By Dave Andrusko
Planned Parenthood, the brainchild of eugenicist Margaret Sanger, celebrated its 100th birthday October 16. Over the last month, NRL News Today wrote at length about the eerie confluence of the 40th anniversary of the life-affirming Hyde Amendment, on September 30, and the 100th anniversary of the life-denying Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
When you understand that at least two million people escaped with their lives because of the Hyde Amendment, you easily appreciate why PPFA so hates the now 40-year-old provision and why PPFA’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, even more so.
No “unwanted” child should ever escape Planned Parenthood’s maw, let alone two million. As Prof. Michael New explained in his study of the Hyde Amendment’s impact, “This is roughly equal to the entire population of Houston, the fourth largest city in America. It is also roughly equal to the population of the entire state of New Mexico, and to the combined populations of the states of Rhode Island and Delaware.”
As always, PPFA and its political arms are swimming in money (their CEO’s salary just jumped to nearly $1 million) and their political arms brag they can influence the outcomes of Senate races in multiple states.
Rather than talk about the fawning press CEO Cecile Richards habitually receives, or the duplicitous ways PPFA hides it up-to-its-eyeballs involvement in abortion, or the arms-locked-together team of PPFA, Clinton, and the Democrat Party, let’s look at Margaret Sanger, PPFA’s founder.
Sanger wrote countless outrageous things. The following two examples are (1) taken from a 1925 book to which she contributed an essay; and (2) a recent tone-deaf “debunking” of criticism of Sanger, the results of which, inadvertently, were very harsh on Sanger.
Both focus on Sanger’s habit of referring to people whom she didn’t approve of as “weeds” which must be cleared away.
Here’s a passage from, “The Need for Birth Control in America,” which appeared in Birth Control: Facts and Responsibilities, ed. Adolf Meyer, M.D., 1925.
“In his last book, Mr. [H. G.] Wells speaks of the meaningless, aimless lives which cram this world of ours, hordes of people who are born, who live, who die, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. 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.”
“Hopeless repetitions” that are “clog[ging] up the path” that “we must clear away” so as to “cultivate our garden”?
Yikes!
Sources sympathetic to Sanger delight in making tortuous distinctions without differences. (By the way, our friends at Wikipedia note, “It is particularly used when a word or phrase has connotations associated with it that one party to an argument prefers to avoid.”)
Snopes tried to defang Sanger’s frequent use of “weeds” by “debunking” an assertion that Sanger specified a “particular race or ethnicity.” In other words, if she wrote something really, really ugly but did not mention a particular people, well, no harm, no foul.
Really? Here’s a quote from an April 8, 1923, New York Times article “attributed” to Sanger that Snopes thinks makes it all right. The quote ends thusly:
Succinctly and with telling brevity and precision “Birth Control” summed up our whole philosophy. Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.
This is supposed to make us look at Sanger more favorably, to see her as a woman unfairly picked upon?!
It is eugenics on steroids– eliminating and eventually extirpating “defective stocks” while we “release” and “cultivate” what Sanger believed were “the better racial elements in our society.”
It is telling that one definition of extirpate is “to pull up as if by the roots” which is what you must do if you are to totally eliminate all those human “weeds.”
One final thought. Even with the power of its praetorian guard–virtually the entirety of the media elite–warding off a true assessment, PPFA’s approval ratings have come down.
True, majorities do not want the organization defunded. PPFA and its legion of media apologists have persuaded large swathes of the public that it is a non-partisan dispenser of women’s “health services,” rather than what it is–the largest abortion provider in the world wholly invested in politics.
Politifact is one of those self-appointed media truth-detectors which almost invariably just happen to come down on the side of the Left. But in late 2015, even Politifact Texas acknowledged that there are late 2015 polls showing PPFA’s favorability ratings as high as 50% and 53% but also as low as 44% and 40%.
Keep the faith. The wheels of justice grind slowly but grind fine.
Editor’s note. This editorial appeared in the latest digital edition of National Right to Life News. We trust you are reading the entirety of this issue and you are using your social media contacts to distribute the contents far and wide.