Friday, June 06, 2008

PP and poor plus minorities

PRO-CHOICE ARGUMENT: Part 4
"Restricting abortion would be unfair to the poor and minorites, who need it most.

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PRO-LIFE ANSWER:
Planned Parenthood's abortion advocacy was rooted in the eugenics movement and its bias against the mentally and physically handicapped and minorities.



Margaret Sanger was the direction-setter and first president of Planned Parenthood, the world's largest abortion promoter and provider. Although, in her earlier writings she condemned abortion, ultimately her organization ended up viewing abortion as just one means of controlling the birthrate of those considered inferior. I have in front of me a stack of Sanger's original writings, as well as copies of her magazine, Birth Control Review. I encourage readers to review these writings and decide for themselves the beliefs and attitudes that gave birth to Planned Parenthood and the American abortion movement.



Margaret Sanger spoke of the poor and handicapped as the "sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility," claiming their existence constituted an "attack upon the stocks of intelligence and racial health." She warned of "indsicriminate breeding" among the less fit that would bring into the world future voters "who may destroy our liberties, and who may thus be the most far-reaching peril to the future of civilization." She called the less priviledged members of society " a dead weight of human waste.

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In a chapter called the "Cruelty of Charity" Sanger argued that groups dedicated to helping pregnant women decide to give birth to their babies were "positively injurious to the community and the future of the race." She claimed, "the effect of maternity edowments and maternity centers supported by private philanthropy would have perhaps already have had, exactly the most dysgenic tendency." Her use of the term dysgenic clearly indicates her belief that these woman-helping efforts violated Darwin's doctrine of the survival of the fittest, by which the weaker were naturally eliminated by virtue of their inferirority.



The same spirit permeates Sanger's magazine, Birth Control Review. It is full of articles with titles such as "The world's Racial Problem," Toward Race Betterment ", and Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need." The latter article was written in 1933 by Dr. Ernest Rudin. a leader in the German eugenics movement that was at the time busily laying the foundation for the Nazi's acts of "racial improvement" and ethnic cleansing." Elsewhere in that issue an article titled "Defective Families" calls the "American Gypsies" a "family of degenerates" started by a man and "a half-breed woman," and warns "their germ plasm has been traced throughout seven middle-western states." Also in the same issue, in his article "Birth Control and Sterilization," Sanger's companion and lover Dr. Havelock Ellis stated, "sterilization would be....helpful, although it could not be possible in this way to eliminate the mentally unfit element in the population. It would only be a beginning." Students of history know where that "beginning" ended only a decade later, under the leadership of a eugenic devotee name Adolf Hitler. (Though Sanger did not write these specific articles herself, as founder and director she was responsible for the content and ideas promoted by the magazine.

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In fact, the international eugenics movement, of which Margaret Sanger was inarguably a part, was openly praising Nazi racial policies at least as late as 1938. Sanger gave the welcoming address to a 1925 international eugenics conference. According to research Marvin Olasky, Margaret Sanger's "Negro Project" of the 1930s was "hailed for its work in spreading contraception among those whom eugenicists most deeply feared." When it became evident that contraceptives were not sufficiently curtailing the black population and other target groups, the eugenicists turned to abortion as a solution to the spread of unwanted races and families.



In Margaret Sanger's own words, to help the weaker and less priviledged survive and to allow them to reproduce was to take a step backward in human evolution-"Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant." These "stocks" were the poor and uneducated, a large portion of whom were ethnic minorities. Sanger was more interested in "aiming to eliminate" these "stocks" than in helping them.



This history helps to explain why to this day Planned Parenthood does virtually nothing to promote adoption or help poor and minority women who choose to give their children life rather than abort them. Planned Parenthood has even brought legal action to shut down alternative pregnancy centers which give women other choices besides abortion.



Though I have read many Planned Parenthood materials, I have never seen any renouce or appologige for Sanger's blatant eugenicism, her bias against the poor and the mentally and physically handicapped, and her implict racism, all of which characterized Planned Parenthood's social philosophy from its inception. The fact there there are some highly visable blacks and other minority leaders in Planned Parenthood does not change its heritage or philosophy. It simply makes it easier to carry out its policies among target groups.

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