We’ve all seen the tapes. Planned Parenthood employees have recently been caught on video engaging in illegal activities: collaborating with the sex trafficking of minors, covering up statutory rape, and even coaching minor girls to avoid disclosing the age of the adult men who got them pregnant.

We also know that Planned Parenthood is – first, last, and always – an abortion organization. Its abortionists committed 337 thousand abortions in 2009, or more than one in every four abortions performed in the U.S. over the course of that same year. Of every 100 pregnant women who walk into a Planned Parenthood clinic, 98 leave with empty wombs.

Finally, we know that Planned Parenthood’s abortion business is very, very lucrative. The organization does a billion dollars worth of “business” each year. Abortions alone account for over a third of this revenue, even though only one in 10 patients come for an abortion. Another third comes from you and me in the form of government grants and contracts. As a result of this profiteering, the organization has built up nearly one billion in assets, making it one of the wealthiest “nonprofits” in American history, even as it has made the rest of us poorer by eliminating millions of people from our population.¹

But what you may not know is that the Planned Parenthood Federation of America is a big player in the international population control movement in its own right. Each year the organization sends tens of millions of dollars overseas to fund abortion campaign, not to mention lobby for the legalization of abortion in countries with pro-life laws, such as the Philippines.

In this the organization continues to follow in the footsteps of its founder, Margaret Sanger, who had little but contempt for the “Asiatic races,” as she and her eugenicist friends called them. During her lifetime, she proposed that their numbers be drastically reduced. But Sanger’s preferences went beyond race. In her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization she unabashedly called for the extirpation of “weeds … overrunning the human garden;” for the segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted;” and for the sterilization of “genetically inferior races.” It was later that she singled out the Chinese, writing in her autobiography about “the incessant fertility of [the Chinese] millions spread like a plague.”

There can be no doubt that Sanger would have been wildly enthusiastic over China’s one-child policy, for her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934, decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit … no permit shall be valid for more than one child.” As for China’s selective elimination of handicapped and abandoned babies, she would have been delighted that Beijing had heeded her decades-long call for exactly such eugenicist policies.

Sanger was not one for subtlety in such matters. She bluntly defined “birth control,” a term she coined, as “the process of weeding out the unfit” aimed at “the creation of a superman.” She often opined that “the most merciful thing that the large family does to one its infant members is to kill it,” and that “all our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class.” That is you and me, folks.

Sanger frequently featured racists and eugenicists in her magazine, the Birth Control Review. Contributor Lothrop Stoddard, who also served on Sanger’s board of directors, wrote in The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy that “We must resolutely oppose both Asiatic permeation of white race-areas and Asiatic inundation of those non-white, but equally non-Asiatic regions inhabited by the really inferior races.” Each issue of the Birth Control Review was packed with such ideas.

But Sanger was not content merely to publish racist propaganda; the magazine also made concrete policy proposals, such as the creation of “moron communities,” the forced production of children by the “fit,” and the compulsory sterilization and even elimination of the “unfit.”

Sanger’s own racist views were scarcely less opprobrious. In 1939 she and Clarence Gamble made an infamous proposal called “Birth Control and the Negro,” which asserted that “the poorer areas, particularly in the South … are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations.” Her “religion of birth control” would, she wrote, “ease the financial load of caring for with public funds … children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation.”

War with Germany, combined with lurid tales of how the Nazis were putting her theories about “human weeds” and “genetically inferior races” into practice, panicked Sanger into changing her organization’s name and rhetoric. “Birth control,” with its undertone of coercion, became “family planning.” The “unfit” and the “dysgenic” became merely “the poor.” The American Birth Control League became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Following Sanger’s death in 1966, Planned Parenthood felt so confident that it had safely buried her past that it began boasting about “the legacy of Margaret Sanger.” And it began handing out cutely named Maggie Awards to innocents who often had no inkling of her real views. The first recipient was Martin Luther King – who clearly had no idea that Sanger had inaugurated a project to set his people free – from their progeny. “We do not want word to go 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,” Sanger had earlier written Gamble.

The good news is that Sanger’s – and Planned Parenthood’s – patina of respectability has finally worn off.

It is time to cut this racist, money-grubbing, abortion-minded organization out of the federal budget forever.

Endnote
1. For more details, see the Defunding Planned Parenthood Fact Sheet developed by the Chiaroscuro Foundation.