In fact, breeding out the mentally unfit seems to have been a top priority of Sanger’s. But did she also want to eliminate so-called racial defects? It looks like the answer is yes. While it is harder to find direct quotes from Sanger about race, she did speak negatively about high birth rates among foreigners and positively about “pure white native stock.” The Rewire author even acknowledges that Sanger quoted W.E.B. Du Bois as saying, “The mass of Negroes particularly in the South still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children possibly.”
In her article, “What Every Girl Should Know,” Sanger made another derogatory statement about race when she said,
In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.
Does Any of This Even Matter Today?
Pro-choice advocates nevertheless argue that, even though Sanger did promote eugenics and even if she was a racist, that does not matter because that is not the purpose of Planned Parenthood today. The Rewire author writes, “Whether or not Planned Parenthood had its roots in anti-Blackness is irrelevant in a discussion of the services that Planned Parenthood provides in 2015.”
While it is true that Planned Parenthood might have changed as an organization throughout its history, it does not seem quite fair to say that the principles on which it was founded are “irrelevant.” And given that an organization intended to provide birth control was founded by a woman who held many disturbing views about breeding, it is worth asking why the abortion rate among black communities is in fact currently disproportionately high.
In November 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report titled “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2015.” According to data from this study and the U.S. Census Bureau compiled by CNS News, even though black Americans make up 13.4 percent of the U.S. population and white Americans make up 76.6 percent of the population, each demographic had almost the same percentage of abortions (36 percent and 36.9 percent, respectively). Put another way, the abortion rate of the black population (25.1) is much higher than that of the white population (6.8).
It would be hasty to conclude from these stats alone that, because it is an abortion provider, Planned Parenthood has an overt agenda to eliminate an entire race. What is clear is that the emotional nature of this issue demonstrates the importance of people, especially those who claim to follow Christ, being well-informed about what they believe.
