For the past 100 years, Planned Parenthood has centered its work around one hugely flawed, unspoken belief that not all human beings are equal.
It began with the group’s founder, Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist who promoted sterilization and birth control to “weed out” human beings who the eugenics movement deemed “unfit.” Today, Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the U.S., killing approximately 320,000 unborn human lives every year.
As Planned Parenthood celebrates its 100th birthday on Sunday, pro-lifers are responding with reminders about the abortion chain’s roots in discrimination. In a column for The Stream, pro-life filmmaker Jason Jones and John Zmirak exposed one of the more horrific details about Planned Parenthood’s past – its connections to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
They wrote:
One eugenics expert, Eugen Fischer, whom Sanger featured as a speaker at a population conference she organized, had already run a concentration camp — in German-ruled Southwest Africa, before World War I, where he murdered, starved and experimented on helpless native Africans. It was Fischer’s book on eugenics, which Hitler had read in prison, that convinced Hitler of its central importance. Another longtime official of Planned Parenthood, Garrett Hardin, had a decades-long track record of serving in eugenics organizations, and as late as the 1980s was calling for mass forced sterilization of Americans as a necessary solution to the “population problem.”
The same people served on the boards of the American Eugenics Society and Sanger’s organizations for decades, and they worked closely together on countless projects …
These included hormonal birth control testing on poor, rural women in Puerto Rico, and legislation to force sterilize or castrate people accused of being “feeble minded” or “shiftless,” according to the report.
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Later, they added:
One of Sanger’s regular authors in The Birth Control Review wrote in a U.S. newspaper in the 1930s defending the forced sterilization of such mixed-race children, for the sake of Germany’s “health.” …
One author who served on Sanger’s board and published regularly in The Birth Control Review was Lothrop Stoddard, a high official of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, Adolf Hitler cited in Mein Kampf as “my bible.”
Today, Planned Parenthood downplays Sanger’s involvement in the eugenics movement by claiming that she only was going along with the popular thinking of the day. They claim Sanger got involved only to make connections and gain support for her own birth control cause.
Jones and Zmirak said this simply is not true.
“The birth control movement and the eugenics movement were the same movement — to the point where Margaret Sanger twice tried to merge her organization with major eugenics groups,” they wrote.
Angela Franks, PhD, who has done extensive research on Sanger, said the Planned Parenthood founder believed strongly in eugenic principles. Throughout her life, Sanger advocated for birth control and sterilization in ways that devalued certain groups of human beings, Franks explained. Like many eugenicists of her time, Sanger basically reduced people to their genetic makeup, lumping people into “good genes” and “bad genes” groups, Franks continued. It’s something the abortion industry still does today, though in a less obvious way, when it fights laws that protect unborn babies with disabilities from abortion.
In one particularly dehumanizing piece, Sanger wrote in 1925: “… Their lives are hopeless repetitions. All that they have said has been said before; all that they have done has been done better before. Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.”
Other evidence indicates that Sanger was heavily involved in the eugenics movement throughout her lifetime, and continued to publicly espouse such ideas even after eugenics fell out of favor, largely because of the Holocaust.
In a 1957 interview, Sanger told journalist Mike Wallace: “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world – that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin – that people can – can commit.”
In the past 100 years, Planned Parenthood has succeeded in these goals in a horrific, deadly way. Pro-lifers estimate the abortion group has eliminated almost 7 million unborn babies’ lives throughout its history. Abortion fits so well into the eugenic roots of Planned Parenthood. Babies in the womb are living, growing human beings, but because they are not born yet, society has deemed them unfit to live.
