How the Eugenics Movement Made Race-Based Abortions NormalPlanned Parenthood condemns sex-, race-, and disability-based discrimination in every other context, except when it occurs in the womb.
By Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis
June 25, 2022
In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, marking the first major endeavor of her career in social activism, which culminated in 1942 when she founded Planned Parenthood. Contrary to what many might assume from witnessing Planned Parenthood operate today as the nation’s largest abortion business, Sanger wasn’t an abortion activist.
Instead, she founded Planned Parenthood as part of a crusade for contraception, which she believed would be an important element of social progress. Unlike feminists later in the 20th century who demanded birth control as a means of liberating women from the supposed tyranny of the female body, Sanger and her allies had a more nefarious angle. It was the Progressive Era, and elite progressive leaders were advocating a frightening campaign: Anglo-Saxon–oriented eugenic policy as a means of reshaping the U.S. population to look, in their view, more ideally American.
In her 1919 essay “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” Sanger couched her argument for birth control in the context and aims of the eugenics movement. “Elimination of the unfit,” Sanger argued, could not be fully achieved without widespread access to birth control. Sanger later elaborated on what she meant by “unfit,” describing the link as she saw it between birth control and progress: “If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy.”
While Sanger and her fellow 20th-century eugenicists were not abortion advocates themselves, they no doubt would be pleased by the way in which the widespread acceptance of abortion has furthered their goal of reducing “undesirable” parts of the population.
The eugenics movement of the early 20th century was full of elite thinkers who advocated contraception and sterilization as a means of minimizing the reproduction of unwanted minorities: non-white Americans, the poor, and those deemed mentally disabled or otherwise unfit. Clarence Little—a university president and renowned genetic researcher—served on Planned Parenthood’s founding board and believed increased availability of birth control would help protect “Yankee stock,” or what Sanger would call those of “unmixed native white parentage.” “The feebleminded are notoriously prolific in reproduction,” Sanger described the problem as she saw it in Woman and the New Race.
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This is evident in how today’s white supremacists embrace abortion, cheering that it eliminates non-white children at a disproportionate rate, thus limiting the growth of the nonwhite population. White supremacist Richard Spencer has argued that abortion is essential in bringing about his ideal, racially homogenous American people. He supports abortion because, as he puts it, “the people who are having abortions are generally very often black or Hispanic or from very poor circumstances.” White women, Spencer notes, avail themselves of abortion “when you have a situation like Down Syndrome”— an acceptable use of abortion, in his view. Meanwhile, Spencer says, “the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics . . . use abortion as birth control,” something that in his view ought to be celebrated.
In the view of modern-day racists, the pro-life position is “dysgenic,” by which they mean that protecting babies from the lethal violence of abortion will harm later generations by allowing supposedly undesirable characteristics to continue to be passed on. In Spencer’s white-supremacist Radix Journal, Aylmer Fisher wrote: “The only ones who can’t [avoid unwanted pregnancy] are the least intelligent and responsible members of society: women who are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and poor.” Spencer and his racist ilk make this hateful argument because non-white and low-income women are indeed the ones who most often have abortions today.
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According to research from Ryan Bomberger’s Radiance Foundation, nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are located within walking distance of neighborhoods occupied predominantly by black and Hispanic residents. While abortion providers and advocates insist that this is a service to lower-income and minority women who need access to affordable health care, abortion statistics tell a different story. Despite constituting only 13 percent of the female population, black women represent well over one-third of all abortions in the United States each year. Black women are five times more likely than white women to obtain abortions, Hispanic women are twice as likely, and abortions are highly concentrated among low-income women. Shockingly, according to vital statistics data, in recent years more black babies were aborted than were born alive in New York City. Between the years 2012 and 2016, black mothers in New York City had 136,426 abortions and gave birth to only 118,127 babies. Among white, Asian, and Hispanic women, births far surpassed abortions.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/25/how-the-eugenics-movement-made-race-based-abortions-normal/
