Planned Parenthood Matters The organization has a dark history and a disturbing present. By Kathryn Jean Lopez
‘We want fewer and better children . . . and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.”
That ghastly message appeared in the introduction to Margaret Sanger’s 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization.
In a little-noticed incident, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced that she is “really in awe” of Sanger. “The 20th-century reproductive-rights movement, really embodied in the life and leadership of Margaret Sanger, was one of the most transformational in the entire history of the human race,” Clinton declaimed upon receiving an award from the organization that Sanger founded, Planned Parenthood.
Clinton’s speech punctured the fiction that she’s a moderate — the radical organization Planned Parenthood certainly has confidence in her.
Clinton’s speech didn’t set off shock waves among the public because Planned Parenthood is about as American as apple pie at this benighted point in history. Most Democrats and even some Republicans bow at its altar. The religious metaphor is intentional: Sanger referred to a “religion of birth control” that sought to “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.”
According to its just-released annual report for 2007–2008, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America was responsible for conducting 305,310 abortions in the United States in 2007, an increase from 289,750 the previous year. Consider that the next time an abortion advocate tells you women are being kept from getting abortions in America. That increase in abortions provided by PPFA coincided with an increase in government funding, from $337 million to $350 million.
Does any of this sound unacceptable to you? We certainly don’t have to subsidize the largest abortion provider in the United States, one with a dark history (which Jonah Goldberg chronicles well in his Liberal Fascism) and a disturbing present.
But attempts by pro-life politicians to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood are always thwarted. Defenders of Planned Parenthood argue that the government money goes to actual family planning, not just abortions. But why does Planned Parenthood even need the U.S. Treasury when it makes a profit? Shouldn’t we at least be arguing over this?
Washington right now is more comfortable with abortion than it has been in a long time. As Hillary Clinton praises the Obama administration’s commitment to “reproductive rights,” it’s an important time for some reflection on what, exactly, that euphemism means.
Does, for instance, Roe v. Wade co-counsel Ron Weddington reflect the reproductive-rights movement? In 1992, he urged the White House to rush to get an abortion pill into the hands of American women. He argued that it will help to “start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country.”
He wrote: “Government is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . . . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery . . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don’t have a lot of time left.” Sounds a lot like the population-culling paranoia of Sanger, doesn’t it?
Pro-lifers are frequently portrayed by the Planned Parenthood crowd as heartless zealots unconcerned with the realities of women’s lives. Not only does the work of many at, say, crisis-pregnancy centers suggest otherwise, but if you pay attention to the words of Sanger and her followers, you’ll find a much more chilling disdain for the realities of lower-class life.
There are folks with good intentions on all sides of the abortion debate. But if you doubt a little scrutiny is way overdue, consider this. We have not yet hit the 100-day mark in the Obama administration and the United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA] has already been given a $50 million check from the United States. The UNFPA has been criticized for its collaboration with coerced abortion in China. But then that’s exactly what can be expected from a State Department run by a woman “really in awe” of Margaret Sanger.
PPFA’s annual report is titled “Planned Parenthood Matters.” It sure does. It’s about time we take notice. ________________
Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.
Mrs. Clinton Can’t Defend Patron Saint of Planned Parenthood By Mona Charen
Margaret Sanger was a most thoroughgoing racist.
Appearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was confronted in a way she probably wasn’t expecting. Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) asked the secretary to account for her comments the previous month, when she accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously,” Secretary Clinton had said in March, “her courage, her tenacity, her vision . . . And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.”
I’m not sure what it means to “take on archetypes” (American Heritage Dictionary: “An original model or type after which other similar things are patterned; a prototype”). Perhaps she meant stereotypes. But it is worth pausing to consider, as Representative Smith did, that the Planned Parenthood organization (of which Sanger’s American Birth Control League was the predecessor) and the secretary of state continue to regard Margaret Sanger as an (if you will) archetypal modern feminist.
Mrs. Sanger was certainly a birth-control pioneer. But when you examine the totality of Mrs. Sanger’s views, you’d think modern feminists would blanch — at least a little. Margaret Sanger was a most thoroughgoing racist. “Eugenics,” she wrote, “is the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems.” Here, from her book What Every Girl Should Know, is an example of her thoughts on human development:
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.
In his book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg quotes Sanger as describing her life’s work this way: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control.”
Representative Smith asked Secretary Clinton to respond to Mrs. Sanger’s views about the “deterioration in the human stock” and “the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents.” As Goldberg has observed, conservatives are always asked to “own” their intellectual forebears and to disavow that which requires disavowal. Yet liberals skate by without having to distance themselves from the dreadful opinions and writings of their heroes and heroines.
The secretary did not respond directly. She chose not to defend Margaret Sanger at all. Instead, she spoke of the suffering women that she had seen around the world. “I’ve been in hospitals in Brazil where half the women were enthusiastically and joyfully greeting new babies and the other half were fighting for their lives against botched abortions. I’ve been in African countries where 12- and 13-year-old girls are bearing children.” I’ve asked the State Department to identify the Brazilian hospital to which Mrs. Clinton was referring. They have yet to get back to me. As for children bearing children in Africa — obviously, birth control is necessary in poor countries, but is she really suggesting that cultures abusive enough to permit the marriage of very young girls would be open to providing them with birth control? It’s like suggesting that the solution to wife beating is to get men to wear boxing gloves.
Secretary Clinton then, in good Obamanista fashion, offered a gratuitous swipe at the Bush administration. “During my time as first lady I helped to create the Campaign Against Teenage Pregnancy . . . and . . . the rate of teen pregnancy went down. I’m sad to report that after an administration of eight years that undid so much of the good work, the rate of teenage pregnancy is going up.”
Politicians always simplify, but this is truly ludicrous. Teen pregnancy down under the Clintons but then up under Bush? Sorry, the statistics do not reflect that. According to the Guttmacher Institute (the research arm of Planned Parenthood), teen pregnancy reached an all-time high in 1988 and 1989 and began trending down thereafter, reaching its lowest recent point in 2005 — past the midpoint of the Bush years. It has been going up since then.
Part of Mrs. Clinton’s solution is to promote abortion, which she calls “women’s reproductive health care.” Anyone for a small irony? Margaret Sanger hated abortion and called abortionists “blood sucking men with M.D. after their names.” Perhaps someone can ask Secretary Clinton about that at the next hearing. ____________
