Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards Promotes Margaret Sanger in Commencement Speech

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   May 20, 2016   |   3:56PM   |   Washington, DC

Through her job, Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards arguably has prevent more young people from graduating college – or even going to college – than most. Her business aborts more than 300,000 unborn babies each year, more than any other group in the U.S.

Ironically, however, Richards was invited to give the commencement address to the graduating class of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health on Tuesday.

Teen Vogue gave a glowing report of Richards’ remarks to the graduates. The piece never mentioned abortion or the Congressional investigation into whether Planned Parenthood illegally profited off the sale of aborted baby parts. Instead, it allowed Richards to paint her abortion business as a caring, compassionate women’s health care provider, and to encourage the graduates to become abortion activists.

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Richards’ key piece of advice to the students was “Get in trouble,” the magazine reported:

No, Richards didn’t telling the public health students to go rob a bank. Rather, she instructed that disrupting the status quo to make the world a better place, “100 percent means there are times you are extremely unpopular.”

Just take Planned Parenthood, which helps 2.5 million women and men receive affordable and sometimes life-saving health care a year, as an example.

“We started 100 years ago when a young nurse named Margaret Sanger… hand[ed] out pamphlets about how to prevent pregnancy — which was completely illegal,” Richards told the 600 graduates. “The great thing is, she was busted by an undercover cop posing as a mother. She was carted off to jail where she taught her fellow inmates about birth control. And a movement was born! Yes, it takes time. Yes, there are setbacks. But it is worth the fight!”

Although half of the United States is currently trying to shut down Planned Parenthood, Richards said, “Ironically, in the face of the attacks on reproductive health care, we have seen a resurgence of activism and it is heartening!”

Calling Planned Parenthood a life-saver and its founder Margaret Sanger a heroine are deceptive. Sanger was a eugenicist who began promoting birth control because she believed in eliminating certain groups of people with less desirable qualities.

Sanger wrote in Pivot of Civilization, “They are … human weeds, reckless breeders, spawning … human beings who never should have been born.” She routinely advocated for sterilization and segregation of minorities, the sick and disabled and once spoke to the Ku Klux Klan. In a 1934 interview with America Weekly, Sanger even advocated for a government system similar to China’s brutal one-child policy, saying it has “become necessary to establish a system of birth permits.”

Of course, Richards did not mention any of this to the Columbia graduates. Nor did she mention how Planned Parenthood’s business model is all about making a profit off abortions, as former employees have exposed. Richards also left out how Sanger’s eugenic mission lives on at Planned Parenthood today. The abortion giant continues to target poor and minority women and their unborn babies for abortions, placing 79 percent of its abortion facilities in minority neighborhoods, according to a study by Protecting Black Life.

This is the kind of “trouble” that most Americans don’t want, but it’s the kind that Richards and Planned Parenthood are deceptively promoting to this year’s college graduates.

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