Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain, was a racist.
Over the weekend, the abortion chain finally acknowledged its troubling roots, including Sanger’s connection to white supremacist and eugenic groups.
In an opinion piece at the New York Times, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson stopped short of calling Sanger a racist, but she acknowledged that their founder “harmed generations with her beliefs.”
Black pro-life leaders responded by criticizing Johnson for failing to acknowledge the worst thing that came out of Sanger’s racism: the targeting and slaughtering of millions of unborn black babies in abortions.
Johnson began her piece by admitting that Planned Parenthood has tried to ignore and disguise its ugly roots.
“We have defended Sanger as a protector of bodily autonomy and self-determination, while excusing her association with white supremacist groups and eugenics as an unfortunate ‘product of her time,’” she wrote.
She said Sanger worked with white supremacist and eugenic groups, including the KKK women’s auxiliary, and she supported the terrible 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Buck v. Bell, which allowed the government to forcibly sterilize people that it deemed “unfit.”
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“The first human trials of the birth control pill — a project that was Sanger’s passion later in her life — were conducted with her backing in Puerto Rico, where as many as 1,500 women were not told that the drug was experimental or that they might experience dangerous side effects,” Johnson continued.
Though Johnson said Planned Parenthood is taking “responsibility for the harm that Sanger caused to generations of people with disabilities and Black, Latino, Asian-American, and Indigenous people,” she refused to call their founder a racist.
“We don’t know what was in Sanger’s heart, and we don’t need to in order to condemn her harmful choices,” she continued. “We will no longer make excuses or apologize for Margaret Sanger’s actions. But we can’t simply call her racist, scrub her from our history, and move on.”
Among other things, Johnson said they plan to amend for their past by pledging to “fight the many types of dehumanization we are seeing right now.”
But pro-life advocate Benjamin Watson, former Super Bowl champion and vice president of Human Coalition, denounced Johnson’s piece as “fake reckoning.”
“It is time for Planned Parenthood to take the next step, or their denunciation of Margaret Sanger rings hollow,” Watson said in a statement to LifeNews. “Whether they personally identify with Sanger’s ideology or not, they continue to carry out her mission, by serving as the leading executioner of our children.”
Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion chain in the U.S. Last year, it reported more than 354,000 abortions. While abortions harm families of every race and culture, research shows that African Americans have a disproportionately high abortion rate compared to other groups. What’s more, a recent study found that 86 percent of its abortion facilities are located in or near African American and Latino neighborhoods.
Watson said Johnson’s words mean nothing if she does not follow up with actions to protect black Americans, born and unborn.
“The same Sanger they claim to disavow would applaud their efforts and results, as a disproportionate percentage of Black children have been killed in Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics,” Watson said. “Acknowledging a racist history does not absolve them of the blood on their hands, as they continue to take full advantage of victims of the racism they decry.”
