“We don’t want the word to get 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, founder of Planned Parenthood191
If there is one organization above criticism for pro-choicers, it’s Planned Parenthood. The organization pretends to be a health care operation, like the Red Cross. In reality, it is the biggest abortion mill in America. What is arguably worse is that its ancestry runs straight back to the most gruesome and violent racism in American history.
Pro-lifers understand this and view Planned Parenthood as the embodiment of modern evil. The satirical outlet Babylon Bee has joked that King Herod would receive Planned Parenthood’s “lifetime achievement award.”192 King Herod is known for slaughtering innocent babies in the Bible, and the reason the grotesque comparison resonates is because Planned Parenthood is in the business of killing babies. Therefore, Planned Parenthood would look at King Herod as a role model.
Despite pro-life opposition, Planned Parenthood is the corporate giant of the abortion industry. It currently has over six hundred clinics all around the country.193 To put that in perspective, Apple, which supplies many of us with smartphones and computers, has only 272 stores across the country. Planned Parenthood remains influential because it has huge megaphones at its disposal, primarily much of America’s show-business empire, the glitzy arbiter of modern culture. The core of this support, of course, is Hollywood. Planned Parenthood recently launched a pro-abortion campaign collaborating with the designer Marc Jacobs and singer Miley Cyrus. Cyrus designed T-shirts and hoodies that say “DON’T F*CK WITH MY FREEDOM,” picturing her topless and covering her breasts by holding grapefruit halves. One hundred percent of the profits from this vulgarity go to Planned Parenthood.194
In order to promote the upcoming collection, Cyrus posted a photo to her ninety-five million followers on Instagram, featuring herself seductively licking a cake. The icing on the cake says “Abortion Is Healthcare” with a caption reading, “Very special collab with @PlannedParenthood.”195 Cyrus told Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show that she’s “a good face” for abortion and Planned Parenthood.196
Planned Parenthood also launched the #BansOffMyBody campaign, which featured an open letter signed by 140 celebrities, including Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, Macklemore, and Billie Eilish, protesting the passage of state laws restricting abortion.197 When Alabama recently voted to restrict abortion, Planned Parenthood and its celebrity entourage were outraged. Some celebrities boycotted working in the state, while others took the opportunity to raise money for Planned Parenthood. Singer Ariana Grande donated the proceeds from her Atlanta, Georgia, concert to Planned Parenthood, which amounted to about $250,000.198
Corporations have also been backing Planned Parenthood. The CEOs of over 180 companies, including Yelp, Warby Parker, Postmates, Glossier, Bloomberg L.P., Square Inc., and others, took out a full page ad in the New York Times calling for an end to bans on abortion.199 And if you think celebrities and corporations love Planned Parenthood, look at Democratic politicians who love it even more. Senator Elizabeth Warren loves Planned Parenthood so much that she was excited to celebrate her birthday there.200 Warren even says that if she ever becomes president, she’ll wear a Planned Parenthood scarf for her inauguration.201
But how has Planned Parenthood achieved this totemic status? The answer is threefold. First, Planned Parenthood insists that abortion is not its main focus. Second, Planned Parenthood prides itself as a “women’s health care organization.” And third, Planned Parenthood claims that minorities are “most in need of its services” and, according to it benefit from its services the most.
We have all heard these claims, but are any of them true? The reality is that abortion is the lifeblood of Planned Parenthood, not its other services. Second, and shockingly, Planned Parenthood places little or no value on health care, not even the health of its female clients. Third, and worst of all, Planned Parenthood uses its power and influence to set up clinics in minority areas in order to target the abortion of black babies specifically.
How ironic that the one organization that is the single largest provider of abortions in the country, also fighting the hardest for abortion rights in politics, pretends not to be about abortion at all. That’s the great hoax. It emphasizes its “other services” and claims that abortion is only 3 percent of what it does. This claim is very important to Planned Parenthood because it relates to its federal funding. According to the Hyde Amendment, abortions cannot be federally funded except in rare cases, so Planned Parenthood needs to emphasize its “other services” in order to keep getting federal funding. This false narrative has had huge payoff in taxpayer dollars. Between 2013 and 2015, Planned Parenthood raked in $1.3 billion for these “other services.” While the funding is not to be used on abortions specifically, this obvious windfall from the government frees it up to use its other funding for abortions.
However, Planned Parenthood doesn’t separate its abortion services from its other services, as it is required to do. Title X of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act allocates funding for family planning services but specifies that those same services cannot refer patients for abortions. When the Trump administration ordered that Planned Parenthood separate its abortion activities from its family planning services if it wanted to continue to receive Title X funding, Planned Parenthood refused.
It really doesn’t make sense for Planned Parenthood to refuse if it is true that its other services are what it cares about so much. Planned Parenthood chose to sacrifice about $60 million, which it was getting under Title X, in order to keep its other services comingled with abortion referrals. Title X is what Planned Parenthood calls “the gag rule” because it makes it feel like it’s being gagged since abortion is so key to its services. No corporation would take a stance that threatens its core business. But abortion is Planned Parenthood’s core business. If it were peripheral to the organization, it would separate the service or give it up. But it won’t.
When Planned Parenthood’s former president, Dr. Leana Wen, was asked about whether Planned Parenthood is focusing more on “other services,” she told BuzzFeed News, “The last thing I want is people to get the impression that we are backing off of our core services. We will always be here to provide abortion access,” adding, “It’s who we are.”202
Let’s look at Planned Parenthood’s famous claim that performing abortions is merely 3 percent of what it does. So, just how does Planned Parenthood arrive at this statistic? Planned Parenthood considers any discreet interaction with the clinic a “service.” For example, if you go in for an abortion, it would likely give you a pregnancy test, an STD test, and a contraceptive device. If this happens, it would count the abortion performed as 25 percent of the services you received, counting each of those other items as a separate service. Planned Parenthood gives birth control out like candy, so every time it does that and a woman takes it, it’s considered a “service.” This kind of counting doesn’t take into account the extensiveness of procedures, as getting a pregnancy test should hardly be considered a procedure equal to that of an abortion, considering you can get a pregnancy test at CVS for $10 and the most common abortion procedure is surgical.
Even the Washington Post, a pro-choice publication, gave Planned Parenthood’s 3 percent figure three Pinocchio’s, meaning that it found the figure to be “significant factual error” with “obvious contradictions.”203 The Post explains, “The 3 percent figure that Planned Parenthood uses is misleading in comparing abortion services to every other service it provides.”
So, just how many babies does Planned Parenthood abort? According to numbers in its own 2018–2019 report, it performed 345,672 abortions that year.204 In 2017–2018 it reported performing 332,757 abortions.205 According to the Guttmacher Institute, there were 862,320 abortions performed in the United States in 2017.206 Abortions in the United States are generally around 800,000 per year if we look at the last ten years.207 This means that Planned Parenthood performs about 40–50 percent of all abortions in the United States, making it the single largest abortion provider.208 There is no other chain of abortion clinics that comes close to matching Planned Parenthood in the number of abortions performed per year.
We can easily see what services Planned Parenthood focuses on by visiting its website. If Planned Parenthood is genuinely focused on broader “health care for women,” then why is it that when you go to its website and click Get Care, the first option that comes up is “Abortion Clinics Near You”?209 It does not say “Mammogram Near You” or “Pelvic Exam Near You.” Aside from the fact that Planned Parenthood does not provide something as fundamental as mammograms, Planned Parenthood is clearly focusing on directing women to come to it specifically for abortions.210
Not only does Planned Parenthood encourage abortion on a grand scale, it routinely performs late-term abortions and is stepping up these numbers. A few years ago, Planned Parenthood had eighteen clinics that performed abortions after twenty weeks, and that number jumped to thirty-seven in 2018.211 It also openly opposes any bans on late-term abortion to this day. They It believes that abortions should be performed to the moment of live birth.
Planned Parenthood used to support the killing of infants outside the womb, a horrific procedure. But, to its dismay, it became illegal in 2003, when President Bush signed into law a prohibition of killing babies outside the womb, such as in circumstances where the baby survived a botched abortion and the abortionist wasn’t able to fully kill it in the womb. Undercover journalist David Daleidon recorded top Planned Parenthood executives on video bargaining over prices of fetal tissue from aborted baby parts. What we learn from this video is that Planned Parenthood is literally putting a price tag on fetal tissue taken from the remains of aborted babies in its clinics.212 It is putting price tags on hearts and brains. One Planned Parenthood executive, when asked how much she wants for the fetal tissue, replies, “a Lamborghini.”213 Planned Parenthood has gone after Daleidon in various legal battles to cause him to go bankrupt because they’re so angry that he exposed their top people on video.
In addition to performing late-term abortions, some Planned Parenthood staffers show a gruesome delight in their abortion work. Former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson has shared anecdotes of the kind of language employees used, such as referring to the freezer containing aborted baby parts as “the nursery.” It’s almost macabre to refer to the freezer with the dismembered parts as the nursery, as it shows the clear mental connection between abortion and killing babies. Abby Johnson also recalled a “supervisor joking about the babies that we aborted and things like, you know, the security code on our alarm was 2229 because that spelled out ‘baby.’ And they thought that was just hilarious.”214
Planned Parenthood also celebrates abortionists themselves and their organizations, including a holiday to celebrate abortion and the people who perform them. Planned Parenthood posted an image on Twitter of a big pink heart that says “I Heart My Local Abortion Provider” with “Planned Parenthood” written underneath.215 Planned Parenthood also posted an article leading up to this holiday describing its abortionists as “passionate, caring, skilled professionals.”216
We’ve seen that abortion is the centerpiece of Planned Parenthood, but let’s examine its second claim, which is that it is a health care organization that focuses on women.
Is health care its number one concern? If Planned Parenthood genuinely cared about health care, then it would have complied with health care regulations during the coronavirus disease pandemic. On March 18, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that all elective surgeries, including medical and dental procedures, should be delayed during the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak.217 Planned Parenthood refused to heed this warning and continued performing its elective services.
The Ohio attorney general, for example, mandated that all “non-essential or elective surgeries and procedures that utilize personal protective equipment” be stopped during the outbreak in an effort to make sure all masks and needed equipment go toward health care workers facing the coronavirus pandemic. The attorney general’s office clarified that this included elective abortions that were not threatening to the mother’s health. Planned Parenthood, however, ignored the order with an official statement: “Planned Parenthood’s top priority is ensuring that every person can continue accessing essential health care, including abortion.”218
Planned Parenthood clinics in Ohio continued to use medical equipment, including gloves and masks, as well as other vital supplies, in order to perform abortions. Planned Parenthood continued to perform abortions in Ohio that were not life-threatening to the mother but were purely elective. By continuing to perform its abortion services every day, it had multiple people congregating in their facilities, coming in and out every hour, while the entire state was in lockdown and ordered to shelter in place. The Ohio Department of Health director, Amy Acton, said, “As countless other clinics across the state comply with this health order and prioritize the lives of their fellow Ohioans, Planned Parenthood continues to put profit and abortion above the safety of our society’s most vulnerable members—children and the elderly.”219
We can also turn to Planned Parenthood’s actions in Illinois. It determined that it would close eleven of seventeen clinics and cease certain operations, including cancer screenings, during the coronavirus pandemic in order to conserve resources. But it announced that it would continue to perform abortions. In other words, genuine health care it decided to stop, but in the case of voluntary “treatments” like abortions, it decided to continue.220
Unlike other hospitals and medical facilities, Planned Parenthood directly funds Democratic pro-choice candidates in political elections. This is not something St. Jude Children’s hospital would do, for example. It’s very unusual for a “health care” organization to do this. It even has an entire page on its website dedicated to bashing Donald Trump.221 There is even a graphic on the page titled “Here is what Donald Trump controls” with arrows to “YOU.” It has a list of the things Trump has done, which are meant to be insults, but they actually just draw attention to his accomplishments. For example, it lists, “Targeting Planned Parenthood.” Planned Parenthood says, “Donald Trump is the first U.S. President to release a budget that singled out Planned Parenthood for ‘defunding.’” It lists, “Packing courts with anti-abortion judges” and mentions Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh as having records of opposing abortion. It condemns Trump for being the first president to speak at the March for Life.
But is it really active in elections, you might ask? I thought it only focused on health care! Planned Parenthood actually considers influencing politics to be one of its main goals. Former president Gloria Feldt started its political wing so that it can elect pro-choice candidates. Planned Parenthood is reported to be contributing a whopping $45 million into the 2020 election by funding pro-abortion candidates.
If there is any question about which side it supports politically, Planned Parenthood Action tweeted on March 15, 2019, “From now until November, this is the goal: we must defeat Donald Trump.”222 Jenny Lawson, the Planned Parenthood Votes executive director, told CBS News, “The Trump administration has managed to undo so much over the last three years. The stakes have never been higher.”223
The Federal Elections Commission (FEC) reported that zero percent of Planned Parenthood donations go to Republican candidates.224 It is functioning as an arm of the Democrats. Cecile Richards, who was president of Planned Parenthood for twelve years, had clear political goals for the organization. After serving as president of Planned Parenthood she left to fund Supermajority, a political action group, and before becoming president of Planned Parenthood she worked for Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Planned Parenthood even received grants from the Obama administration to promote Obamacare.
Not only does it fund pro-abortion Democratic candidates, but it also funds the fight against pro-life judges and cases related to abortion. It wants to influence the courts in its favor, so it does everything it can to funnel money in ways that are beneficial to its pro-abortion cause. This is not a secret. An entire section of its annual report is devoted to what it calls “advocacy.” It claims Roe is at risk and that fighting back in courts is what is necessary. It is proud to report that it had over one thousand people standing outside the Judiciary Committee hearings to protest Kavanaugh’s confirmation every day. It also organized marches throughout seventy-five communities across the country to protest his confirmation.225 According to its own report, it has 140,357 “defenders signed up to take action at a moment’s notice following a text from us.” It has over 120 chapters at college campuses in order to get young people involved in elections, teaching them “deep organizing skills.”226 We can see that Planned Parenthood is a political arm of the pro-abortion Left. Does this sound like a “health care” organization to you?
On July 16, 2019, Planned Parenthood came out directly criticizing me and women who support President Trump, tweeting, ‘“Women for Trump’ launched today, and the hypocrisy is stunning. Since taking office, the Trump admin has systematically taken away our health and rights—policies that hurt all women, including his own supporters.”227 As the youngest woman on the Advisory Board of Women for Trump, who deeply cares about women’s empowerment, I find Planned Parenthood’s view that in order to be an intelligent woman, you have to support the killing of innocent babies, flat-out ridiculous. There is nothing hypocritical about women opposing killing babies because killing babies is not synonymous with women’s health, well-being, or our nature. We are nurturers, communicators, fighters, and preservers of life, not killers. The proclamation that all women must join in the fight to take innocent babies’ lives degrades us all as women and is a proclamation we should all oppose.
Women have brains, just like men do, and can reason out the fact that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider and does not stand up for women seeking aid or vulnerable infants in the womb. Women’s rights extend to the little girl babies in the womb. Women deserve to be treated with dignity and given better options than abortion. President Trump protects life and supports women through policies he’s passed like paid family leave, allowing working women to spend more time with their babies while still making money. But what about Planned Parenthood, you may wonder—does it value women?
If Planned Parenthood cared about the health and well-being of women, why would it vehemently oppose laws requiring doctors to show a woman her ultrasound? Why do it want to pull the wool over women’s eyes? Many women do not know that the fetus in the womb has developed much at all because abortion clinics tell them otherwise. If this is truly a health care procedure and not a sting operation intended to mislead women, then women should be informed, as they would be about any other health care procedure, and not left in the dark.
This is why Republicans are advocating that women be shown an ultrasound before getting an abortion. The woman can still proceed with her abortion if she wishes. Kentucky passed this law and Democrats challenged it, but it was upheld in the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge John K. Bush wrote that this law “requires the disclosure of truthful, non-misleading and relevant information about an abortion.”228
Planned Parenthood says that showing women their ultrasound is “cruel.” Why? It knows what the woman will see in that ultrasound: a baby. A woman seeing that, and in light of that, often changes her mind and walks out of the clinic. This is detrimental to Planned Parenthood’s revenue and reputation, as well as the entire pro-choice ideology, so Democrats try to strike down these laws whenever they can.229
Planned Parenthood also opposes any laws requiring a waiting period to get an abortion. These laws are intended to ensure that the woman really wants to get one, is not being coerced, and has had time to think it over. This waiting period is typically twenty-four hours between the initial session and the abortion itself. Not a lot of time. Planned Parenthood opposes even this short window because it knows that if a woman goes home to think about what abortion is, even without having seen her ultrasound, she will likely not return the next day. This is why Planned Parenthood does not want to give you that chance to think it over. This is merely another attempt to manipulate women and coerce them into the operating room. Planned Parenthood has to think about its bottom line. More abortions, more money.
Planned Parenthood does not value the health and well-being of young women either. For example, the organization opposes laws requiring parental notification before an abortion is performed on a minor. Though abortion on a fifteen-year-old or younger is rare, Planned Parenthood still performs abortions on demand for minors, who do not have the right to vote or buy a beer but can undergo a surgical procedure without their parents knowing. This could be a scarring experience for a minor and have lifelong consequences for her. It also raises the question of whether this minor fully understands the procedure about to take place. Serious health complications could arise as well. What if the minor does not disclose or does not know her full health history and the procedure is performed at risk to her health? What if she is allergic to the type of anesthetic used? Parents have the right to know about other operations performed on their underage child, so why is abortion the exception?
Lila Rose, now the president of Live Action, exposed the hypocrisy of Planned Parenthood in a series of undercover videos, in which she showed how it treats women in cases of sexual abuse. Lila walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic and said that she needed an abortion because she was a fifteen-year-old girl having sex with a twenty-three-year-old boyfriend, making her a victim of statutory rape. Instead of referring her to where she might be able to get help or reporting the stated abuse, Planned Parenthood officials told her to lie about her age on the paperwork at the clinic so they could act like they had never heard anything about it and could move on with the abortion. This is what Planned Parenthood means when it says that it does “nonjudgmental care.” Its nonjudgment extends even to protecting rapists.
You may wonder—But isn’t Planned Parenthood required to meet the health care needs of women? If Planned Parenthood wasn’t around, where would women go for health care? First, community health centers outnumber Planned Parenthood locations ten to one.230 Second, if Planned Parenthood was necessary in order to serve the health care needs of women, how do some states with very few or no Planned Parenthood locations at all—North Dakota, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Kansas—manage without it?231 The women in those states are getting their health care needs met. New York and California have the most Planned Parenthoods. Are women in California and New York getting better tested for cancer then? No, but they are having more abortions.
Planned Parenthood also supports the horrible practice of sex-selective abortions. In other words, a woman can choose to stay pregnant until she can find out the sex of the baby, and if it isn’t the gender she wants, then she can abort it. In March 2016, the Indiana legislature passed a law by wide margins called the Sex-Selective and Disability Abortion Ban, preventing a woman from having a sex-selective abortion. Planned Parenthood promptly filed a lawsuit opposing this law as unconstitutional.232
Why would it do this? Shouldn’t we all agree that targeting a baby girl because of her gender is discrimination? But Planned Parenthood stopped the law from going into effect. It then was tried in several courts and made it all the way to the Supreme Court. It was put on hold, and the court will certainly return to it soon. The sad reality is that in the world today, the majority of abortions are performed on baby girls, solely because of their sex. If we look at the effects of China’s one-child policy, for example, we see generations without girls, a missing 160 million women, about the size of the female population in the United States.233
In America, no one should be discriminated against solely because of gender, according to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I know that Planned Parenthood and other pro-choicers would argue that rights don’t apply to a little girl in the womb because she is not a “person.” But to that I say—she obviously has private parts and genitalia; she is in every way a girl and purely because of that is being targeted and killed based on her sex. Shouldn’t we all oppose this brutal killing rooted in discrimination? If Planned Parenthood is genuinely for “women’s rights,” it would oppose sex-selective abortion, but instead its actions are quite the contrary as it is the biggest advocate for it, advocating for it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Last, Planned Parenthood claims to serve minority communities, even claiming that taking away its services would harm blacks the most. It features black women in its pamphlets and on its website and attempts to appeal to black women directly. Planned Parenthood is currently selling merchandise including T-shirts, water bottles, purses, and other items that are black or purple with the capitalized slogan “STAND WITH BLACK WOMEN.”234 It clearly thinks that abortion services are for black women. What does Planned Parenthood mean when it says this?
We can answer this question by looking to Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who was proudly and unabashedly motivated by an ideology called eugenics. In her 1932 speech “My Way to Peace,” she lays out her eugenics creed as the way to achieve “world peace,” which involves segregation and sterilization. She calls this controlling “the input and output of morons.”235 She wanted to create what she thought was a “perfect society.” She wanted to create a society of the “fit,” which she defined as rich, white, educated elites. Meanwhile the “unfit” must be stopped from ruining the rest of society.
In her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger wrote, “A lack of balance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and ‘fit’ is admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization.”236 She described the supposed problem of the “feeble-minded” on the one side producing too much and the “educated and well-to-do classes” reproducing less, resulting in a society that would have far more feeble-minded people than well-to-do people. She said that chaos would ensue “unless the feeble-minded are prevented from reproducing their kind.”237
Margaret Sanger was obsessed with eugenics, as the titles of several of her articles show: “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The Purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), and “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928), to name a few.
She thought of blacks as the lowest of the low. Once Sanger realized she could not forcibly sterilize everyone she viewed as a human weed, she knew she had to convince blacks to sterilize themselves so that they would not procreate anymore and eventually die out. Sanger instigated what she termed “The Negro Project” in 1939, a project that merged with the efforts of Birth Control Federation of America. The goal was to limit the number of black babies born by making sure black women started using birth control. With the cooperation of the New York Urban League, Sanger set up one of her first birth control clinics in Harlem, New York, to target blacks.238 After focusing on blacks in urban areas, she moved to blacks in rural areas.
Sanger co-drafted a report titled Birth Control and the Negro in which she stated, “Negroes present the great problem of the South,” as they are the group with “the greatest economic, health, and social problems.” She claimed that their population must be curtailed because they are largely illiterate and “still breed carelessly and disastrously.”239
Sanger had nothing but positive recollections of her visit to the women of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, in 1926.240 She said of the visit in her 1938 autobiography, “I believe I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered.”241 She was right at home with them. Sanger did not write of any regrets of having spoken to them or any disagreements she had with them either. Their goals were the same as hers.
Sanger’s overarching goal was to “exterminate the Negro population,” as she wrote in a private letter to Clarence Gamble in 1939. She says that the nature of her organization is to target the African American community, writing, “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through religious appeal. We don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is just the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”242 Sanger convinced prominent blacks like W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to spread her message of population control for blacks.
One might say that Planned Parenthood has changed and isn’t racist anymore. But sadly, Planned Parenthood is just as racist today as its founder was then. Eugenicists after World War II did not disappear but simply moved into the population control movement. World War II brought the informal referendum on racism to the forefront, and the public did not like what it saw. The civil rights movement of the 1960s solidified this, and racism was not acceptable in the public square by the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, the eugenics movement needed a different name, another justification for the same ideology of limiting population but with the same end goal. “Population control” became an acceptable way to argue that we need fewer people in the world without having to say the word “eugenics.” Once the population control movement collapsed, the same people pivoted into the abortion movement as we know it today.
A key pivoter includes Planned Parenthood itself, which began by promoting eugenics and sterilization, then population control, and then abortion. Planned Parenthood follows this line of thinking in its history. Planned Parenthood’s website under “Our History” confirms this. The American Birth Control League, which it describes as “an ambitious new organization that examined the global impact of population growth,” and Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Research Bureau “merged to become Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”243 The same ideology of eugenics and extermination continued, but using a different strategy.
We can see the same act of pivoting regarding other prominent eugenics organizations. The American Eugenics Society, for example, changed the name of its scholarly publication from Eugenics Quarterly to Social Biology.244 The journal’s editor explained that eugenics goals could be achieved through different tactics.
Alan Guttmacher carried on the legacy of Margaret Sanger. He was vice president of the American Eugenics Society of which Margaret Sanger was a member. He became one of Planned Parenthood’s most influential presidents, serving as president through the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision until 1974. He explicitly endorsed abortion for eugenic reasons.245 Regarding abortion, he claimed that “the quality of parents must be taken into account,” including “feeble-mindedness.”246 He claimed that the question of whether to allow abortion must be “separated from emotional, moral, and religious concepts.”247 He was purely focused on the social outcome.
But is the ghost of Margaret Sanger still alive today? Oh, yes it is. Let’s look at where Planned Parenthood clinics are located today. Over 70 percent of Planned Parenthood locations are located in predominantly minority communities. Abortion is the leading cause of death for black Americans.248 In New York City, more black babies are aborted than are born.249 In some areas, a black baby is eight times more likely to be aborted than a white baby. This is not health care, this is Planned Parenthood purposefully putting its locations in predominantly black neighborhoods, targeting them, and succeeding. Margaret Sanger could never have dreamed that her organization would be this effective in exterminating the next generation of blacks. If Margaret Sanger were alive today, she would be happy to see that clinics today are exactly where she wanted them.
Planned Parenthood pretends it does this because it wants to “serve black women.” But you don’t help a community by killing its next generation. Alveda King, civil rights activist and niece of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., explains that the leading cause of death for the black community isn’t gang violence, gun violence, heart attack, stroke, diabetes, or HIV but abortion alone. About a third of abortions in America since Roe v. Wade have been on black babies, when blacks are 13 percent of the population.250 These numbers are wildly disproportionate. King said, “The great irony… is that abortion has done what the Klan only dreamed of.”251
King dispels the notion that blacks are more prone to wanting abortions, saying, “Now does it mean that African Americans are more immoral or don’t care? Absolutely not. We are just regular, everyday people like everyone else. But Planned Parenthood moved into our community with the abortion killing centers and said, ‘We’re here to help you. Let’s kill your baby, so you can have a better life.’”252
We all know that Planned Parenthood targets minority communities for a reason, and it’s eugenics. Secretary of Urban Development Ben Carson told Neil Cavuto on Fox News, “One of the reasons that you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a way to control that population.”253 Benjamin Watson, a tight end for the Baltimore Ravens, spoke at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC, saying, “I do know that blacks kind of represent a large portion of the abortions, and I do know that honestly the whole idea with Planned Parenthood and Sanger in the past was to exterminate blacks,” Watson said. “And it’s kind of ironic that it’s working.”254
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his opinion of Box v. Planned Parenthood that “the use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical. The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement.… Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause.”255
The proof that Planned Parenthood continues in the Margaret Sanger tradition is that it celebrates her still. Planned Parenthood’s presidents including Gloria Feldt and Faye Wattleton share Sanger’s ideology. Wattleton has claimed that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.”256 Feldt has stated: “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.”257 Planned Parenthood’s current president, Alexis McGill Johnson, even wrote an article in 2019 titled “In Defense of Margaret Sanger on Eugenics.”258 Planned Parenthood proudly carries the torch of Margaret Sanger.
In 1966, Planned Parenthood began presenting the Margaret Sanger Award annually to recognize, in its words, “individuals of distinction in recognition of excellence and leadership in furthering reproductive health and reproductive rights.” It venerated Margaret Sanger in the 1960s, and clearly it venerates Margaret Sanger to this day. Not surprisingly, one of the recipients of the Margaret Sanger Award, the “highest honor,” was Hillary Clinton. In her acceptance speech in 2009, Hillary Clinton said, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision.… I am really in awe of her.”259 Nancy Pelosi glowingly accepted the award in 2014. President Obama spoke to Planned Parenthood in 2013 and hailed the organization, commending its “extraordinary” and “remarkable work,” saying it does a “great, great job.”260