011 | 4:38 pm
Brian,
You say: “So that’s the entire explanation for why blacks make up 12% of the population but have about 33% of the abortions?”
Yes, the unintended pregnancy rate totally explains why there are so many abortions among blacks. The important question is WHY the unintended pregnancy rate is so high among black women. Here are the statistics:
• White women have 35 unintended pregnancies per thousand women and 11 abortions per 1000 women.
• Hispanic women have 78 unintended pregnancies per 1000 women and 28 abortions per thousand women.
• Black women have 98 unintended pregnancies per 1000 women and 50 abortions per 1000 women.
When the rate of unintended pregnancies is 180% (2.8 times) higher in one group (black women) than in another group (white women), it should be no surprise that that group has a much higher abortion rate.
You ask: “And are the locations of Planned Parenthood clinics just a result of being able to get great deals on real estate in minority areas?”
As Michael has noted, a survey of ALL abortion providers (not just Planned Parenthood) revealed that they are not primarily located in minority neighborhoods. Black women are not getting abortions because abortion clinics are more conveniently located for them. They are getting abortions because they are conceiving many more babies than they want to give birth to. Now, racism may ultimately be one of the reasons black women find themselves in situations (such as poverty) where abortion is more likely. But the high rate of abortions among black women is not a result of their being “targeted” by Planned Parenthood. It is the result of a high rate of unintended pregnancy.
March 31st, 2011 | 4:57 pm
“When the rate of unintended pregnancies is 180% (2.8 times) higher in one group (black women) than in another group (white women), it should be no surprise that that group has a much higher abortion rate.”
How do you define an unintended pregnancy?
“Sanger had black friends and allies and reviled abortion, so her racism and eugenics were not simple white supremacy.”
She did hate “inferior” white people as well, so you do have a point there.
March 31st, 2011 | 6:30 pm
Hello, Michael,
You wrote:
“A study in January found that 63% of their clinics are located where most residents are non-Hispanic white, 12% where most are Hispanic, and 9% where most are black.”
Whose study? According to Dr. Clenard Childress, 78 percent of PP clinics are in minority neighborhoods.
One can learn about Dr. Childress here:
http://www.blackgenocide.org/director.html
His claim of 78 percent can be found here:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hughes/sharon170.htm
As for your remark about Southern Baptists, whatever their past sins may be, they are not currently working to reduce the minority population as is Planned Parenthood.
If you haven’t seen it, watch the documentary Maafa 21. You will find in very enlightening.
March 31st, 2011 | 7:41 pm
Brian English:
You ask: “How do you define an unintended pregnancy?”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:
An unintended pregnancy is a pregnancy that is either mistimed or unwanted at the time of conception. It is a core concept in understanding the fertility of populations and the unmet need for contraception. Unintended pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of morbidity for women, and with health behaviors during pregnancy that are associated with adverse effects. For example, women with an unintended pregnancy may delay prenatal care, which may affect the health of the infant. Women of all ages may have unintended pregnancies, but some groups, such as teens, are at a higher risk.
In 2001, approximately one-half of pregnancies in the United States were unintended (Finer 2006, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health), and the United States has set a national goal of decreasing unintended pregnancies to 30% by 2010.
March 31st, 2011 | 9:10 pm
harry,
You ask: “Whose study? According to Dr. Clenard Childress, 78 percent of PP clinics are in minority neighborhoods.”
Might it be that the best source of data on where Planned Parenthood clinics are located would not be the founder of blackgenocide.org?
I looked up all the Planned Parenthood clinics in the state of New York. There are 68 of them. Then I took the zip code of each and looked up the census data at
http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en
Here are the results, with the numbers following the zip code being the percentage of the white population followed by a slash followed by the percentage of the black population. I rounded to whole numbers.
NY 13367 98/1
NY 12883 98/1
NY 14224 98/1
NY 12832 98/0
NY 13856 98/0
NY 11930 97/2
NY 14843 97/2
NY 14424 97/1
NY 13617 97/1
NY 12801 97/1
NY 13350 97/1
NY 13815 97/1
NY 13421 97/1
NY 12983 97/1
NY 14891 97/1
NY 11795 97/0
NY 12043 96/2
NY 13838 96/1
NY 11787 96/1
NY 14830 95/2
NY 12866 94/3
NY 12065 94/2
NY 14304 94/2
NY 14120 94/2
NY 14626 93/3
NY 12010 93/2
NY 10509 93/2
NY 12095 92/5
NY 11758 92/5
NY 14020 92/4
NY 13820 92/4
NY 13901 91/5
NY 10924 90/6
NY 13440 90/6
NY 13601 90/5
NY 13669 89/7
NY 13502 88/8
NY 11743 88/6
NY 12901 86/5
NY 12401 85/9
NY 11772 85/5
NY 12180 83/10
NY 12534 82/12
NY 11542 81/6
NY 14850 80/5
NY 14901 78/17
NY 12953 76/17
NY 10940 75/12
NY 11901 74/20
NY 14301 74/19
NY 10012 73/3
NY 12701 69/2
NY 13210 65/22
NY 12601 63/27
NY 11201 63/21
NY 12550 61/22
NY 10301 57/24
NY 14214 56/38
NY 10977 51/33
NY 10607 50/33
NY 10701 43/29
NY 12206 42/48
NY 12307 42/43
NY 11550 28/51
NY 10451 19/46
NY 10550 18/69
NY 10801 18/69
NY 14605 17/59
If a minority neighborhood is defined as one with more blacks than whites, then the last 7 on the list count as minority neighborhoods. If a minority neighborhood is defined as one where the percentage of blacks is over 16 percent (the percentage of blacks in the State of New York), then 20 out of 68 count as minority neighborhoods. It is clear merely from glancing at this list that Planned Parenthood, in New York State at least, has the vast majority of its clinics very predominantly white neighborhoods.
April 1st, 2011 | 12:18 am
Hello, David Nickol,
You didn’t tell me whose study.
Clenard Childress has looked into the matter as carefully as Planned Parenthood has, I am sure. Could it be the study you refer to was a PP study?
While your method of doing a quick study was creative, I think an entire zip code would be too large of an area to give one an indication of the ethnicity of the area immediately surrounding a PP clinic.
April 1st, 2011 | 6:20 am
To some extent, most white Americans are racists, and that was even truer in Sanger’s day than ours. There’s a significant difference among kinds of racism: The Klan might be the poster child of racism but Citizens’ Councils are a softer version. And as David points out, Lincoln and Jefferson were also racists but of a much softer type. So, too, were Kennedy and LBJ. Strom Thurmond was obviously of a harder type, except in bed.
Well, we all may be racist, but not all of us wrote books urging the policies that led to tens of thousands of American citizens being sterilized against their will, without their consent, and sometimes without even their knowledge.
Not all of us crusaded on behalf of “racial purity”, or advocated putting people in “camps”.
Lots of people are racist, but Sanger should be remembered for her actions, not her beliefs. Her crusades are directly responsible for “paupers” and “illiterates” being “diagnosed” as “unfit” – just like she wanted.
Why would she be any more deserving of sympathetic revisionism than any other supremacist? She’s probably responsible for more real human suffering and death than any KKK terrorist – if, of course, you count babies.
If it weren’t for people like her, there would be no question as to whether babies would count when we tally suffering. One of her “greatest” achievements was her extreme cleverness in finding words to turn ordinary people into things that aren’t quite human and don’t deserve basic human rights.
April 1st, 2011 | 9:31 am
harry,
You say: “Clenard Childress has looked into the matter as carefully as Planned Parenthood has, I am sure.”
What makes you sure? Can you tell me how Clenard Childress arrived at his numbers? What was his definition of a minority neighborhood?
April 1st, 2011 | 11:35 am
“It is a core concept in understanding the fertility of populations and the unmet need for contraception.”
What is an unmet need for contraception? Are there really people wandering around the streets today who are unaware of the existence of contraception and where they can obtain it?
April 1st, 2011 | 11:52 am
Mr. Nickol, what do you think Justice Ginsburg meant when she said the following: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html?pagewanted=print
April 1st, 2011 | 12:28 pm
Some information on Planned Parenthood from Mike Pence:
Planned Parenthood clinics focus mainly on abortion — and because money is fungible, there is no way to fund the useful services without freeing up money for the organization to spend on abortion. In 2009, the group made only 977 adoption referrals and cared for only 7,021 prenatal clients, but performed a record 332,278 abortions. In other words, a pregnant woman entering a Planned Parenthood clinic was 42 times more likely to have an abortion than to either receive prenatal care or be referred for adoption. Planned Parenthood recently made plain the centrality of abortion to its mission by mandating that every one of its affiliates have at least one clinic that performs abortions within the next two years.
April 1st, 2011 | 12:30 pm
Harry,
“Whose study? According to Dr. Clenard Childress, 78 percent of PP clinics are in minority neighborhoods”
As the exchange with David indicates, we’ve got a case of dueling numbers here. My numbers come from Guttmacher; yours from Childress. It matters how minority and neighborhood are defined. As you point out, you think zip code is too large, but we don’t know how Guttmacher or Childress defined neighborhood. So, unless someone does more digging, we’re at a draw here.
But we can talk about the point of the numbers. You want to use them as evidence that Planned Parenthood is racist and part of some genocidal plot. I think those claims are untrue now and misrepresent the past. I think the case against abortion is strong enough on its own merits that we don’t have to distort the record.
“As for your remark about Southern Baptists, whatever their past sins may be, they are not currently working to reduce the minority population as is Planned Parenthood”
That’s exactly my point. Organizations change. Racism and eugenics are part of Planned Parenthood’s history but not its present, just like Southern Baptists have left their racism behind. If you want to claim that Planned Parenthood is racist, use evidence from today. Blacks are having more abortions and unintended pregnancies. Why? It’s not because abortion clinics are nearby. Most of these women are single mothers. What has broken these lives and made them think young life so expendable? That’s the real question.
“If you haven’t seen it, watch the documentary Maafa 21. You will find in very enlightening”
I have seen it, and I thought it made use of weak arguments and conspiracy theory. Some blacks like to claim that racist conspiracies are behind every ill in their community. The film offers just another conspiracy theory. Abortion is bad enough that we don’t have to accept a conspiracy theory just because it is anti-abortion.
—
Blake,
“Well, we all may be racist, but not all of us wrote books urging the policies that led to tens of thousands of American citizens being sterilized against their will, without their consent, and sometimes without even their knowledge”
Yes, Sanger was wrong to promote sterilization, but observe that race was not the issue. She wanted to sterilize idiots, the insane, criminals, and other physical or social misfits. Her views are absolutely wrong, but some state governments still castrate sex offenders.
“Not all of us crusaded on behalf of “racial purity”, or advocated putting people in “camps”
She didn’t campaign for racial purity in the ordinary sense. She did want to purify the human race by preventing idiots, the insane, etc., from breeding and therefore producing more. I’m not aware of any proposal to place people in camps.
“Her crusades are directly responsible for “paupers” and “illiterates” being “diagnosed” as “unfit” – just like she wanted”
Is that still happening? And again, notice that she is not being racist in seeing the poor as unfit. Prejudice against the poor differs from racism. It’s not any less ugly, but it is different.
“Why would she be any more deserving of sympathetic revisionism than any other supremacist? She’s probably responsible for more real human suffering and death than any KKK terrorist – if, of course, you count babies”
Well, I’m not being revisionist at all, just accurate. And it’s odd that you claim she is racist when your examples are about health. A eugenicist who targets mental and physical health differs from one who targets race. They’re both wrong but in different ways.
“If it weren’t for people like her, there would be no question as to whether babies would count when we tally suffering.”
She was against abortion.
“One of her “greatest” achievements was her extreme cleverness in finding words to turn ordinary people into things that aren’t quite human and don’t deserve basic human rights”
You’re certainly right about that, though she would not have listed that as her greatest achievement. She thought her greatest achievement was giving women the information they needed to control when and whether they would have children.
—
Mike,
“what do you think Justice Ginsburg meant when she said the following: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
I think Ginsburg’s statement has been misinterpreted. It is easy to misread the line because Ginsburg talks like a lawyer, using passive constructions and failing to provide clear pronoun referents. So you have to back up and read the context. Earlier in the interview, Ginsburg explains that she believes that “government has no business making that choice [abortion] for a woman.” She was worried when Roe came out that it “was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion,” and she feared that Medicaid funding carried the risk of “coercing women into having abortions when they don’t really want them.”
So the question is, why was Ginsburg worried that Roe was going to force some women to have abortions they didn’t want? Because some of the supporters of Roe were concerned “about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want too many of.” This is the sentence some people like to pluck out as evidence that Ginsburg is part of some eugenics-loving elite, when it is quite clear that Ginsburg believes in the individual woman’s right to decide without the government telling women either to have an abortion or to not have one.
I’m not happy that Ginsburg supports abortion rights, but I am happy that she defended women from any government attempt to force them to have an abortion. In the same interview, she’s proud of her litigation of the Struck case, which occurred before Roe. In that case, the Air Force was trying to force a female officer to have an abortion on base.
April 1st, 2011 | 1:07 pm
Brian English:
You say: “In 2009, the group made only 977 adoption referrals and cared for only 7,021 prenatal clients, but performed a record 332,278 abortions.”
There is another way of looking at what Planned Parenthood did in 2009, and that is to check out their annual report. You will find the following information:
Total Services = 10,943,609
• Contraception 35%
• Sexually Transmitted Diseases / Infections (STD/STI) Testing and Treatment 34%
• Cancer screening and Prevention 17%
• Other women’s Health Services 10%
• Abortion Services 3%
• Other Services 1%
There is no getting away from the fact that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the country, but in terms of the number of clients they serve, abortion is a small part of the operation.
April 1st, 2011 | 1:08 pm
Michael:
Justice Ginsburg’s statement is not a statement of her support of eugenics. However, it is a true statement about the motives of many who supported Roe: the fears of overpopulation, particularly those populations (i.e. those mired deep in poverty, a disproportionate number of which are minorities) that “too many of” they thought would cause further misery. While a convincing argument can be made that racism was not a motivation, one cannot make a convincing argument that “eliminating the birth of an unwanted child who would add to the population” was not a motive. This is, of course, using abortion as a form of birth control, which is abhorrent.
April 1st, 2011 | 1:09 pm
Hello, Michael,
You wrote:
“You want to use them as evidence that Planned Parenthood is racist and part of some genocidal plot. I think those claims are untrue now and misrepresent the past.”
A few sentences later you wrote:
“Racism and eugenics are part of Planned Parenthood’s history but not its present …”
So, such claims misrepresent the past, yet they are part of PP’s history …
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.
April 1st, 2011 | 2:51 pm
JGB,
“one cannot make a convincing argument that “eliminating the birth of an unwanted child who would add to the population” was not a motive. This is, of course, using abortion as a form of birth control, which is abhorrent”
I agree that abortion for whatever reason is abhorrent, and I agree that Ginsburg is right that some who supported Roe wanted to control population growth. I hope you don’t think I was trying to argue otherwise.
I was trying to argue against the misinterpretation of Ginsburg’s statement as implying that she promotes abortion because she fears overpopulation or the wrong people having children. Ginsburg wants women to have the option of aborting a child they don’t want. Lots of people agree with Ginsburg. They’re wrong, of course, but I don’t think most people who support abortion are racist or fear overpopulation, and I don’t think most abortion rights organizations, including Planned Parenthood, are racist or fear overpopulation.
Most abortion supporters are focused on women’s right to decide what to do with their own bodies. That’s the logic we have to attack. Arguing that Planned Parenthood is racist genocide just makes us look silly.
—
Harry,
“So, such claims misrepresent the past, yet they are part of PP’s history”
I understand your confusion. You think those two statements are contradictory and thus deceptive. I was instead trying to make a distinction I’ve been making all along. To say that racism is “part of” Planned Parenthood’s history is not the same as saying that Planned Parenthood “is racist.” You can find racism in just about every organization in the early twentieth century, but that doesn’t mean those organizations were racist.
Sanger’s primary motivation was to give women ways of controlling when or whether they had children. She liked contraceptives and hated abortion. In promoting contraception, she went along with and agreed with those eugenicists who wanted to prevent the mentally and physically unhealthy from reproducing. In the meantime, she rejected those eugenicists who wanted to eliminate or reduce whole races.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”
Although I understand your reasons for being confused by the apparent contradiction in my statements, there are better ways of asking for clarity than accusing me of deception. I don’t appreciate that one bit.
April 1st, 2011 | 3:42 pm
“There is no getting away from the fact that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the country, but in terms of the number of clients they serve, abortion is a small part of the operation.”
Planned Parenthood skews the statistics by counting each time they hand out a condom as contraception. Abortion is what makes Planned Parenthood what it is. There are many other facilities that provide the same services other than abortion, and under the Pence Amendment, the money taken from Planned Parenthood will go to those facilities. How can you be opposed to that?
April 1st, 2011 | 3:56 pm
Hi again, Michael,
You wrote:
“You think those two statements are contradictory and thus deceptive.”
Actually, your statements weren’t deceptive at all. On the contrary, they were very revealing.
You wrote:
“You can find racism in just about every organization in the early twentieth century, but that doesn’t mean those organizations were racist.”
Of course it means they were racist. Racism was not politically incorrect in the early twentieth century and many organizations were blatantly and unashamedly racist — shockingly so by today’s standards. You are slipping. Your contradictions are now packed in the same sentence. You want to space them out a little more.
You wrote:
” … [Margaret Sanger ] rejected those eugenicists who wanted to eliminate or reduce whole races.”
I don’t know where you are coming from, but here on planet Earth there was a Margaret Sanger who definitely and verifiably worked with eugenicists who wanted to reduce the population of whole races. This is very well documented in the documentary Maafa 21.
Come on, Michael. Be frank with us. What is the motivation for your valiant (but unsuccessful ) efforts to put lipstick on a pig?
April 1st, 2011 | 4:35 pm
harry,
You say: “Come on, Michael. Be frank with us. What is the motivation for your valiant (but unsuccessful ) efforts to put lipstick on a pig?”
Michael has been writing some of the most intelligent, dispassionate, and balanced comments in this thread that I have had the good fortune to read in any Internet discussion in a long while. He has made it clear he doesn’t approve of Planned Parenthood as an abortion provider. He cites and recommends Linda Gordon’s “The Moral Property of Women,” and you cite Maafa 21 and the founder of blackgenocide.org. On his side, this has been a model of what the exchange of ideas should be like. And yet you accuse him of being dishonest and having ulterior motives for refusing to agree with you that Planned Parenthood is racist. You really owe him more courtesy than you are exhibiting.
April 1st, 2011 | 5:33 pm
I’m so angry at this moment. I want to know why some pro-lifers need to lie. Don’t they know how this hurts us?
I just noticed that Carter provided a link when he described Sanger as a “minority-despising eugenicist.” So I followed the link to Diane Dew’s site, which damns Sanger “in her own words.” The first quotation, which serves as an epigraph to the rest, says, “The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
I assumed that the quotation referred to abortion and was horrified. Then I looked up the sentence in the book that Dew cited, and it turns out that Sanger wasn’t writing about abortion or infanticide at all.
She’s making the case that large families damage not themselves but the larger society. She thinks large families become more impoverished, leading to high infant mortality. After giving the numbers for babies dying, she then turns to the children that survive and finds that they have lower health rates.
That’s what she means when she says that it would have been more merciful had the children died when they were younger than suffer as they grew older.
Sanger’s logic is all wrong, and I doubt her research was very solid, despite her quotation of other studies, but the quotation doesn’t mean what Dew wants readers to think it means. Maybe Dew isn’t lying, but surely she knows that readers will put this quotation in a very different context than Sanger intended. I don’t know what I’ll find behind the other quotations Dew cites, but right now, I’m sorely disappointed and angry.
—
Harry,
“Of course it means they were racist. Racism was not politically incorrect in the early twentieth century and many organizations were blatantly and unashamedly racist — shockingly so by today’s standards. You are slipping. Your contradictions are now packed in the same sentence.”
Please see my earlier comments to Blake concerning the different kinds of racism found in the early part of the century. Because words like racist are so very inflammatory, I think it’s especially important to be precise in distinguishing what kinds of racism are present in any given case. Otherwise, the word is just a sledgehammer used to bash anyone you don’t like.
“This is very well documented in the documentary Maafa 21”
I think it is poorly documented.
“Be frank with us. What is the motivation for your valiant (but unsuccessful ) efforts to put lipstick on a pig?”
I agree that Sanger is a pig, but I think it’s important to distinguish one kind of pig from another. I can see that you don’t.
As for my motivation, I think I’ve expressed it. What puzzles me is your need to suspect it. Argue with my facts or my logic, but I’m not interested in trading insults.
—
David,
Thanks for your kind words. In another mood I’d ask you to explain how you can support being pro-choice and the extent to which you do, but I’ve had enough for one day from “friends” like Harry who’ll join me in voting against abortion rights but can’t be bothered with good faith discussion.
April 1st, 2011 | 5:59 pm
Michael Then I looked up the sentence in the book that Dew cited, and it turns out that Sanger wasn’t writing about abortion or infanticide at all.
Sir, you are either dishonest or have a reading comprehension problem. Here is the quote in context:
Sanger is saying that since life is so bad for poor children that infanticide is the most “merciful” choice.
Sanger was a propagandist who wanted to control women—and preserve the white race—by encouraging the widespread use of contraceptives. She never said that abortion shouldn’t be allowed—only that it would be unnecessary if women had access to contraceptives. We all know that turned out to be a lie.
April 1st, 2011 | 6:54 pm
Hi, Michael,
You are quite right about the undesirability of the discussion descending into a sophomoric exchange of insults. I don’t think that has happened, but I will be more careful in how I make my points from here on out.
Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest abortion provider. Actually, the term “abortion provider” is euphemistic; it sounds like we are talking about some kind of legitimate medical procedure. Taking the life of the child in the womb used to be against the law precisely because doing so is not legitimate at all.
Doing so is a violation of the “First, do no harm” ethic of Hippocrates, which was the ethical guide of the medical profession for thousands of years. The Hippocratic Oath explicitly prohibits abortion.
Doing so also violates the ethic that was the foundation of Western Civilization. And what was that? Here is an excerpt from an editorial, A New Ethic for Medicine and Society by Dr. Malcolm Watts, that appeared in the September, 1970 issue of California Medicine. I think it fairly sums up what that ethic was as applied to government and medicine:
Dr. Watts seems to understand the serious ramifications of discarding the old ethic and substituting it with a new one. He continues with:
Curiously, Dr. Watts admits that deception will be necessary in order to successfully replace the old ethic with a new one:
Deception is indeed necessary for society to tolerate what the nation’s largest “abortion provider” routinely does: Brutally dismember innocent human beings. Lies and murder. That is what Planned Parenthood is all about.
So, even if Margaret Sanger had been an ardent enemy of racism and eugenics I would still doubt those who attempt to put lipstick on the Planned Parenthood pig. As it was though, Sanger paved the way for the thinking of the likes of Dr. Watts, putting “relative rather than absolute values on such things as human lives.” The relative value of Blacks was less than that of others according to Sanger. She didn’t just think so, she put that belief into practice, as the organization she founded does to this day. Her sick values are still being rammed down society’s throat by a handful of people who are a self-appointed “elite” group, certain they know better than the rest of us. They strive to “better” the human race. Planned Parenthood does their lethal dirty work.
April 1st, 2011 | 8:27 pm
Sanger is saying that since life is so bad for poor children that infanticide is the most “merciful” choice.
You seem to think that when do-gooders cause real harm to people, “I only did it for their own good” is somehow an excuse.
Nice, clean people love to talk about how those taking away the basic human rights of those dirty people is “for their own good”, eh?
In the middle ages, it was a theatrical convention for the character of “the vice” to go by a false name. That is the nature of what used to be called vice – Hatred goes by the name of Love, and White Supremacist goes by the name of “I Want What Is Best For Those Unfortunates!”
How many slave owners argued that the slaves were better off enslaved?
(Ok now I’ve got the song “I’m Only Thinking Of Him” from Man of La Mancha stuck in my head…)
Sanger’s beliefs, actions, and the results of those actions were just horrible.
April 2nd, 2011 | 12:11 am
Joe Carter,
You say to Michael, “Sir, you are either dishonest or have a reading comprehension problem. . . . Sanger is saying that since life is so bad for poor children that infanticide is the most ‘merciful’ choice.”
Your reading of Sanger is incorrect.
In the chapter to which you link, Sanger makes the case in paragraph 8 that after the third child, each successive child is more likely to die, with the 12th having only a 40 percent chance of survival.
In paragraph 10, she writes this alarming sentence, “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” It’s meaning may not be clear at first reading, but if you pay careful attention to what has come before and what comes after, it is clear that she is NOT advocating infanticide. Note that she says, “The most merciful thing that THE large family DOES . . . .” If she were advocating infanticide, she would say something like, “The most merciful thing that A large family CAN DO . . . .” Upon careful reading, it seems clear to me that she is saying not that infanticide is the most merciful choice a large family can make, but rather that THE LARGE FAMILY KILLS. She is not advocating infanticide at all. She is arguing that people should not have large families because they result in the deaths of children.
So she’s saying the large family kills and also, somewhat melodramatically, that killing is the most merciful thing it does. Why? Because (she argues) the survivors from the large family are destined to wind up as inmates in jails or insane asylums, as child laborers in factories, as prostitutes, etc. It may strike us as hyperbole (and it may very well have been), but remember she is writing in 1920.
You said to Michael: “She never said that abortion shouldn’t be allowed—only that it would be unnecessary if women had access to contraceptives. We all know that turned out to be a lie.”
Actually, in another chapter of the work we are discussing, she says, “While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.” In her 1938 autobiography she says, “To each group we explained what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun.” So she opposed abortion not just because it was “unnecessary,” and not just because it was dangerous to women, but because it was the taking of a life.
When you say that she opposed abortion only because it was unnecessary and that “[w]e all know that turned out to be a lie,” you give the impression that Sanger herself was lying. If that was your intention, it is unfair to Sanger, who could not predict the future and spent her whole life advocating only contraception and never abortion. There is absolutely no reason to claim Sanger ever advocated either abortion or infanticide, and it is untrue and irrational to blame her for legalized abortion in the United States today.
April 2nd, 2011 | 1:16 am
Joe,
“Sanger is saying that since life is so bad for poor children that infanticide is the most “merciful” choice”
I think you have misread the passage. The thesis of the chapter is, as you have quoted, that large families are “the most serious evil of our times.” This notion is obviously wrong, but, looking at the photographs of Jacob Riis, one might understand why she might have made the mistake. The start of the chapter makes claims like large families are to blame for prostitution because families that are too large to care for require daughters to sell themselves in order to help feed the family. Her target in this chapter is to show how large families create death, misery, and crime, not to argue for infanticide.
In the passage you quote, she wants to argue that large families are a health risk, killing infants, killing children under 5, and then weakening the health of children over 5 so much that they might have preferred dying as infants than living in the misery their large family condemned them to. That is what she means when she says that “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” She doesn’t believe that large families intend to kill their infants but that the lack of birth control is tantamount to killing infants.
If you’re still having trouble buying my analysis, read the preface to Michael Perry’s edition of Sanger’s Pivot of Civilization.” It’s available on Google books. On pages 8-9, he argues that Sanger was probably for abortion but hid her real views because it would have hurt her propaganda effort. If he’s right, then why would Sanger promote infanticide, which was and remains a harder sell? Perry’s purpose in editing the edition is to show how liberal apologists for Sanger have made her look better than she actually was. He wants to show just how evil Sanger was, but even he doesn’t suggest that she promotes infanticide.
Perry also criticizes two liberal accounts of Sanger, one by David Kennedy and another by Linda Gordon. On page 10, he criticizes most people for “muddling” together the ideas of race suiciders, eugenicists, social Darwinists, and birth controllers with the result that “some of the worst offenders are uncriticized while the more benign are targeted as bigots.” In short, he wants to make the kinds of distinctions I’m getting shot down for.
His beef against Kennedy and Gordon is that they attribute a quote to her that comes from someone else. It is “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.” Perry says, “Anyone who knew Sanger would know the first clause would never pass her lips.” Why? Because she didn’t care about so-called race suicide. She simply didn’t believe any woman should have a child she didn’t want.
Sanger’s record is bad enough that we don’t have to exaggerate it to make it seem worse.
—
Harry,
“You are quite right about the undesirability of the discussion descending into a sophomoric exchange of insults. I don’t think that has happened, but I will be more careful in how I make my points from here on out”
Thanks. I appreciate it.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to argue in the rest of this post. You seem mostly concerned to explain that abortion is evil and that Planned Parenthood provides abortions. I agree with both arguments. I thought the debate was about how much influence Sanger’s views still had over the organization and whether the organization was racist and eugenicist in orientation. I see you mentioning these issues in the last paragraph but not replying to what I’ve said or advancing new arguments.
—
Blake,
“You seem to think that when do-gooders cause real harm to people, “I only did it for their own good” is somehow an excuse”
Which “you” are you addressing? You’ve pulled your quotation from Carter, but surely you don’t think he’s arguing for infanticide? I’m not defending infanticide, and I don’t think Sanger was either. So who are you arguing against?
“White Supremacist goes by the name of “I Want What Is Best For Those Unfortunates!”
I know plenty of people, by the way, who believe that whites are smarter and more civilized than blacks, but who are against the Klan, against segregation, against abortion, and against contraception. One of them is my mother, who nevertheless had my severely learning disabled brother sterilized before he married so she wouldn’t have to raise his children. Distinctions among these different things matter. You may want to dismiss Sanger as merely a supremacist, but there are different kinds of supremacist, and neither contraception nor abortion is about white supremacy today. You’re fighting yesterday’s battle.
April 2nd, 2011 | 6:36 am
Blake,
“You seem to think that when do-gooders cause real harm to people, “I only did it for their own good” is somehow an excuse”
Sorry, was meant in response to anyone arguing that Sanger somehow needs to be “understood”.
I am sure that all white supremacists, racists, and people who advocate taking human rights away from people in the name of building Utopia, are all perfectly nice people whose motives are either “good” or “understandable”, if you look at them just right. What I don’t get is why we are obligated to look at them just right, in order to make bad people into sympathetic people.
April 2nd, 2011 | 9:31 am
Hi, Michael,
I wrote:
You wrote:
and you wrote:
Your assessment of Maafa 21 indicated to me that it was futile to present you with facts-based arguments regarding Planned Parenthood. Unlike unfounded conspiracy theories, the facts presented in Maafa 21 are documented as they are presented. This was necessary because of the disturbing nature of the truth it reveals. Maafa 21 demonstrates that Planned Parenthood is “racist and eugenicist in orientation” and that the eugenics movement is alive and well. Anyone who views it with an open mind will see that there is far, far more here than the tendency of some Blacks to “claim that racist conspiracies are behind every ill in their community,” as you put it. Your summing it up that way reveals to anyone who has actually seen it that you have already made up your mind and nothing is going to change it. To understand how you sound to those who have seen it, try to imagine someone going through the Holocaust Museum for hours and then glibly dismissing its documentation of the Holocaust with “Some Jews like to claim that …”
April 3rd, 2011 | 12:19 am
Blake,
“Sorry, was meant in response to anyone arguing that Sanger somehow needs to be “understood”.”
That’s ok. I don’t think anyone is trying to make that argument. The two questions are what kind of racist or eugenicist was Sanger and whether Planned Parenthood remains racist or eugenicist.
—
Harry,
“Your assessment of Maafa 21 indicated to me that it was futile to present you with facts-based arguments regarding Planned Parenthood.”
Just because we assess the film differently doesn’t mean that you are interested in facts and I’m not. Throughout this thread, I’ve pointed to facts and presented arguments based on them. For example, I disagree with how Dew and Carter interpret a sentence Sanger wrote, but I’ve pointed to evidence for my conclusions and so has Carter. At most, only one of us can be right, but we’re both arguing from facts.
“Unlike unfounded conspiracy theories, the facts presented in Maafa 21 are documented as they are presented.”
Most conspiracy theories are chock full of facts. Some of those facts are true, some are misattributed, and some are misinterpreted. What really distinguishes a solid theory from a conspiracy theory is the soundness of how facts are connected. Maafa 21 doesn’t present a plausible way of connecting the facts it presents.
“Your summing it up that way reveals to anyone who has actually seen it that you have already made up your mind and nothing is going to change it”
The other possibility is that I watched it with an open mind, the film’s argument unraveled before me, and I came to the conclusion that it was a weak, conspiracy minded film.
“To understand how you sound to those who have seen it, try to imagine someone going through the Holocaust Museum for hours and then glibly dismissing its documentation of the Holocaust with “Some Jews like to claim that …”
Holocaust deniers usually argue that only a few Jews were killed and that there was no extermination plan. They deny the basic facts of the Holocaust. I don’t deny the basic facts of Maafa 21, which are that the black abortion rate is far higher and that racists and some eugenicists wanted to exterminate blacks. My issue with the film is that it misinterprets those facts, weaving a dark conspiracy out of something much less malevolent and far more dangerous. There’s no elite plotting to destroy black America, but there is instead a widespread callousness toward the value of all human life.
April 3rd, 2011 | 8:07 am
“Sorry, was meant in response to anyone arguing that Sanger somehow needs to be “understood”.”
That’s ok. I don’t think anyone is trying to make that argument. The two questions are what kind of racist or eugenicist was Sanger and whether Planned Parenthood remains racist or eugenicist.
The first argument: sure, absolutely The only people who don’t see it are those who twist themselves in knots to apply a different standard (other than the ones normally used when judging whether someone is racist and/or their eugenicist thoughts involve human rights violations).
The second argument: there are certainly some who are racist and support abortion out of “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” as Judge Ginsburg so eloquently put it
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html?pagewanted=all
But what I find interesting is that the political groups and interests debating this are the ones who usually are the ones who argue that the essence of discrimination can’t be made to rely on proving malicious intent.
Pro-abortion forces are pro-abortion because they claim that discrimination is about “impact” – that is, if something has a disproportionate “impact” on something is how you measure discrimination.
If we are going to use the far more generous standard that something isn’t “racist” or “discriminatory” until and unless you’ve proved malicious intent, then we can throw out every argument about how criminalizing abortion is “discriminatory”, can’t we?
April 3rd, 2011 | 1:39 pm
Hello, Michael,
You wrote:
So, according to you, the real situation is far more dangerous to Blacks than the film indicates, yet not nearly as malevolent as the film indicates; we have an effect that is a source of greater danger to Blacks than the one portrayed in Maafa 21, but that effect has a much less malevolent cause than the one presented in the film.
Tell us about this effect that is “far more dangerous” to Blacks and its not-so-malevolent cause.
Hello, everyone else reading this,
Just get a copy of Maafa 21 and watch it. I believe it can be watched for free online at some web sites — Google it up. Maafa 21 makes it painfully clear that Planned Parenthood was the illegitimate child of an affair between racism and eugenics.
There are those who have seen Maafa 21 who would have you believe that in spite of evidence to the contrary, PP is now an upstanding “citizen” with the best of intentions, untainted by its dark roots. Well, like a tree, PP is stuck with its roots and can’t live apart from their influence. The only reasonable thing to do with the PP “tree” is to chop it down.
And speaking of conspiracy theories, as it is PP can afford to pay people to create the illusion, through a web-presence on discussion sites, that in spite of the damning evidence to the contrary the PP “tree” is somehow living without being influenced by its dark, sick roots. They would have you believe there is no need to be concerned with contemporary PP’s true intentions.
There is, of course, no proof there is an artificially created web-presence of such people, but, if you were taking the heat PP is currently taking, and, like them, were fabulously wealthy in terms of cash and terribly impoverished in terms of morality, what would you do?
Am I the only one to have such a thought as I read some of the “PP is not really all that bad” comments on discussion boards?
April 3rd, 2011 | 2:21 pm
Blake,
I confess that, once again, I am having trouble understanding what you are trying to say. Are you responding to something I’ve said, or just speaking in general? I really don’t know because you don’t identify who you mean when you say “people,” “political groups,” “ones,” or even “pro-abortion groups.” It is hard to discuss something when everything is left so vague. Concrete examples help.
The one concrete example you do give is Ginsburg. As I explained in an earlier post on this thread, Ginsburg, in this quotation, was attacking those groups that supported abortion because they feared overpopulation or because they supported eugenics. Ginsburg, on the other hand, supports abortion because she thinks only women can make choices concerning their own bodies.
People support abortion for lots of different reasons, and abortion rights advocates often find that the reasons their allies support abortion are heinous. But those of us who are pro-life make a grievous mistake when we confuse those reasons and claim that Ginsburg is the same as Sanger or that Sanger is the same as the Klan.
April 3rd, 2011 | 4:37 pm
Blake,
If I understand you (and I am not sure I do), you are basically saying that Planned Parenthood is defended as not being *intentionally* racist by people who would otherwise charge racism without making a distinction between intentional and unintentional racism. So such people are applying a double standard. But it seems to me that this puts you in the strange position of having to say that black women who obtain abortions are racists and black political leaders who support abortion rights (which most do) are racists.
No one, it seems to me, has ever claimed that the high rate of abortion among Hispanic women is due to ethnic hatred of Hispanics. And no one that I know of has ever argued that white women should not have abortions because they may be depriving white American of potential leaders, when in fact, according to the Census Bureau, it is the white population, not the black population, that is in decline:
———-
Non-Hispanic Whites, the slowest growing group, are likely to contribute less and less to the total population growth in this country. Although non-Hispanic Whites make up almost 75 percent of the total population, they would contribute only 35 percent of the total population growth between 1990 and 2000. This percentage of growth would decrease to 23 percent between 2000 and 2010, and 14 percent from 2010 to 2030. The non-Hispanic White population would contribute nothing to population growth after 2030 because it would be declining in size.
According to the middle-series projection, the Black population would increase almost 5 million by 2000, almost 10 million by 2010, and over 20 million by 2030. The Black population would double its present size to 62 million by 2050.
———-
http://www.census.gov/population/www/pop-profile/natproj.html
So we have a growing black population, a shrinking white population, and yet abortion is alleged to be a genocidal plot to exterminate blacks. Of course, you could have an *intentional* plot to exterminate blacks that simply wasn’t effective. But in order for blacks to be being eliminated *unintentionally*, the black population would have to be in actual decline.
It is interesting to note that while this is a Christian web site, no one seems to bring up the possibility that the women who get pregnant unintentionally, who don’t want to keep the babies, and who consequently procure abortions just might bear at least *some* responsibility for their own actions.
It seems to me that the message of organizations like blackgenocide.org and Life Always—to the extent that it is directed to black women—is that they should stop having abortions because it is a threat to their race. Isn’t the true pro-life message to a woman of any color or race that she should not have an abortion because it is the killing of her own son or daughter?
It is as if some in the pro-life movement feel arguments about life are not strong enough or effective enough, so instead of talking about life, they talk about racism.
April 3rd, 2011 | 7:45 pm
From the 1912 online Catholic Encyclopedia article on Eugenics:
———-
Thus the science is divided into positive eugenics and negative. The one encourages parenthood of the fit or worthy, whilst the other discourages parenthood of the unfit or unworthy. Thus eugenics concerns itself largely with selection in marriage and with the exercise of the marital function. Negative eugenics also seeks to eradicate the racial defects of alcohol, venereal disease, lead poisoning, feeble-mindedness, and consumption. But the Church, too, has a doctrine concerning marriage and its use, and also a doctrine and a method of dealing with racial defects. The Church therefore has no fault to find with race culture as such. Rather does she encourage it. But she wishes it carried out on right lines. . . .
The welfare of the State, if seriously threatened by the degenerate, could be better protected by segregation. Therefore the operation [surgical sterilization] is not permissible, except as a necessary means to bodily health, and consequently except for this necessity may not be performed even with the patient’s consent. The Church has never regarded the marriage of degenerates as unlawful in itself: they cannot be deprived of their right without a grave reason. Even eugenists like Dr. Saleeby and Dr. Havelock Ellis disapprove of compulsory surgery. As for compulsory segregation it seems to be both right and good, provided that all due safeguards are taken in respect of the grades of feebleness. . . .
———-
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/16038b.htm
April 4th, 2011 | 5:34 am
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April 4th, 2011 | 11:28 am
Harry,
“Tell us about this effect that is “far more dangerous” to Blacks and its not-so-malevolent cause”
We live in a culture that tries to evade the consequences of sex on both intimacy and conception, that tries to convince itself that life doesn’t begin at conception, and that, in rightly giving women more autonomy and choice than they’ve ever had before, has difficulty recognizing and acting on the recognition that pregnancy must be supported and not terminated.
More specifically, blacks had their families torn apart by slavery, by internal migration, and by segregation. The black church has been valiant and consistent in preaching sexual morality, but the loosening of sexual morality in the general culture has rotted the fragile roots of a culture that has never been given much of a chance to thrive in the US.
The result is that blacks have more to fear from the legacy of racism and from a current culture that fails to value either sexual morality or human life than they do from some shadowy conspiracy of white racists and eugenicists that supposedly haunt the upper reaches of Planned Parenthood without clueing their employees in on the plot.
“There are those who have seen Maafa 21 who would have you believe that in spite of evidence to the contrary, PP is now an upstanding “citizen” with the best of intentions, untainted by its dark roots. Well, like a tree, PP is stuck with its roots and can’t live apart from their influence.”
If you’re referring to me, then you misrepresent my position. I think that the promotion of abortion is never “upstanding.” To keep with your metaphor, I’d say that Planned Parenthood is rooted not in the soil of racism and eugenics but in the soil of the idea that sex can be separated from procreation. The tree was fertilized during its early years by racism and eugenics, but its primary impetus remains birth control. Later in its history, it adopted abortion as a form of birth control.
“And speaking of conspiracy theories, as it is PP can afford to pay people to create the illusion, through a web-presence on discussion sites, that in spite of the damning evidence to the contrary the PP “tree” is somehow living without being influenced by its dark, sick roots.”
Here, you have gone way over the top. Conspiracy theories have a way of generating suspicious thinking. A more likely possibility is that there are lots of people who can distinguish good history from bad history like Maafa 21.
You might read over the article from the Catholic Encyclopedia that David posted. As you can see, its editors recognized the legitimacy of eugenics and believed that the Roman Catholic Church had its own “method of dealing with racial defects.” Thus, the church was also, for a time, fertilized with eugenics. To its great credit, it was never led astray into promoting abortion or even to the prevention of the marriage of the “degenerate.” The editors toy with the idea of “segregating” the unfit from the rest of the population, but the thrust of the article makes it pretty clear that the church can only offer celibacy as an answer to eugenics.
For me, the article reinforces the point that lots of people were attracted to eugenics, even the Roman Catholic Church. Later, lots of those same people dropped it. I think Hitler’s final solution clarified things for a lot of people. Sanger was never primarily motivated by eugenics. Neither was the birth control movement or the later abortion movement. The concerns over conception that animate both movements long predate eugenics, just as the church’s concerns long predate eugenics.
—
David,
“It is interesting to note that while this is a Christian web site, no one seems to bring up the possibility that the women who get pregnant unintentionally, who don’t want to keep the babies, and who consequently procure abortions just might bear at least *some* responsibility for their own actions”
It’s true that the responsibility of not just women but the men that impregnate them has not come up on this thread, but it has on many others.
You didn’t comment on the encyclopedia entry you quoted, but I want to clarify a couple of things about it that might be misleading. When the article mentions “segregation” and “racial defects,” it’s not talking about blacks or other non-white races. It’s talking about the human race. It’s thinking of the defects caused, for example, by lead poisoning, and on that issue, it calls for justice. The segregation it calls for is highly qualified and is not about Jim Crow. It proposes celibacy for the “degenerate,” but it largely stays consistently on point—that we are not to think of people in terms of their “civic worth” but as creatures of God. Because the church thinks of the human in eternal terms, it is steadfast in opposing any compulsory program of sterilization.
Oddly enough in this current debate, both Sanger and Ginsburg also rejected compulsory schemes. The Catholic Encyclopedia even notes that Havelock Ellis rejected compulsory sterilization.
The role of eugenics in the early twentieth century is more complicated and less deeply rooted than some people want to make it seem.
April 4th, 2011 | 2:39 pm
Michael,
Thanks for your comments. The main reason I quoted from the old Catholic Encyclopedia was to show that the Catholic Church (insofar as the encyclopedia represented the Catholic Church) did not condemn eugenics wholesale. And, in fact, there are certain practices that one might associate with eugenics that I think most people today would not find objectionable. For example, the Catholic Church has no objection to genetic counseling for couples who are considering marriage and are concerned they may pass on serious genetic defects to any children they may have. Based on what they find, the couple may choose not to get married. Is this eugenics? Not exactly, but sort of. I would say any effort to reduce the incidence of a heritable genetic disorder in the population is, loosely speaking, an example of eugenics.
Margaret Sanger, although I certainly gasp at some of the things she wrote, is not a moral monster (in my opinion) in the same way that Thomas Jefferson as a slave owner is not a moral monster and a hypocrite. They were people who lived in different eras, and it is necessary to take that into account. I find some of the things that Thomas Aquinas said about Jews to be appalling, but I would not dismiss all of Aquinas on the grounds that he was an anti-Semite.
I am not endorsing the views of Margaret Sanger, and I am not declaring myself in favor of eugenics. I am saying (as you say) these things are not as simple as some make them out to be.
In exploring the topic, I happened across an account of how the Rockefeller Foundation helped develop eugenics programs used by Nazi Germany. Their involvement was quite direct, and it is truly shocking. But few would condemn the Rockefeller Foundation today for that part of their history, appalling as it was.
April 4th, 2011 | 8:18 pm
I am not endorsing the views of Margaret Sanger, and I am not declaring myself in favor of eugenics. I am saying (as you say) these things are not as simple as some make them out to be.
Things are simple because the act of making them simple avoids harm.
If we are going to recognize that “things are not as simple as some make them out to be” for Sanger, are we going to adopt the same doctrine for every other racist?
The danger in redirecting attention away from the victim (or in this case victims), toward the perpetrators is that it tends to make it hard to recognize the distinction: people empathizing with the perpetrator (which is the desired goal) leads naturally to justifying the perpetrator’s behavior.
This is why normally people don’t get into “nuanced psychological portraits” of what makes bad people the way they are until after the ethical questions are resolved. Until that point, any attempt to justify the racist or the eugenicist is tantamount to justifying their behavior.
I’m sure Sanger was a perfectly nice person, when she was with her own kind.
April 4th, 2011 | 11:03 pm
David,
“I would say any effort to reduce the incidence of a heritable genetic disorder in the population is, loosely speaking, an example of eugenics”
Yes, I caught that, and I thought you made a smart point through that example. Read the entry on Torquemada in that encyclopedia. It contains a disheartening echo of debates in our time.
“Margaret Sanger, although I certainly gasp at some of the things she wrote, is not a moral monster (in my opinion) in the same way that Thomas Jefferson as a slave owner is not a moral monster and a hypocrite. They were people who lived in different eras, and it is necessary to take that into account.”
I agree in general, but I’m always a little leery about putting someone too much in their context. Jefferson isn’t a moral monster, but he is something of a hypocrite. He knew slavery was wrong, and he hoped that he had helped create a country that could dispense with it, but he had contemporaries who could take that further step that he couldn’t. Many owners in his generation freed their slaves because slavery contradicted the Revolution. Even Washington freed his slaves after his death, but Jefferson couldn’t bring himself to do either, which makes him no monster but still more accountable than some of his contemporaries.
The Rockefeller story is a nice addition.
—
Blake,
“If we are going to recognize that “things are not as simple as some make them out to be” for Sanger, are we going to adopt the same doctrine for every other racist?”
Sanger promoted birth control for all women, rich and poor, white or black, mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy, physically healthy or physically unhealthy. She worked with black leaders like WEB DuBois and Charles Johnson to promote birth control among blacks regardless of their wealth, poverty, mental or physical fitness.
Why did such prominent leaders cooperate with her? Because they believed birth control would help lead blacks out of poverty.
She did not promote abortion for anyone nor did she promote infanticide.
Can you explain what makes you think she was racist and thus unworthy of any nuance?
April 5th, 2011 | 5:44 am
Sanger promoted birth control for all women, rich and poor, white or black, mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy, physically healthy or physically unhealthy. She worked with black leaders like WEB DuBois and Charles Johnson to promote birth control among blacks regardless of their wealth, poverty, mental or physical fitness.
Why did such prominent leaders cooperate with her?
And here I thought it was because she spoke out so openly about those “people we don’t want to have too many of”.
Oh wait, that was a Supreme Court justice who said that. Sanger was the one who wrote about putting “defective” people in camps, to protect society and to keep them from breeding.
April 5th, 2011 | 11:18 am
Joe Carter,
Great Story. I would have thought this would have made bigger news than it has.
Is there any place to get the stats on Asian-American selective abortion?
Keep up the good work.
Drew
April 5th, 2011 | 12:03 pm
Blake,
“And here I thought it was because she spoke out so openly about those “people we don’t want to have too many of””
Produce a statement by Sanger in which she explains that she doesn’t want more blacks in this world. You can find plenty of statements by her in which she explains that she doesn’t want more “defectives” in the world, but “defectives” come in every color.
As David pointed out earlier, the Roman Catholic Church was also concerned about “defectives,” and so if you’re going to complain about Sanger’s ancillary interest in eugenics, you’d better talk about the Roman Catholic Church’s ancillary interest in eugenics. The idea that “defectives” should be placed in camps so they couldn’t breed is what the Roman Catholic Church called “segregation.”
“Oh wait, that was a Supreme Court justice who said that.”
No, it wasn’t. As I explain above, Ginsburg was concerned first and foremost with protecting women from government intrusion. Their body, their choice. In the quotation you cite, she was attacking those eugenicists who would deprive women of their choice.
I understand how much it would please you to have Sanger be an out-and-out racist and to have Ginsburg be an out-and-out eugenicist, but they weren’t. The truth matters, and the truth about abortion is ugly enough that you don’t need to lie.
April 5th, 2011 | 10:27 pm
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the 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.”
Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble
April 5th, 2011 | 10:45 pm
Excerpts from:
http://www.spectacle.org/997/richmond.html
The Planned Parenthood connection – Who is Lothrop Stoddard?
Margaret Sanger appointed Lothrop Stoddard as a board member of the Birth Control League (the forerunner of Planned Parenthood). What did Stoddard think about Nazi eugenics? Author Stefan Kuhl writes (5):
Lothrop Stoddard and the “Jews Problem”
It is no secret that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis favored Jews be more subject to induced abortion and sterilization than other groups. Stefan Kuhl writes (pp. 61-62):
Kuhl continues:
Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, made Lothrop Stoddard a board member of the forerunner to PP (the Birth Control League). Why was the Birth Control League reconstituted as Planned Parenthood? The ‘Nazi smell’ of BCL was so bad, that some ‘cosmetics’ were required.
(5) The Nazi Connection (Eugenics, American Racism, And German National Socialism), Stefan Kuhl, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 62 (6) The Nazi Connection, p. 85
(7) Into The Darkness: Nazi Germany Today, Lothrop Stoddard, 1940, pp. 190-191
(8) Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, William L. Shire (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1941):257
April 6th, 2011 | 1:09 am
Harry,
“We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population”
There’s at least a couple of ways of taking this statement. You take it to mean that Sanger wants to exterminate blacks. Another possibility is that Sanger feared that someone was spreading untrue rumors that she was trying to exterminate blacks.
Read the full letter and learn something about the context of that letter, and you’ll see that the second interpretation is more likely. One of Gamble’s innovations was to use not social workers, who felt foreign and impersonal to many, but trusted people in the community to spread the word of birth control. In black communities, he used preachers; in white communities, he used women in their fifties. He was aware that people feared government and health workers, so he used people the community could trust.
By the way, when Gamble learned in 1950 that half of Japanese pregnancies ended in abortion, he immediately forged a mission to teach them birth control instead. I encourage you to read more widely. Look for histories that are not trying scare or shock you.
—
Your second post relies on guilt by association. Sanger liked Stoddard. Stoddard liked the Nazis. Therefore, Sanger liked the Nazis. You would be more persuasive if you produced solid evidence that Sanger was in fact racist. She clearly liked some parts of the eugenics movement but not others. So did the Roman Catholic Church. Remember that people put people on boards all the time without fully agreeing with their views.
I read the Richmond article, and he confuses, as I think you do, eugenics with genocide and birth control with abortion. Any analysis that mixes people into one big pot without making clear distinctions isn’t writing good history.
April 6th, 2011 | 10:03 am
Hi, Michael,
Sanger had a following among KKK members and even spoke at one of their rallies. She bragged that she had invitations to speak at many more.
In April of 1933, Sanger’s Birth Control Review published an article by Dr. Ernst Rudin, who was Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene.
Rudin worked with SS chief Heinrich Himmler to draw up the Nazi 1933 sterilization law which called for the sterilization of all Jews and “colored” German children.
Now, amuse everyone once again your spinning of the facts. Your chutzpah is impressive: If we don’t approve of Sanger, we have to disapprove of the Catholic Church as well. Stunning “logic.”
Cheers.
April 6th, 2011 | 12:02 pm
Harry,
You say: “Rudin worked with SS chief Heinrich Himmler to draw up the Nazi 1933 sterilization law which called for the sterilization of all Jews and ‘colored’ German children.”
You are making up “facts.” The Nazi sterilization laws did not call for the sterilization of Jews and “colored” children. They provided for the sterilization of people with hereditary diseases. The Nazis were inspired, at least to some degree, by the sterilization laws of the state of California.
Michael is not “spinning the facts.” You are. He is looking at facts very carefully and trying to make distinctions. That Sanger published an article by Rudin in 1933 on eugenics does not make Sanger complicit in the Holocaust and all the other atrocities of the Nazis.
April 6th, 2011 | 12:51 pm
Harry,
I agree with David’s answer, so I’ll just add a couple of things.
What did Sanger say at Klan meetings? Did she encourage them to find ways to prevent blacks from having more babies? Or did she encourage them to practice birth control themselves so that their families would thrive and to support her proposals to restrict the breeding of the mentally and physically unfit?
Remember that racism differs from eugenics. Both are wrong, but they are different kinds of wrong. Remember also that there are different kinds of eugenics, positive (promoting some kinds of people) and negative (eliminating the unfit) as well as compulsory and voluntary schemes.
Sanger was promoting both personal and public policy. The personal policy was that she wanted individuals to have the means to choose to limit the size of their family for personal reasons. The public policy was that she wanted the country to implement a negative eugenics program and eliminate the unfit.
I want to underscore that Sanger believed that elimination of the unfit should be through birth control, not abortion. Remember my Gamble story about him going to Japan because he was horrified by the number of abortions there. He wanted to replace the horror of abortion with birth control.
Most Christians have adopted the personal policy she advocated. Even the Roman Catholic Church supports natural family planning. They even use the same word Sanger used, “planning.” Scary, huh?
One sign of the force of eugenics thinking is that so many Christians embraced the cause. Even the Roman Catholic Church did to some extent. Happily, most Christians, including the Roman Catholic Church, believed that any eugenics program should be voluntary rather than compulsory. When the Nazis demonstrated to the world exactly what eugenics would mean, most supporters quickly changed their minds and went on to other tasks.
And so today, Planned Parenthood continues to promote birth control, but it does so based on the personal justification that women should control their bodies and the size of their family. They left their eugenic thinking behind. In the meantime, abortion became legal, and they added it to the services they offered.
I don’t approve of either eugenics or abortion, but I’m not going to subscribe to mistruths about Planned Parenthood or anyone else.
“Now, amuse everyone once again your spinning of the facts.”
Explain where I have spun facts. How would you interpret them differently and based on what reasoning?
“If we don’t approve of Sanger, we have to disapprove of the Catholic Church as well. Stunning “logic.”
Explain how you understand what the editors of the encyclopedia are saying.
April 6th, 2011 | 1:06 pm
Hello, David Nickol, Michael,
An excerpt from:
http://violence.freedommag.org/page21.htm
From page 132 of Psychiatry’s role in the holocaust by Peter R. Breggin.
Rudin was given a medal by Hitler and wrote for Margaret Sanger.
April 6th, 2011 | 1:21 pm
Excerpt from:
http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/African.htm
Mandatory Sterilization for Black Youth
Prior to World War I, there were very few dark-skinned people of African descent in Germany. But, during World War I, black African soldiers were brought in by the French during the Allied occupation. Most of the Germans, who were very race conscious, despised the dark-skinned “invasion”. Some of these black soldiers married white German women that bore children referred to as “Rhineland Bastards” or the “Black Disgrace”. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that he would eliminate all the children born of African-German descent because he considered them an “insult” to the German nation. “The mulatto children came about through rape or the white mother was a whore,” Hitler wrote. “In both cases, there is not the slightest moral duty regarding these offspring of a foreign race.”
The Nazis set up a secret group, Commission Number to organize the sterilization of these offspring to keep intact the purity of the Aryan race. In 1937, all local authorities in Germany were to submit a list of all the children of African descent. Then, these children were taken from their homes or schools without parental permission and put before the commission. Once a child was decided to be of black descent, the child was taken immediately to a hospital and sterilized. About 400 children were medically sterilized — many times without their parents’ knowledge.
April 6th, 2011 | 3:50 pm
Harry,
Thanks for this information about Rubin’s involvement in Nazi atrocities. There are more questions that need to be answered.
What was the content of the article he published in Sanger’s journal? How much and what kind of work had he done for the Nazis at the time he published? Did Sanger publish a range of views in her journal the way First Things does, or did she publish only articles she fully endorsed? Did Sanger herself ever explicitly promote the sterilization of inferior races?
April 6th, 2011 | 5:04 pm
harry,
You say: “Rudin was given a medal by Hitler and wrote for Margaret Sanger.”
You should have said Rudin was given a medal by Hitler in 1944 and wrote an article that appeared in a publication co-edited by Margaret Sanger in 1933. Publishing his paper in 1933 is not an endorsement of what he did subsequently. It probably constitutes an endorsement of the 1933 paper, so what is relevant is what was in that paper.
I have no doubt that Rudin was an anti-Semite, but I do not trust your information from Freedom Magazine (Published by the Church of Scientology International) on the sterilization laws when it says they were used to sterilize Jews. Here is some information on the sterilization laws from the Jewish Virtual Library, and it specifically says the sterilization laws were not used against Jews:
———-
Most of the persons targeted by the law were patients in mental hospitals and other institutions. The majority of those sterilized were between the ages of twenty and forty, about equally divided between men and women. Most were “Aryan” Germans. The “Sterilization Law” did not target so-called racial groups, such as Jews and Gypsies, although Gypsies were sterilized as deviant “asocials,” as were some homosexuals. Also, about 500 teenagers of mixed African and German parentage (the offspring of French colonial troops stationed in the Rhineland in the early 1920s) were sterilized because of their race, by secret order, outside the provisions of the law. . . .
Only the Roman Catholic Church, for doctrinal reasons, opposed the sterilization program consistently; most German Protestant churches accepted and often cooperated with the policy. . . . .
———
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/disabled.html
There is no question that Rudin was a despicable person, but I see no direct connection of Rudin to the Holocaust. It is not even clear that Rudin is implicated in the forced sterilization of blacks. And in any case, even if Rudin had been the mastermind of the Holocaust, it would not implicate Margaret Sanger that she published one of his papers in 1933.
April 6th, 2011 | 6:48 pm
Just to clarify in case it is not clear. I think Ernst Rudin was a disgrace not just to the medical profession but to the human race, and he was less qualified to call himself human than those whose number he sought to limit. However, he should be condemned for what he did, not for things he didn’t do. And Margaret Sanger should not be condemned for anything Rudin did unless she was actually complicit in it. Publishing a paper by someone does not make you complicit in everything they do for the rest of their lives.
April 6th, 2011 | 7:34 pm
Wow. Thanks, David, for doing the digging on Rudin. Although the sources Harry is pulling from have distorted the truth every time, I assumed they got Nazi-sterilized-Jews part right. I should have known better by now.
Your point about the distance between 1933 and 1944 is well taken, but it really depends on what Rudin published. Of course, as you point out, even then, editors don’t always agree with their writers.
You’re still wrong to support abortion rights, but you have a good historical mind, and I’ve appreciated your contributions. It does the pro-life movement no good that you are going back to your friends describing the ahistorical conspiracy theorists you’re finding at First Things, but please be assured that some of us are thinking through the facts over here.
There are some in the abortion rights movement, after all, who describe every abortion law as an assault on abortion rights. Surely, the abortion rights movement can agree after Gosnell that abortion clinics need to be regularly and rigorously inspected, and surely, the abortion rights movement can agree to limit definitions of mother’s health so that viable children are not being aborted except for the most extreme cases.
April 8th, 2011 | 12:27 am
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who coined the term “eugenics”, wrote:
It seems clear that anyone who thinks that those who don’t meet their requirements for membership in the “gifted class” are “enemies of the state” is morally degenerate. It also clear that they have a less than fully human compassion for others. Maybe it would be more accurate to say they have a sub-human, sociopathic indifference to others. Sadly, a handful of such people – moral morons – took such asinine thinking seriously and, having way too much time and money on their hands, decided to “save” the human race from those not belonging to what they had decided was the “gifted class.” They, of course, oblivious to their own depravity, bigotry and inhumanity, considered themselves members of that “gifted class.” Such were the buffoons who financed Margaret Sanger’s efforts to “save” humanity.
Margaret Sanger, the personification of such buffoonery – except for the fact that she had no wealth of her own; she made up for that with a brassy, baseless self-confidence – happily spent the money of her patrons in doing all she could to save the world from those these self-appointed “elites” considered inferior to themselves. Tragically, Sanger and her patrons, somewhat like idiot savants, did have a few things they could do very well (such things are always easier for sociopaths to do): accumulate wealth and use it to get what they wanted. Their “success” in the United States was dramatic. Philip Reilly, in his book The Surgical Solution estimates that up to 10,000 Americans a year were sterilized without their consent before eugenics was popularly seen for what it really is: sociopathic buffoonery.
Yet their grand social experiment was much more disastrous than just that. Their propaganda spread beyond our shores. The Nuremberg trial defendants involved in Nazi eugenics projects cited eugenics as practiced in the U.S. as part of their defense. There is no doubt that the Nazis had simply taken the “principles” propagated by Sanger to their logical conclusion. No social experiment in the history of the world has produced more evidence that its basic premise is horribly stupid and evil than did the one launched by Sanger and her fellow buffoons. When Man plays God he becomes an evil beast instead.
April 8th, 2011 | 1:59 am
Harry,
I’m glad to see that you are blaming Sanger only for her support of eugenics and blaming Nazis for their racism.
You also blame Sanger’s support for eugenics as inspiring Nazis to add racism to it. That claim is fair enough and can be supported.
I hope I can take your post to mean that you have given up your earlier claim that Sanger actively sought the genocide of blacks. That claim has been the central one at issue for me.
April 8th, 2011 | 11:43 am
Harry and Michael,
There is a question in my mind as to how much responsibility you can assign to Person A when you believe that Person B has “carried Person A’s ideas to their logical conclusion.”
April 8th, 2011 | 12:22 pm
David,
I don’t assign any personal blame to Sanger if someone else carried her ideas to their logical conclusion. It’s not right to blame someone for someone else’s misdeeds. Besides, I don’t buy the logical conclusions argument wherever I find it. Ideas usually have several logical conclusions. Some people take an idea one way and some another.
April 8th, 2011 | 1:29 pm
Michael,
I agree. We certainly wouldn’t want to blame Jesus for everything that has been done in the name of Christianity or the authors of the Bible for all the various (and often mutually exclusive) interpretations it has spawned.
April 9th, 2011 | 8:24 am
Hi, Michael,
You wrote:
Sanger was a racist eugenicist who sought to “better” the human race by reducing the Black population. See:
The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Plan for Black Americans
http://www.cwfa.org/articledisplay.asp?id=1466
The claim that the current disproportionate abortion rate among Blacks has nothing to do with Planned Parenthood’s racist founder’s clearly stated plans to “exterminate the Negro population” is ludicrous.
April 10th, 2011 | 11:18 pm
Harry,
The article you quote provides no direct evidence that Sanger was racist but relies on innuendo instead. Here’s an example:
“That blacks endured extreme prejudice and discrimination, which contributed greatly to their plight, seemed to further justify restricting their numbers. Many believed the solution lay in reducing reproduction. Sanger suggested the answer to poverty and degradation lay in smaller numbers of blacks.”
The problem with this argument is that Sanger argued that the health of every group—wealthy and poor, immigrant and native, white and black—would be improved if they restricted their numbers. Sanger preached this message to every group, and when ‘positive’ eugenicists argued that healthy white Protestants should have more babies so that the white race would grow, Sanger vehemently disagreed. She did not support this racist argument. She wanted smaller families period, for everybody.
“The claim that the current disproportionate abortion rate among Blacks has nothing to do with Planned Parenthood’s racist founder’s clearly stated plans to “exterminate the Negro population” is ludicrous”
A more honest and measured response would admit that there’s at least a couple of ways of understanding Sanger’s statement and that the one I offer is at least plausible. Given the other evidence I’ve provided, it’s fair to say that my analysis is more likely than yours.
The tragic truth is that blacks are disproportionately represented in almost every negative social measure—poverty, imprisonment, addiction, crime, broken families, missing fathers, single mothers, unintended pregnancies, falling out of the middle even after entering it. Is Sanger somehow responsible for all of this, too?
April 12th, 2011 | 10:37 am
Hi, Michael,
You wrote:
Yeah. The Planned Parenthood way and the honest way.
You wrote:
Blacks have been subjected to centuries of slavery. They were bred, bought and sold like animals, which is not exactly conducive to the creation of strong families. Then slavery was outlawed and they were no longer “assets” to their former owners. Their human dignity could no longer be so blatantly violated. What would the racists do with them now? They were judged to be inferior by Sanger and were (and still are) subjected to an assault by the social engineering of racist eugenicists. Until they are “exterminated,” as Sanger put it, the plan appears to be to keep as many Blacks as possible totally dependent upon the state, so they at least have some political value as a reliable voting block.
My point is this: It should not surprise us that a segment of humanity so used, abused and violated for centuries has more than their share of social difficulties. Without a doubt racist, sociopathic, eugenicists like Sanger and her patrons have a very large share of the responsibility for the current plight of the Black community. Black Americans will eventually work their way out of all of this in spite of the diabolical social engineering to which they have been and still are subjected. The way out is for them to figure out who their friends really are and reject the “help” of those who aren’t – like Planned Parenthood and their political action committee, the Democrat party. Thanks in part to truthful information now being made easily available, as in documentaries like Maafa 21, many Blacks are “free at last” and many others are on their way. May God bless them.
April 12th, 2011 | 2:52 pm
Harry,
“Yeah. The Planned Parenthood way and the honest way”
Language is sometimes ambiguous and can be interpreted in more than one way. The way to deal with ambiguity is to find more context that will clarify the meaning of the disputed passage. Because you believe that Sanger is a racist, you believe that the sentence can only mean racism.
But I have provided more and better context than you have. Sanger didn’t promote genocide in any of her writings or her speeches. She didn’t promote ‘positive’ eugenics. The black leaders who supported her were the highest profile and most celebrated black leaders of their time. The sentence in question was written to Gamble who was so disturbed by the high rate of abortion that he rushed in to put an end to it. And he did so just after the war, when racist sentiment was still running high.
Against this context, you have a single sentence that could be taken another way, a way that becomes more plausible the more context is added.
“subjected to an assault by the social engineering of racist eugenicists”
You have provided no evidence that racist eugenicists still exist and are active in the black community.
April 14th, 2011 | 7:12 am
Hi, Michael,
What do you make of this? It doesn’t look good for PP:
http://www.childpredators.com/Tapes/intro.cfm
Below is an excerpt from:
http://www.physiciansforlife.org/content/view/1828/2/
William Bouie Haden, of United Negro for Progress, once said, “Anyone who votes for Planned Parenthood programs in black neighborhoods is an Uncle Tom.”
In 1971 he said, “Into the black community stepped Planned Parenthood; only when they come into the black community they’ve become Planned Black Genocide.”
His words proved to be prophetic, since with the legalization of abortion in 1973, Planned Parenthood and the abortion cartel began systematically marketing (targeting) abortion in the African American communities.
As Mark Crutcher, producer of the recently released DVD documentary Maafa 21 Black Genocide in 21st Century America (www.maafa21.com), pointed out in his documentary,
The dramatic outcome of this abortion industry strategy is described by Michael Novak,
April 14th, 2011 | 2:38 pm
Harry,
“What do you make of this? It doesn’t look good for PP”
It looks bad for Planned Parenthood. As I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t support either Planned Parenthood or abortion; I just want clarity in the record. The more I dig into Sanger the more I find that people in the pro-life movement have misrepresented her in order to make a bad thing look even worse. Nothing justifies the kind of distortion of the truth that I’m seeing. Abortion is evil, and Planned Parenthood has done much evil in the name of supporting women’s choice, but we are not therefore justified in distorting the record either of Planned Parenthood itself or of its founder.
I have two problems with you. First is that you seem to confuse explaining the truth about Sanger with defending her actions or Planned Parenthood. I am explaining not defending, but you continue to claim or insinuate that I am doing both.
Second is that you seem incapable of reading the historical record with any nuance. You are convinced that Sanger is guilty of everything the conspiracy theorists claim she is. I don’t have so much of a problem with that. People are convinced by the arguments that convince them. What I do have a problem with is that you can’t acknowledge any ambiguity in the record. You believe that an honest person could only interpret her words in one particular way rather than admitting that an honest observer could interpret her words in several plausible ways.
Good historians differ from one another not because some are honest and some are not but because they bring different knowledge and contexts to bear in their interpretations. I think the evidence for my understanding of Sanger is better and fuller than yours. I even think that David’s evidence is better than yours even though I agree with your politics than I don’t his. But you seem to think that you bring truth to the discussion and that I bring only deception or willful ignorance.
“William Bouie Haden, of United Negro for Progress, once said, “Anyone who votes for Planned Parenthood programs in black neighborhoods is an Uncle Tom.”
Simone Caron has an interesting article in a 1998 issue of the Journal of Social History about the charge of genocide that black power activists, including Haden, frequently brought in the 1960s. Here’s the context she sets:
“The Black Panther party considered contraception only one part of a larger government scheme of genocide. Drugs, venereal disease, prostitution, coercive sterilization bills, restrictive welfare legislation, inhuman living conditions, “police murders,” rat bites, malnutrition, lead poisoning, frequent fires and accidents in run-down houses, and black over-representation in Vietnam combat forces all contributed to the malicious plan to annihilate the black race… Malcolm X also suspected genocidal motives behind population-control advocacy… In the summer of 1967 the male-dominated Black Power Conference in
Newark, New Jersey, passed an anti-birth-control resolution that contained the key phrase, birth control equals “black genocide.”… Resistance ranged from a small California group called Efforts to Increase Our Size (EROS) to groups in Pittsburgh and Cleveland that protested Planned Parenthood programs to the ultramilitant group in New York known as the Five Percenters. These organizations asked two main questions: “Is birth control just
a ‘white man’s plot’ to ‘contain’ the black population?” and “Is it just another scheme to cut back on welfare aid or still another method of ‘keeping the black man down’?”
As I said earlier, some black communities are conspiracy minded. We need better evidence than words from Haden to prove that abortion is actually a plot against blacks.
“Studies from the CDC show that prior to the legalization of abortion approximately 80% of all illegal abortions were done on white women … but at the moment abortion became legal that began to reverse.”
In her article, Carone makes two arguments: first, that male black power activists fought contraception and abortion because they believed both were part of a white plot to kill off blacks; second, that black women fought for contraception and abortion because they wanted those choices. The black middle class, both male and female, also supported contraception and abortion, believing that they could rise faster by limiting the size of their families. Thus, the fight over contraception and birth control was not between innocent blacks and evil whites but between black power activists who didn’t want contraception and abortion and black women and the black middle class who did want them.
“Abortion has swept through the Black community like a scythe, cutting down every fourth member.”
The fact that abortion has devastated the black population is not evidence that there has been a plot against black Americans anymore than the fact that a quarter of black men have served prison time proves there is a plot. You can find blacks who claim that both facts are evidence of a genocidal plot but that doesn’t mean there is one.
April 14th, 2011 | 6:14 pm
Hi, Michael,
This discussion has been fun (as well as disturbing at times). I hope readers of the posts on this thread have been inspired to do a little research of their own. I think a good starting place is watching Maafa 21. Whether one believes it is a fair presentation of the facts or whether it is poor history, it IS the place one should start, since it is being shown all over the country in churches, in private homes and at meetings of various organizations over and over again. Its message, I suppose, has reached hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people already. Its portrayal of massive injustice, if true, demands that those injustices be brought to an end — if false, they must be carefully and credibly refuted in order to restore shattered confidence in the institutions of society.
I, as many others do, think Maafa 21 contains overwhelming evidence of an ongoing, terrible injustice against non-whites. I encourage others to watch it and see what they think.
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