Life; The Most Basic Right In America

Her Name was Margaret Sanger. Born in Corning, New York she grew to be the founder of Planned Parenthood and the pioneer of ‘family planning’. She studied to become a nurse at a young age and then, after training became interested in many taboo subjects of the era. She traveled far and wide throughout Europe studying the aspects of human sexuality under the controversial Havelock Ellis and others.

Upon her return to America and to New York City, she had been influenced by Marxist philosophers while in Europe and became an important member of the American Communist Party. Her work soon focused on eugenics and birth control, which at the time were extremely controversial. She was arrested in both 1915 (for mailing birth-control flyers) and again in 1916 for running an illegal birth-control clinic in Brooklyn.  Eventually her work, defiance to law and controversy was observed worldwide. Even Adolph Hitler was inspired by Sanger's organization's position on “murdering socially undesirable people”. Sanger was a communist, a Nazi sympathizer and above all else, a racist. Margaret Sanger aligned herself with the eugenicists whose ideology prevailed in the early 20th century. Eugenicists hailed racial supremacy and “purity,” particularly of the “Aryan” race. Eugenicists hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the race by encouraging the “fit” to reproduce and the “unfit” to restrict their reproduction. They sought to contain the “inferior” races through segregation, sterilization, birth control and abortion. Margaret Sanger contributed to a controversial book titled "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy" by Lothrop Stoddard. In Stoddard's book, Sanger wrote of “ridding America of The Muddy Races.” “Muddy Races”, according to her were: Blacks, Chinese, Jews, Hispanics, Catholics and Southern Mediterranean's. Sanger herself wrote a book called “The Pivot of Civilization”. In it she wrote how authorities should have the legal power to enter  private homes and take the mentally inferior away to work or labor camps. She thought euthanizing mentally and physically impaired citizens was the pragmatic way to ensure a superior Aryan American culture. She condemned charity as "perpetuating the existance of the moron and diseased". Lets not forget where Sanger began her practice. Sanger illegally operated a birth control clinic in October 1916, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, which eventually closed. The clinic serviced the poor immigrants who heavily populated the area—those deemed “unfit” to reproduce.  She wrote:

“Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.”

The  Review printed an excerpt of an address Sanger gave in 1926. In it she said:

“It now remains for the U.S. government to set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means. In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition. The number of the feeble-minded would decrease and a heavy burden would be lifted from the shoulders of the fit.^”

Her most revealing work (which today's Planned Parenthood guards closely) was in Harlem New York City.

The Following is an investigative report by Concerned Women for America:

In 1929, 10 years before Sanger created the Negro Project, the ABCL laid the groundwork for a clinic in Harlem, a largely black section of New York City. It was the dawn of the Great Depression, and for blacks that meant double the misery. Blacks faced harsher conditions of desperation and privation because of widespread racial prejudice and discrimination. From the ABCL's (American Birth Control League)  perspective, Harlem was the ideal place for this “experimental clinic,” which officially opened on November 21, 1930. Many blacks looked to escape their adverse circumstances and therefore did not recognize the eugenic undercurrent of the clinic. The clinic relied on the generosity of private foundations to remain in business. In addition to being thought of as “inferior” and disproportionately represented in the underclass, according to the clinic's own files used to justify its “work,” blacks in Harlem:

• were segregated in an over-populated area (224,760 of 330,000 of greater New York's black population lived in Harlem during the late 1920s and 1930s);
• comprised 12 percent of New York City's population, but accounted for 18.4 percent of New York City's unemployment;
• had an infant mortality rate of 101 per 1000 births, compared to 56 among whites;
• had a death rate from tuberculosis—237 per 100,000—that was highest in central Harlem, out of all of New York City.

Although the clinic served whites as well as blacks, it “was established for the benefit of the colored people.” Sanger wrote this in a letter to Dr. W. E. Burghardt DuBois, one of the day's most influential blacks. A sociologist and author, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP in 1909 to improve the living conditions of black Americans.

That blacks endured extreme prejudice and discrimination, which contributed greatly to their plight, seemed to further justify restricting their numbers. Many believed the solution lay in reducing reproduction. Sanger suggested the answer to poverty and degradation lay in smaller numbers of blacks. She convinced black civic groups in Harlem of the “benefits” of birth control, under the cloak of “better health” (i.e., reduction of maternal and infant death; child spacing) and “family planning.” So with their cooperation, and the endorsement of The Amsterdam News (a prominent black newspaper), Sanger established the Harlem branch of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. The ABCL told the community birth control was the answer to their predicament.

Sanger shrewdly used the influence of prominent blacks to reach the masses with this message. She invited DuBois and a host of Harlem's leading blacks, including physicians, social workers, ministers and journalists, to form an advisory council to help direct the clinic “so that our work in birth control will be a constructive force in the community.” She knew the importance of having black professionals on the advisory board and in the clinic; she knew blacks would instinctively suspect whites of wanting to decrease their numbers. She would later use this knowledge to implement the Negro Project.

Sanger convinced the community so well that Harlem's largest black church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, held a mass meeting featuring Sanger as the speaker. But that event received criticism. At least one “very prominent minister of a denomination other than Baptist” spoke out against Sanger. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of Abyssinian Baptist, “received adverse criticism” from the (unnamed) minister who was “surprised that he'd allow that awful woman in his church.”

Grace Congregational Church hosted a debate on birth control. Proponents argued birth control was necessary to regulate births in proportion to the family's income; spacing births would help mothers recover physically and fathers financially; physically strong and mentally sound babies would result; and incidences of communicable diseases would decrease.

Opponents contended that as a minority group blacks needed to increase rather than decrease and that they needed an equal distribution of wealth to improve their status. In the end, the debate judges decided the proponents were more persuasive: Birth control would improve the status of blacks. Still, there were others who equated birth control with abortion and therefore considered it immoral.

Eventually, the Urban League took control of the clinic, an indication the black community had become ensnared in Sanger's labyrinth.

 ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~ ~  ~  ~  ~  ~

"We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" – Margaret Sanger Founder of Planned Parenthood As Quoted in a letter  to Clarence Gamble, October 19, 1939


So in closing, this is why I myself left the Democratic Party. Now seeing the Democratic presidential candidates respond to the April 18, 2007 Supreme Court decision to ban PBA, I feel even better about my choice to leave.
 
Hillary Clinton:  "This decision marks a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman's right to choose and recognized the importance of women's health. Today's decision blatantly defies the Court's recent decision in 2000 striking down a state partial-birth abortion law because of its failure to provide an exception for the health of the mother. As the Supreme Court recognized in Roe v. Wade in 1973, this issue is complex and highly personal; the rights and lives of women must be taken into account. It is precisely this erosion of our constitutional rights that I warned against when I opposed the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito."

Barack Obama:  "I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling, which dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the health of pregnant women.  As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings respecting a woman’s medical concerns and the very personal decisions between a doctor and patient.  I am extremely concerned that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further measures to restrict a woman's right to choose, and that the conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law and a matter of equal rights for women."