A few weeks ago, satirical site the Babylon Bee ran the following headline: ‘I Think We’ve Found All The Institutions Founded By Racists And We Can Just Stop Looking For Them Now,’ Says Planned Parenthood Spokesperson Nervously.
Once again, satire is just barely keeping ahead of reality.
In a startling departure from its typically dogged defenses, Planned Parenthood admitted through clenched teeth this week what many have asserted for decades: that their founder Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenicist.
Which leads us to wonder what will happen, now, to all the “fact-checks” which have insisted that Margaret-Sanger-was-a-big-ol-racist is nothing more than a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced Tuesday that it will remove the name of Margaret Sanger from its Manhattan abortion clinic and will even lobby the city to scrub her name from a street sign near its Bleecker Street location.
‘The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,’ reads a statement from Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate’s board.
As far as anyone could glean a spark of meaning from such splendid corporate gobbledegook, they seem to be talking about all those unborn black lives extinguished on an industrial scale by Planned Parenthood.
The admission, while bland, marks the strongest sign to date of a shift in rhetoric for the 103-year-old organization, which for years defended Sanger as a feminist icon and pioneer for reproductive rights. The nation’s largest abortion provider’s reckoning comes as protests against racism around the country condemn a plethora of historical figures, some of whom owned slaves or otherwise condoned racist practices.
In a document from around Planned Parenthood’s 100-year anniversary, the organization offered an even more milquetoast admission that Sanger ‘had some beliefs, practices, and associations that we acknowledge and denounce, and that we work to rectify today,’ hastily moving on to adulate her associations with black civil rights leaders.
Indeed. In 1926, Sanger gave a speech on birth control to a women’s auxiliary branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. In 1930, she established her organization’s first clinic in Harlem, New York City that sought to make birth control widely available to disenfranchised black women. Her ‘Negro Project’, begun several years later, targeted African American women in the rural South.
And hit that target her weapon of mass baby destruction did.
In New York City, where Sanger set up shop so many decades ago, an unborn black child is now more likely to be killed in the womb than born alive. Between 2012 and 2016, only slightly over two-fifths of the 254,553 pregnancies of black women that ended in abortion or birth ended with the mother having her baby, according to the city’s Health Department.
Still, Planned Parenthood isn’t showing any indication that they’re going out of the black baby killin’ business any time, soon. All they’re trying to do is keep one step ahead of the statue-toppling mobs and lie low until the ruckus is over (i.e. mid-November, 2020).
‘We’re not going to obliterate her,’ said Merle McGee, the New York affiliate’s chief equity and engagement officer. ‘If we obliterate her, we cannot reckon with her.’
In the meantime, black lives are only going to matter to Planned Parenthood for as long as they bring in the cash by being disposed of.
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