Black Pro-Life Activist: Planned Parenthood CEO’s Denial of Sanger’s Racism ‘Desperate Attempt to Rewrite History’

Supporters and patients of Planned Parenthood take part in a "Pink the Night Out" rally at
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Black pro-life leader Ryan Bomberger says Planned Parenthood’s new acting CEO is creating “fake history” in her defense of the organization’s eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger.

Bomberger, chief creative officer and co-founder of the Radiance Foundation, asserts Alexis McGill Johnson’s “denial of basic historical facts is a pathetic and desperate attempt to rewrite history and project Planned Parenthood’s own inherent racism.”

The pro-life activist isn’t mincing any words. He states in a column at his foundation’s website that Planned Parenthood’s new acting president “oversees the $2 billion leading killer of unborn black lives (an estimated 247 per day),” all the while she is hoping to tag the pro-life movement as racist.

In a recent opinion column at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Johnson responded to Bill McGurn, member of the WSJ’s editorial board, who himself took to task, as did other writers, Marissa Brostoff, for her op-ed at the Washington Post, titled “How White Nationalists Aligned Themselves with the Antiabortion Movement.”

“The pro-life proposition is simple: Human life begins at conception, and every human life is equal in dignity and worth,” McGurn wrote, adding that such a philosophy is “incompatible with white supremacism.”

“Perhaps that’s why so many African-Americans, especially African-American women, have been leaders in the pro-life cause,” he observed.

McGurn went on to say that “eugenics have been used to justify abortion from the start.”

“It was Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, speaking of the Negro Project — a campaign to get African-Americans to have fewer children” who fretted the “more rebellious members” of the black community might start thinking “we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

Planned Parenthood’s Johnson wrote “McGurn’s description of Margaret Sanger’s ‘Negro Project’ is callous and incorrect.”

“A full reading of Sanger’s letter about the project reveals her outlining the important role black doctors and nurses serve to calm concerns about eugenics, not to promote it,” she continued. “Planned Parenthood denounces eugenics because we believe every person, regardless of race or income, should have the freedom to make their own decisions about their body.”

Bomberger writes that Johnson now heads up a multi-billion-dollar abortion business that persistently denies it is steeped in eugenics.

“Johnson denies that Sanger promoted eugenics,” he explains. “Sanger didn’t merely promote it; she embodied it as a member of the virulently racist American Eugenics Society and one of its ringleaders.”

The pro-life leader continues:

The Negro Project… was not an altruistic effort despite the official Margaret Sanger Papers Project’s laughable denial of Sanger’s own documented racism (opposition to legal immigration, anti-semitism, and speaking to KKK and other like-minded gatherings in her autobiography). Its objective was to severely reduce or eliminate the birth rate of poorer blacks. The ever duplicitous Sanger proudly proclaimed, in her article entitled The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda: “…the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics.” She continued: “Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism.”

Bomberger observes many black women leaders share the view that Sanger promoted eugenics.

“Dr. Alveda King, Catherine Davis, Day Gardner, Star Parker, Dr. Freda Bush, Connie Eller, Zina Hackworth, Kay Coles James or the late Dr. Mildred Jefferson (who was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the co-founder of the National Right to Life Committee) just to name a few,” he continues, adding his own refusal to buy into Johnson’s denials:

I’m not fooled either … I’m a black adoptive father with beautifully brown children. I was conceived in rape yet adopted and loved into a racially diverse family of fifteen. My white pro-life parents weren’t concerned about a “falling white birth rate.” They wanted to love those who escaped the violence of abortion and were wrongly written off as “unwanted” and “unloved.” They adopted nine non-white children (black and biracial, Native American, and Vietnamese) and one Caucasian child.

Bomberger points to the now well-known report that, in New York City, where Planned Parenthood was created, more black babies—for years—have been aborted than born alive.

“In 2014, when Johnson was Planned Parenthood’s Board Chair, there were 1,101 black babies aborted for every 1,000 born alive,” he notes. “Johnson conveniently never talks about that grim reality. Nor does she ever talk about fathers and the massive epidemic of fatherlessness which leads to abortion rates up to five times higher in the black community.”

The pro-life leader writes there is “no escaping the truth about Sanger’s brokenness and the vile anti-human ideology she maintained throughout her life.”

“Planned Parenthood regularly celebrates their eugenicist founder,” he notes and quotes from chapter 18 of Sanger’s book, Women and the New Race:

Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.

Bomberger states Sanger’s words explain “her motivations for ‘reproductive health.’”

The pro-life leader says abortion activists like Johnson “can keep trying to defend Margaret Sanger and the unsevered DNA of Planned Parenthood.”

“An industry that was inarguably birthed in eugenic racism and elitism somehow wants people to believe that the leading killer of black lives isn’t practicing systemic racism but ‘reproductive justice,’” he asserts.

 

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