By Jim Sedlak
Over the last few months, much discussion and even some violence have surrounded the existence of statues and other reminders of the American Civil War.
The Civil War is seen by most as a fight over slavery, and therefore is tied closely to racism. Many people believe that we must obliterate from our society the existence of any perception of the support of racism. Hence, any statue of Robert E. Lee or other southern general must be removed from the landscape. This call for political correctness reached its zenith of stupidity when ESPN, worried about viewer backlash, reassigned a college football play-by-play announcer from a football game in Virginia to a game in another state. The reason? His name was Robert Lee!
Whatever you might think of this movement, there is a racist who has done more to destroy the black race than any other single person. That woman is Margaret Sanger. Sanger was a white eugenicist who filled her board of directors with people who thought like she did. Her first organization was the American Birth Control League. It was founded in 1921, and among its initial board members was Lothrop Stoddard who authored the 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat against White World-Supremacy.
In the 1930s, Sanger set out to convince black leaders that their race was stuck in a poverty cycle because their families were having too many children. It was a consistent teaching of Sanger’s and she used it to get birth control accepted among minorities and to stem that “rising tide of color” Stoddard had written about. Sanger’s efforts led to the ABCL establishing its Negro Project. Much has been written about the Negro Project, and even the New York University Sanger Papers Project was forced to admit: “Influenced strongly by both the eugenics movement and the progressive welfare programs of the New Deal era, the Negro Project was, from the start, largely indifferent to the needs of the black community and constructed in terms and with perceptions that today smack of racism.”
After making that statement, the NYU project launches into a detailed and labored explanation of all the infighting that took place in the ABCL over the Negro Project. It tries to convince readers that the project was not racist. It does admit, however, that “the public rationale for the Project was rooted in economics, tax-payer burden, and the social threats posed by what was perceived to be an exploding black underclass, rather than the health and sexual liberation of black women. . . . And there is no doubt that a good number of medical professionals involved in the birth control movement exhibited strong racist sentiments, some of them arguing for and even carrying out compulsory sterilization on black women considered to be of low intelligence and therefore not capable of choosing not to control their fertility, as well as on those deemed morally or behaviorally deviant.”
Margaret Sanger founded the ABCL and was the woman behind the creation of the Negro Project—a project specifically undertaken to lower the birth rate of the black race in America. The American Birth Control League later changed its name to the Birth Control Federation of America, and, in 1942, became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The same racist philosophies of the ABCL still operate in Planned Parenthood today.
When the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in the United States in 1973, Planned Parenthood immediately set out to target minorities. As early as 1991 Planned Parenthood reported that 42 percent of abortions at its own facilities were done on minority women (23 percent on black women). Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that black women make up six percent of the US population but have 35 percent of the abortions.
Yet Margaret Sanger has somehow escaped unscathed among our progressive elite. In 2015, 25 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to the Smithsonian asking it to remove a bust of Margaret Sanger displayed there. The Smithsonian refused. Just a few weeks ago, with all the attention on racism, a group of black pastors rallied outside the Smithsonian demanding the removal of the same bust. Once again, the Smithsonian refused.
It is estimated that over 114,000 black children died at Planned Parenthood abortion facilities just last year. The toll in black lives lost at Planned Parenthood since it first started doing abortions in 1970 is around 2.8 million!
What we must do now is educate all Americans about Margaret Sanger, who author George Grant called the Killer Angel, and teach people the truth about how Planned Parenthood carries on her racist legacy today.
American Life League’s Culture of Life Studies Program has created a critically-acclaimed video entitled Who Was the REAL Margaret Sanger? which illustrates these and other documented facts about Sanger. It is time everyone took the initiative to learn more about this evil woman and to teach others the truth.
Jim Sedlak is executive director of American Life League, founder of STOPP International, and a talk show host on the Radio Maria network. He has been successfully fighting Planned Parenthood since 1985.