Ben Carson: Planned Parenthood Trying to Control Black Population

Planned Parenthood sets up abortion clinics in black neighborhoods to “control that population,” GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson said Wednesday. “I know who [Planned Parenthood founder] Margaret Sanger is,” Carson said on Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto.” “I know that she believed in eugenics and that she was not particularly enamored with black people.”

Sanger’s writings indicated that she viewed some races as inferior, though she worked with African-Americans in her projects.

“Look and see what many people in Nazi Germany thought of her,” Carson said.

Cavuto asked Carson about his views on defunding Planned Parenthood in the light of a recent series of videos showing abortion doctors discussing the sale of fetal tissue.

Carson said he is willing to have a discussion about when life begins.

“Certainly once the heart starts beating. Certainly at that point,” he said. “If we are willing to open up the discussion, both sides, I think we can come to accommodation.”

Before you read the following, you need to know that all of what you are about to read will sound like they are describing a Nazi. You’ve been warned.

Jerry Broussard of WhatDidYouSay.org

Margaret Sanger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term “birth control”, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Controversies

Sexuality

While researching information on contraception Sanger read various treatises on sexuality in order to find information about birth control. She read The Psychology of Sex by the English psychologist Havelock Ellis and was heavily influenced by it.[77] While traveling in Europe in 1914, Sanger met Ellis.[78] Influenced by Ellis, Sanger adopted his view of sexuality as a powerful, liberating force.[79] This view provided another argument in favor of birth control, as it would enable women to fully enjoy sexual relations without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy.[80] Sanger also believed that sexuality, along with birth control, should be discussed with more candor.[79]

However, Sanger was opposed to excessive sexual indulgence. She stated “every normal man and woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and women who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, are never sensual.”[81][82] Sanger said that birth control would elevate women away from a position of being an object of lust and elevate sex away from purely being for satisfying lust, saying that birth control “denies that sex should be reduced to the position of sensual lust, or that woman should permit herself to be the instrument of its satisfaction.”[83] Sanger wrote that masturbation was dangerous. She stated: “In my personal experience as a trained nurse while attending persons afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter what their ailments, I never found any one so repulsive as the chronic masturbator. It would not be difficult to fill page upon page of heart-rending confessions made by young girls, whose lives were blighted by this pernicious habit, always begun so innocently.”[84] She believed that women had the ability to control their sexual impulses, and should utilize that control to avoid sex outside of relationships marked by “confidence and respect.” She believed that exercising such control would lead to the “strongest and most sacred passion.”[85] However, Sanger was not opposed to homosexuality and praised Ellis for clarifying “the question of homosexuals… making the thing a—not exactly a perverted thing, but a thing that a person is born with different kinds of eyes, different kinds of structures and so forth… that he didn’t make all homosexuals perverts—and I thought he helped clarify that to the medical profession and to the scientists of the world as perhaps one of the first ones to do that.”[86] Sanger believed sex should be discussed with more candor, and praised Ellis for his efforts in this direction. She also blamed the suppression of discussion about it on Christianity.[86]

Abortion

Sanger advocated the use of contraception for family planning as a safe alternative to abortion.[87][88][89][16] As a nurse she was alarmed by the cases of death that resulted from botched abortions.[90][91] She was eager to separate the issue of birth control from the less acceptable and higher risk procedure of abortion.[87][92] While she did accept abortion “as a last resort”[87][93] she generally distanced herself from the practice as it was then performed.[92]

Eugenics

Originally Sanger based the advocacy of birth control on feminist ideals. After World War I, Sanger increasingly appealed to the societal need to limit births by those least able to afford children. The affluent and educated already limited their child-bearing while the poor and ignorant lacked access to contraception and information about birth-control.[94] Here she found an area of overlap with eugenicists.[94] She believed that they both sought to “assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.” They differed in that “eugenists imply or insist that a woman’s first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her duty to the state.”[95] Sanger was a proponent of negative eugenics, which aims to improve human hereditary traits through social intervention by reducing the reproduction of those who were considered unfit.[96][97]

In “The Morality of Birth Control,” a 1921 speech, she divided society into three groups: the “educated and informed” class that regulated the size of their families, the “intelligent and responsible” who desired to control their families however did not have the means or the knowledge and the “irresponsible and reckless people” whose religious scruples “prevent their exercising control over their numbers.” Sanger concludes “there is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”[98]

Sanger’s 1920 book endorsed negative eugenics. An advertisement for a book entitled “Woman and the New Race”. At the top is a photo of a woman, seated affectionately with her two sons.

Sanger’s eugenic policies included an exclusionary immigration policy, free access to birth control methods and full family planning autonomy for the able-minded, and compulsory segregation or sterilization for the “profoundly retarded”.[99][100] In her book The Pivot of Civilization, she advocated coercion to prevent the “undeniably feeble-minded” from procreating.[101]

Although Sanger supported negative eugenics, she asserted that eugenics alone was not sufficient, and that birth control was essential to achieve her goals.[102][103][104]

In contrast with eugenicist William Robinson, who advocated euthanasia for the unfit,[note 8] Sanger wrote, “we [do not] believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.”[105] Similarly, Sanger denounced the aggressive and lethal Nazi eugenics program.[100] In addition, Sanger believed the responsibility for birth control should remain in the hands of able-minded individual parents rather than the state, and that self-determining motherhood was the only unshakable foundation for racial betterment.[102][106]

Sanger also supported restrictive immigration policies. In “A Plan for Peace”, a 1932 essay, she proposed a congressional department to address population problems. She also recommended that immigration exclude those “whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race,” and that sterilization and segregation be applied to those with incurable, hereditary disabilities.[99][100][107]

Race

E. B. Du Bois served on the board of Sanger’s Harlem clinic.[108]

Sanger’s writings echoed her ideas about inferiority and loose morals of particular races. In one “What Every Girl Should Know” commentary, she references popular opinion that Aboriginal Australians, to her “the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development,” possessed “so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets,” as compared to the “normal man and Woman.” who were able to exercise control over their desires.[81] Elsewhere she bemoaned that traditional sexual ethics “… have in the past revealed their woeful inability to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has today drifted.”[106]

Such attitudes did not keep her from collaborating with African-American leaders and professionals who saw a need for birth control in their communities. In 1929, James H. Hubert, a black social worker and leader of New York’s Urban League, asked Sanger to open a clinic in Harlem.[109] Sanger secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and opened the clinic, staffed with black doctors, in 1930. The clinic was directed by a 15-member advisory board consisting of black doctors, nurses, clergy, journalists, and social workers. The clinic was publicized in the African-American press and in black churches, and it received the approval of W. E. B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP.[110] Sanger did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects.[111] Sanger’s work with minorities earned praise from Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1966 acceptance speech for the Margaret Sanger award.[112]

From 1939 to 1942 Sanger was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America, which included a supervisory role—alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble—in the Negro Project, an effort to deliver birth control to poor black people.[113] Sanger wanted the Negro Project to include black ministers in leadership roles, but other supervisors did not. To emphasize the benefits of involving black community leaders, she wrote to Gamble “we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” While New York University’s Margaret Sanger Papers Project, argues that in writing that letter, “Sanger recognized that elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow South;”[114] Angela Davis uses the quote to support claims that Sanger intended to exterminate the black population.[115]

Freedom of speech

Sanger opposed censorship throughout her career. Sanger grew up in a home where orator Robert Ingersoll was admired.[116] During the early years of her activism, Sanger viewed birth control primarily as a free-speech issue, rather than as a feminist issue, and when she started publishing The Woman Rebel in 1914, she did so with the express goal of provoking a legal challenge to the Comstock laws banning dissemination of information about contraception.[23] In New York, Emma Goldman introduced Sanger to members of the Free Speech League, such as Edward Bliss Foote and Theodore Schroeder, and subsequently the League provided funding and advice to help Sanger with legal battles.[117]

Over the course of her career, Sanger was arrested at least eight times for expressing her views during an era in which speaking publicly about contraception was illegal.[118] Numerous times in her career, local government officials prevented Sanger from speaking by shuttering a facility or threatening her hosts.[119] In Boston in 1929, city officials under the leadership of James Curley threatened to arrest her if she spoke. In response she stood on stage, silent, with a gag over her mouth, while her speech was read by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.[120]