By Rita Diller
In case you missed it, Planned Parenthood quietly dropped its Margaret Sanger Award after the 2015 award went to Dr. Willie Parker. That’s the year after it was awarded to none other than Nancy Pelosi.
From the PPFA website: “Our highest honor, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Margaret Sanger Award, is presented annually to recognize leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement.”
For decades, Planned Parenthood denied its racist origins, and today it denies its racist targeting of people of color for graphic sex ed indoctrination, its birth control and sterilization programs, and its ever-booming abortion business.
But today, remarkably, Planned Parenthood admits in the “Our History” section of its own website that Sanger was involved with eugenics, which it admits is inherently racist and has “deepened racial injustice.”
Quoting the website: “Planned Parenthood traces its roots back to a nurse named Margaret Sanger.”
After sharing the story of Sanger’s arrest in Brooklyn in the early days of her activism comes the lengthy admission:
Sanger believed in eugenics — an inherently racist and ableist ideology that labeled certain people unfit to have children. Eugenics is the theory that society can be improved through planned breeding for “desirable traits” like intelligence and industriousness. In the early 20th century eugenic ideas were popular among highly educated, privileged, and mostly white Americans. Margaret Sanger pronounced her belief in and alignment with the eugenics movement many times in her writings, especially in the scientific journal Birth Control Review. At times, Sanger tried to argue for a eugenics that was not applied based on race or religion. But in a society built on the belief of white supremacy, physical and mental fitness are always judged based on race. Eugenics, therefore, is inherently racist. She held beliefs that, from the very beginning, undermined her movement for reproductive freedom and caused harm to countless people.
Sanger was so intent on her mission to advocate for birth control that she chose to align herself with ideas and organizations that were ableist and white supremacist. In 1926, she spoke to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) at a rally in New Jersey to promote birth control methods. Sanger endorsed the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that states could forcibly sterilize people deemed “unfit” without their consent and sometimes without their knowledge. The acceptance of this decision by Sanger and other thought leaders laid the foundation for tens of thousands of people to be sterilized, often against their will.
As a result of these choices, the reproductive rights movement, in many cases, deepened racial injustice in the health care system. The field of modern gynecology was founded by J. Marion Sims, who in the mid-1800s repeatedly and forcibly performed invasive experiments on enslaved Black women without anesthesia. In 1939, Sanger began what was called the “Negro Project” — alongside Black leaders like W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell. The mission of the Negro Project was to put Black doctors and nurses in charge of birth control clinics to reduce mistrust of a racist health care system. Sanger lost control of the project, and Black women were sent to white doctors for birth control and follow-up appointments, deepening the racist and paternalistic problems of health care in the South. Continuing to this day, Black women’s experiences and pain are too often dismissed or ignored by doctors and other health care providers, which, alongside historical dehumanization of Black people, contributes to staggering and avoidable disparities in health outcomes.
Doesn’t all of this sound so familiar? Much of it is what we have been saying at American Life League for decades. And now Planned Parenthood leadership finally admits that its heroine is a liability. But the organization still won’t admit that she championed the same cause they do today—sexual license at any and all cost, especially the wholesale slaughter of tiny human beings, including disproportionately minority children. According to PP’s last report, almost 355,000 babies in just that one year were killed at its facilities. Each one of them was not only a unique human being but represents generations lost.
How long will we tolerate Planned Parenthood’s racist extermination tactics? How long will we support a government structure that subsidizes Planned Parenthood with taxpayer money to the tune of $1.7 million per day? The time to stop Planned Parenthood was so many yesterdays ago.
The solution is right before our eyes. It lies with the Rosary. Yes, those prayer beads that have been recently proclaimed in the media a weapon for radical Catholics. In the end, it is Our Lady who will stop Planned Parenthood, and she will do it through the Rosary. We are already seeing the fruits of faithfully praying the Rosary to end abortion and stop Planned Parenthood. Watch for our upcoming announcement. It is a game changer. The stakes have never been higher. It is time for a Marian surge.