The Big Cruel Lie
Uncovering the Racist History of Planned Parenthood
Many years ago, when I was
still a first grader, my father and I went for a walk. We strolled past a
brand-new building made of shining white concrete and gleaming glass doors. My
father had been quite interested in this building, and we often walked past it
during its construction. Now it was completed.
You could see into the
reception area from the street. The walls were painted in soft pastel colors.
The furniture seemed – to my six-year-old eyes, at least – to be quite elegant.
The staff seemed to be entirely made up of cheerful-looking young white women.
The sign said “Planned Parenthood.”
My father lifted an eyebrow
and said something that made no sense to me at the time. He said, “Not everyone
who smiles in your face is your friend.” I started to ask my father what he
meant by that, but – even at that tender age – I realized that, when my father
was deliberately vague, the conversation was over.
Years later, I have had
occasion to ponder my father’s seemingly cryptic words. At that time, our
neighborhood lacked a grocery store. The nearest thing was a small market five
blocks away. If you couldn’t find what you wanted there, the next option was a
trip to the open-until-midnight Giant. Unless you owned a car, however, this
trip involved taking two buses or paying for an expensive cab ride.
We did not have a
bookstore, drugstore or a dry cleaner. The elementary school was so bad that my
parents found it necessary to make the financial sacrifice of placing me in a
private school. In fact, we had little of the conveniences that my parents said
other neighborhoods possessed.
But, somehow, someone had
been happy to provide us with this beautiful new abortion clinic.
We were not alone.
According to LEARN (the Life, Education and Resource Network), an
African-American pro-life organization, an astonishing 78% of all abortion
clinics in this country are in or near minority neighborhoods. Black America is
12% of the general population, yet we account for a whopping 40% of the
abortions. How did this come about?
In the late 1930s, Margaret
Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, came up with the idea for the
infamous “Negro Project.” Sanger, despite the rosy and saint-like portrait the
organization presents of her, was a frank racist. Judging by her public
statements and private letters, the woman thought that blacks – southern blacks
in particular – were simple, child-like brutes whose fertility needed managing the
same way a farmer needs to tend to his breeding stock of sheep or cows.
Alarmed
by the numbers of southern blacks who were migrating to northern cities, Sanger
and her associates created the Negro Project. They believed that, by convincing black people to
limit the size of their families, they would prevent the black population’s
numbers from overwhelming those of the white population.
It was assumed that blacks –
they especially worried about the men – would look suspiciously on any white
effort to meddle with their fertility, so a clever fiction was created. Black
elites – doctors, educators and even ministers – were enlisted to preach
contraception and, later, abortion.
Black people were told
that, if they just learned to limit the size of their families, whites would
come to respect them for their self-control. One day, this fiction said, this
respect would lead to greater civil rights for blacks. In other words, fewer
black children would equal more freedom.
This was a lie, and a cruel
one at that. As we all know, black
Margaret Sanger’s Negro
Project is discussed at length in the book Blessed Are the Barren. Although the
Project is not as well-known as the Tuskegee Experiment, it involves the same
kinds of falsehoods and manipulations.
Not everyone who smiles in
your face is your friend, my father said. Recently, I visited my old
neighborhood. It now has a bookstore, a drugstore, a dry cleaner and even
restaurants.
The abortion clinic is
still there, and it still looks beautiful with the same shining white concrete
and gleaming glass doors.