Genocide by abortion. Black Genocide. It is the leading cause of death among Black Americans, greater than all diseases, accidents, suicides and murders combined. Over nineteen million Black Americans have been intentionally killed. In some communities more Blacks are killed than born.
From Black Panthers to the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Black leaders have cried out for the killing to stop. They have been protesting Planned Parenthood targeting Black neighborhoods for a generation. They say that Planned Parenthood has spilled more Black blood than the Ku Klux Klan.
In an era when the cry of “Black Lives Matter!” rises from our streets, the Jefferson County Public Health Department honored the entity Black leaders hold primarily responsible, today and throughout its history, for Black Genocide. In October 2017, the agency co-sponsored a celebration of 100 years of Planned Parenthood. In doing so, it endorsed decades of eugenicist rhetoric, theories and programs embraced by Adolf Hitler and American racists.
The public officials responsible for this might plead ignorance, though that would be hard to believe. The facts are not secret. It is just that many white supporters of Planned Parenthood choose to ignore them, just as the Health Department did.
This same agency last week declared systemic racism to be a public health crisis. It would do well to reexamine its decision to ignore the charges of racism that have been made against Planned Parenthood. Not all Black Americans stand against Planned Parenthood or are as vocal as, say, Dr. Alveda King, MLK’s niece and leader in the fight to end Black Genocide. She points out that the killing of a quarter of the Black American population has not been from lynching or police shootings, but “from abortionists who plant their killing centers in minority neighborhoods and prey on woman who they think have no hope.”
But by tuning out those voices pleading for the killing to stop–perhaps because “they ain’t Black”in liberal white eyes–the Public Health Department has exhibited symptoms of the systemic racism it says is causing a public health crisis. In this case, the crisis is Black Genocide.
Everything to follow is well-documented. Most of the material comes from Black scholars and leaders. I have listed the sources on which I relied, with links, at the end of this article. This is a necessarily abbreviated treatment of a long, sad and still open chapter in American history. It starts at the conception of Planned Parenthood by Margaret Sanger.
One can support easy access to contraception and gynecological care without celebrating Sanger. One can pledge themselves to the defense of Roe v. Wade. But one cannot celebrate 100 years of Planned Parenthood and hope to avoid embracing Sanger’s racism and abhorrent eugenicist viewpoint.
Turning a White-Privileged Blind Eye to Black Genocide
The goal of reducing and eventually eliminating the population of Black Americans and other “undesirables” gave birth to the eugenics movement. It surfaced in this country in the first decade of the 20th Century about the same time as Margaret Sanger started the local clinics and chapters that culminated in the American Birth Control League. That organization was later renamed Planned Parenthood.
Birth control for Sanger was always about “improving” the “stock” of the American people. Sanger shared the racist eugenics viewpoint that whites were superior because they were more highly evolved. In an essay offering sexual advice to young girls she warned that Blacks could not help themselves from being inclined towards rape. It was in the Black man’s nature because of their low rung on the evolutionary ladder. At the bottom of the ladder was the Australian aborigine, “the lowest known species of the human family, just a step above the chimpanzee in brain development.”
Sanger later launched The Negro Project, an effort targeting Black communities to reduce their birth rates. In an infamous letter that surfaced after her death she detailed a plan for co-opting Black ministers and paying them to spread Planned Parenthood’s disinformation. “[W]e do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” she wrote.
These were also the beliefs of the officers and directors, scholars and journalists of Sanger’s League and publishing arm, and, later, Planned Parenthood. Sanger worked her whole life to get the federal government to adopt her racist eugenic goals. She eventually succeeded with President Richard Nixon. Tape recordings of conversations with his staff reveal that he shared Sanger’s concern about an increasing Black population. He believed that abortion would be an excellent way to “take care of the Black bastards.” Taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood started at his initiative. (You can hear Nixon’s voice in the Maafa21 documentary linked below).
Racism and Eugenics Celebrated by the Jefferson County Public Health Department
In 1921 Sanger declared in a speech to the Pennsylvania Conference on Birth Control that the goal of her work “was to create a superman.” That would be done by eliminating from the gene pool those she and her eugenicist collaborators viewed as “weeds”–a term she applied to people of color. She also advocated having the federal government establish “open spaces” where the illiterate, the poor, the unemployed, and all classes she considered undesirable would be confined against their will until such time as they improved their “moral qualities.”
Contrast Sanger with Dr. Mildred Jackson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and co-founder of the National Right to Life committee: “I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.
It is unsurprising that Sanger’s organization provided intellectual fodder for Nazi eugenics and the Holocaust. Hitler wrote of his admiration for essays published in the Birth Control Review and considered a book by an American eugenicist, part of Sanger’s circle, to be “his Bible” (Hitler’s words) on race theory.
One of Sanger’s directors participated in rounding up and forcibly sterilizing hundreds of Black Germans and their children. This was Lothrop Stoddard, a man fanatically committed to eliminating black and brown people from the United States. His work introduced the term untermenschen (English: sub-humans) into Nazi ideology. When he returned from Nazi Germany he resumed his collaboration with Sanger’s organization. Little wonder, as he was a founding member and director of Sanger’s League, and thus also a founding member of Planned Parenthood.
The Ku Klux Klan thought highly of Sanger and her organization. In her autobiography she wrote of the pleasurable experience of being the featured speaker at a Klan rally in New Jersey, and how pleased she was to be invited to twelve more Klan convocations. “We are paying for and even submitting,” Sanger once wrote, “to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” She was perfect for audiences draped in white hoods.
Sanger organized the World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927. She gave a leadership role to Eugen Fischer. He had prior experience running concentration camps for Blacks in South Africa and went to work for Hitler in applying his experience to territory conquered by Nazi Germany. One of his duties was to exterminate Blacks from Europe.
In 1933 the Birth Control Review published “Eugenic Sterilization,” by psychiatrist Ernst Rudin. He later wrote Germany’s eugenics law and participated in brutal racial medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners.
By 1942, the connections between Sanger’s League and Nazis were becoming uncomfortably visible. It was the depths of WWII and America was learning of Nazi atrocities used for population control and genocide. “Population control” had garnered too many negative connotations. The group rebranded itself as Planned Parenthood.
Forced Sterilization
Black Americans know well the history of forced sterilization government programs that targeted their women and girls, some as young as ten years old. Planned Parenthood was an active participant in that evil history, from formulating and publishing proposals for mandatory sterilization to assisting state and local government eugenics boards that forced the procedures upon unwilling Black women and girls. Sanger and her officers publicly called for forced sterilization on a national level, one proposal going so far as to demand the sterilization of a quarter of our nation’s population. Planned Parenthood was such a fierce supporter of forced sterilization that its Iowa executive director attacked the state for reducing the number of poor and minority women forced to undergo the procedure.
This, too, was celebrated by the Jefferson County Public Health Department when it chose to celebrate Planned Parenthood’s entire history, no exceptions, no reservations.
What was the Public Health Department’s motivation in engaging in an event unreservedly honoring an organization with such a repulsive history? This history is so vile it cannot be excused. We certainly would not allow any other organization to whitewash such an evil past.
All Black Lives Must Matter
“If Black lives matter, then Black women matter. If Black lives matter, then Black children matter. If Black lives matter, then Black babies matter.” Black activist Star Parker spoke these words to a crowd of Black Americans outside a Selma, Alabama abortion clinic. They had come there after crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge, walking in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They believe his work is not done and that the greatest threat they face today is the leading cause of death among Black Americans, Black Genocide, or, others call it, race suicide by abortion.
About 13 percent of American women are Black, but they account for about 30 to 35 percent of abortions. They undergo abortions at three times the rate of white women. Black leaders see in those numbers not only a horrific loss of Black life, but also a loss of Black political power, for every Black life ended is one less Black vote. And they see in Planned Parenthood’s targeting of Black communities an extension of the racist eugenics agenda of Margaret Sanger that began with her first writings concerning Black Americans.
“For too long, this very important issue has been dismissed as ‘that’s just white people trying to stir something up,’” says Bishop E.W. Jackson, who led a Black protest against the addition of Sanger’s bust to the National Statue Gallery. “We want people to understand this is a vital interest to Black people.”
Among those who need to understand this vital interest to black people are the white officials of the Jefferson County Public Health Department. Nothing is more systemic about systemic racism than the government holding up for recognition and praise a century-long history of racism.
A Closing Observation
As Sanger’s true character and agenda have received more widespread attention. Planned Parenthood has begun to put some distance between itself and its founder and leader for many decades. It will occasionally say that Sanger’s views were “harmful,” but that’s about it. To this day, Planned Parenthood’s highest award is still called The Sanger Award.
Resources on Black Genocide
The volume of material available is massive, from books to historical monographs to videos. One place to start is the 2008 doumentary “Maafa21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America.” Maafa is a Swahili word for oppression, and refers to the nightmare of slavery. The film is long, 2.5 hours. It takes time to cover everything and display screen shots of the writings of Sanger and eugenists to prove what the film reveals. It also provides the audiotape of Richard Nixon lauding legalized abortion as a way to “deal with Black bastards.” The documentary has gained a wide Black audience, but far fewer whites know of it. It can be viewed online at this link.
PBS’ Frontline in 2018 produced a short-film on the growing Black anti-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood movement.
A number of videos on Sanger, her Negro Project and eugenicist ideology are available here.
BlackGenocide.org is a leading source for research and essays by Black Americans opposed to Planned Parenthood and what it is doing to their communities.
Here is a list of further resources. Just click on each heading to be linked to the underlying article. You will notice much of the opposition to Planned Parenthood comes from Black churches. That was also the fount of leadership for the civil rights movement. Two of these articles focus on relatives of Dr. Martin Luther King leading the fight against Black Genocide.
These Black Leaders in History Viewed Abortion as Black Genocide
Planned Parenthood’s Racist History
Planned Parenthood: The Biggest Bastion of Eugenics and White Supremacy in America
Black Christian Leaders Protest New Planned Parenthood Clinic: Lament “Silent Genocide”
Dr. Alveda King: “Planned Parenthood Targets Blacks for Abortion”
Fifteen Outstanding, Accomplished Pro-Life Black Women
And this book by Samuel Yette, the first Black Washington correspondent for Newsweek. He was fired in retaliation for speaking out.
Jim Scarantino was the editor and founder of Port Townsend Free Press. He is happy in his new role as just a contributor writing on topics of concern to him. He spent the first 25 years of his professional life as a trial attorney, then launched an online investigative news website that broke several national stories. He is also the author of three crime novels. He resides in Jefferson County. See our "About" page for more information.
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