About six months ago, a university student posing as a potential donor called a number of Planned Parenthood offices expressly requesting that his donation be used to pay for the abortion of black babies.  The media picked up the story and Americans - for a moment - were outraged.  American life has since been punctuated by any number of outrages and, in between, we continue to live out the mundane sentences of our lives.  So why raise the issue again?  Two reasons: one is that this story, though I'm sure it captured bandwidth, is not an isolated media incident; rather it reveals the long-term selective extermination of certain persons who, not too long before, had not been persons at all.  The Civil War lives on...and on. 

 

And this brings me to the second reason.  The story was billed as an example of Planned Parenthood's racially motivated fundraising practices.  But that is to woefully understate the problem.  Racism is defined as the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capabilities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race (Merriam-Webster dictionary).  Planned Parenthood's willingness to earmark funds to "help" black women obtain abortions may be fueled by racist beliefs, but this is so much more than a story about racism.  

Beliefs have consequences.

In this case, the acting on those beliefs has resulted in the deaths of over 13 million black children over the past thirty-five years.  Yet the media focused only on the egregiousness of Planned Parenthood's beliefs as manifested through the taped conversations - not on the devastating consequence of the intentional elimination of 13 million black human beings.  This is like saying the primary issue with slavery is that it is racist.  But that is to condemn the attitude while ignoring the action.  It is not nearly sufficient.  Slavery and the selective targeting blacks for abortion are not belief systems.  They are real actions resulting in real, unimaginable suffering and actual, though well-hidden, killing of a racial group.  

The conversations between Planned Parenthood and the undercover donors were recorded and posted on YouTube.  In one call, the staged donor said he wanted to fund abortions for black women because "the less black kids out there the better."  Planned Parenthood of Idaho's VP of Development and Marketing, clearly eager to take the money, responded that the donor's wishes were "understandable."  In its defense, Planned Parenthood of Idaho “firmly and unequivocally” denounced racial bias, stating, “[a] fundraising employee violated the organization's principles and practices when she appeared to be willing to accept a racially motivated donation.”

Whoa there...not so fast! A fundraising employee? We're not talking about some part-time high school student here – this is someone who referred to herself as Director of Development and is (was?) Vice President of Development and Marketing for the entire state. If anyone knew the ins and outs of Planned Parenthood's messaging, she would be it.

And what's all this about racially motivated donations violating “the organization's principles and practices?” The principles of Planned Parenthood were instituted by Margaret Sanger, a woman who believed some human beings are "a dead weight of human waste [1] ...who never should have been born at all." [2]   A woman so deeply committed to eugenic principles of “race betterment” [3] that she believed imposing birth control and sterilization to prevent certain people (including the poor and working class) from reproducing would “raise the level and increase the general intelligence of the population.” [4] A woman who created the “Negro Project” in 1939 – when eugenics and race purification were all the rage – to curtail “overbreeding” [5] and “an unceasing spawning class of human beings” [6] in Harlem and other predominately black communities in America that were “producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations.” [7] A woman who stopped at nothing in her crusade to reserve the right of parenthood to privileged, white, upper class Americans – and even they were urged to limit their offspring to one or two so as to preserve the elite gene pool. [8] A woman who co-opted black pastors to help her disseminate “the organization's principles and practices” and who called her appeal to religious convictions “the most successful educational approach to the Negro.” [9] Of course, she did not “want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population...” [10] because that might be misinterpreted. Nevertheless, she was confident that “the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members [read: those who opposed her eugenic agenda]...” [11]

 

So, let's suppose that Ms. Sanger's VP of Development and Marketing gets a call from a donor who wants to earmark birth control and sterilization funds for the Negro Project. Would Sanger chastise her employee for violating company policy? Hardly. Soliciting racially motivated donations to fund racially motivated anti-reproductive efforts was all in a day's work – then and now.

 

*****

 

For more information, visit: http://www.blackgenocide.org/sanger.html.

For more on the Negro Project, see Tanya L. Green's “The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan for Black Americans, May 10, 2001. 

 

 

Genocide? You decide:

 

Under Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Genocide includes killing members of the group as well as “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” Planned Parenthood, staying true to its organizational principles, has located a disproportionate number of its facilities in urban areas and targeted its marketing efforts at young black women. It has been estimated that about 80% of its clinics are in minority and inner-city neighborhoods, often next to schools.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, “More than a third (37 percent) of pregnancies for [sic] black women ended in abortion compared with 12 percent for non-Hispanic white women and 19 percent for Hispanic women.” Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the nation, performed nearly 300,000 abortions last year (out of a total of 1.2 million abortions annually in America ).  In 2008, Planned Parenthood will knowingly end the life of over 100,000 black babies.