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Planned Parenthood's Century of Brutality

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Leroy N. Soetoro

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Jul 1, 2017, 4:20:08 PM7/1/17

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448746/planned-parenthoods-brutal-
century?target=topic&tid=1743

It is functioning today as its eugenics-obsessed founders intended.

Infanticide did not go out of fashion with the advance from savagery to
barbarism and civilization. Rather, it became, as in Greece and Rome, a
recognized custom with advocates among leaders of thought and action. —
Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race

Clarence C. Little was a cultivated man. He was a Harvard graduate who
served as president of the University of Maine and the University of
Michigan. He was one of the nation’s leading genetics researchers, with a
particular interest in cancer. He was managing director of the American
Society for the Control of Cancer, later known (in the interest of verbal
economy) as the American Cancer Society; the president of the American
Eugenics Society, later known (in the interest of not talking about
eugenics) as the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology; and a
founding board member of the American Birth Control League, today known
(in the interest of euphemism) as Planned Parenthood. His record as a
scientist is not exactly unblemished — he will long be remembered as the
man who insisted that “there is no demonstrated causal relationship
between smoking or [sic] any disease” — but he was the very picture of the
socially conscious man of science, without whom the National Cancer
Institute, among other important bodies, probably would not exist.

He was a humane man with horrifying opinions.

Little is one of the early figures in Planned Parenthood whose public
pronouncements, along with those of its charismatic foundress, Margaret
Sanger, often are pointed to as evidence of the organization’s racist
origins. (Students at the University of Michigan are, at the time of this
writing, petitioning to have his name stripped from a campus building.)
Little believed that birth-control policy should be constructed in such a
way as to protect “Yankee stock” — referred to in Sanger’s own work as
“unmixed native white parentage,” if Little’s term is not clear enough —
from being overwhelmed by what was at the time perceived as the dysgenic
fecundity of African Americans, Catholic immigrants, and other
undesirables. (“The feebleminded are notoriously prolific in
reproduction,” Sanger reported in Woman and the New Race.) The question of
racial differences was an obsession of Little’s that went well beyond his
interest in eugenics and followed him to the end of his life; one of his
later scientific works was “The Possible Relation of Genetics to
Differences in Negro–White Mortality Rates from Cancer,” published in the
1960s.

The birth-control movement of the Progressive era is where crude racism
met its genteel intellectual cousin: Birth Control Review, the in-house
journal of Planned Parenthood’s predecessor organization, published a
review, by the socialist intellectual Havelock Ellis, of Lothrop
Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy. Ellis
was an important figure in Sanger’s intellectual development and wrote the
introduction to her Woman and the New Race; Stoddard was a popular birth-
control advocate whose intellectual contributions included lending to the
Nazi racial theorists the term “untermensch” as well as developing a great
deal of their theoretical framework: He fretted about “imperfectly
Nordicized Alpines” and such. Like the other eugenics-minded progressives
of his time, he saw birth control and immigration as inescapably linked
issues.

Stoddard’s views were so ordinary a part of the mainstream of American
intellectual discourse at the time that F. Scott Fitzgerald could refer to
his work in The Great Gatsby without fearing that general readers would be
mystified by the reference. What did Stoddard want?

“We want above all things,” he wrote, to preserve America. But “America,”
as we have already seen, is not a mere geographical expression; it is a
nation, whose foundations were laid over three hundred years ago by Anglo-
Saxon Nordics, and whose nationhood is due almost exclusively to people of
North European stock — not only the old colonists and their descendants
but also many millions of North Europeans who have entered the country
since colonial times and who have for the most part been thoroughly
assimilated. Despite the recent influx of alien elements, therefore, the
American people is still predominantly a blend of closely related North
European strains, and the fabric of American life is fundamentally their
creation.

Yesterday’s scientific progressives are today’s romantic reactionaries.

Sanger, who believed that the potential for high civilization resided
within “the cell plasms” of individual humans, made statements that were
substantially similar: “If we are to develop in America a new race with a
racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability
to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction
beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming
generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert
individuals as are the ideal of a democracy.”

Such was the intellectual ferment out of which rose the American birth-
control movement — or, rather, the American birth-control movements, of
which there were really two. Sanger, working within the socialist–feminist
alliance of her time, was a self-styled radical who published a short-
lived journal called “The Woman Rebel,” the aim of which as described in
its inaugural issue was “to stimulate working women to think for
themselves and to build up a conscious fighting character.” To fight what?
“Slavery through motherhood.” The Post Office refused to circulate the
periodical, a fact that The Woman Rebel reported with glee: “The woman
rebel feels proud the post office authorities did not approve of her. She
shall blush with shame if ever she be approved of by officialism or
‘comstockism.’” But Sanger and her clique did not have a monopoly on the
birth-control market. Her rival was Mary Ware Dennett, founder of — see if
this name sounds familiar — the Voluntary Parenthood League (VPL).

Where Sanger was a radical, Dennett was a liberal, couching her advocacy
in the familiar language of the American civil-libertarian tradition. She
was an ally of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had defended her
when she was charged with distributing birth-control literature classified
(as most of it was at the time) as “obscene.” While Sanger’s organization
was focused on setting up birth-control clinics (the first was in
Brooklyn), Dennett’s group was focused on lobbying Congress for the
legalization of contraception. Sanger’s group was characterized by a top-
down management structure (the local affiliates had no say in American
Birth Control League policymaking) and a cash-on-the-barrelhead approach
to social reform: Its membership and coffers were swelled in no small part
by the fact that the ABCL would not provide birth-control literature to
anyone who was not a dues-paying member.

As Linda Gordon put it in The Moral Property of Woman: A History of Birth-
Control Politics:

Increasingly the ABCL organized its local affiliates as upper-class
women’s clubs, even high-society charity groups. In 1926, league
organizing in Philadelphia was focused mainly on women of the Main Line, a
group of extremely wealthy suburbs. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Mrs. C. C.
Edmonds, of 1414 Wealthy St., S.E., was collecting “influential people”
for a local group. New York meetings were held in the Bryn Mawr Club.
These details pile up, drawing an unmistakable picture of an organization
of privileged women.

In the contest between the ABCL and VPL, we see the familiar struggle that
has long characterized the broader American Left: On one hand, there are
liberals advocating a legislative reform project through ordinary
democratic means; on the other hand are progressives, often led by
radicals, who are engaged in a social-change project based on coopting
institutions and the expertise and prestige associated with them. Gordon
concludes: “It was Sanger’s courting of doctors and eugenists that moved
the ABCL away from both the Left and liberalism, away from both socialist-
feminist impulses and civil liberties arguments toward an integrated
population ‘program for the whole society.’”

Which is to say, the word “planned” in “Planned Parenthood” can be
understood to function as it does in the other great progressive dream of
the time: “planned economy.”

Who plans for whom?

Sanger herself was generally careful to forswear compulsion in her
eugenics program, but in reality the period was characterized by the
widespread use of involuntary sterilization. Mandatory-sterilization bills
were introduced unsuccessfully in Michigan and Pennsylvania at the end of
the 19th century, but in 1907 Indiana became the first of many states to
create eugenics-oriented sterilization programs, targeting such “unfit”
populations as criminals and the mentally ill, along with African
Americans (60 percent of the black mothers at one Mississippi hospital
were involuntarily sterilized) and other minority groups. The Oregon state
eugenics board was renamed but was not disbanded until the 1980s. About
65,000 people in the United States were involuntarily sterilized.

European programs went even further, with the Swiss experiment in
involuntary sterilization drawing the attention of Havelock Ellis, who
wrote up his views in “The Sterilization of the Unfit.” Ellis, too,
objected to compulsory measures — up to a point. “There will be time to
invoke compulsion and the law,” he wrote, “when sound knowledge has become
universal, and when we are quite sure that those who refuse to act in
accordance with sound knowledge refuse deliberately.” He did not have
access to the modern progressive term “denialist,” but the argument is
familiar: Once the science is settled, then the state is empowered to act
on it through whatever coercive means are necessary to achieve the end.
Two recent press releases from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, both
from May, are headlined: “State Abortion Restrictions Flying in the Face
of Science” and “Many Abortion Restrictions Have No Rigorous Scientific
Basis.”

Progressives holding views closer to those of the proto-Nazi Lothrop
Stoddard frequently talked about eugenics in zoological terms, but, in the
main, eugenics was subordinated to the larger progressive economic agenda:
the management of productive activity by enlightened experts. The great
economic terrors among progressives of the time were “overproduction” and
“destructive competition,” both of which were thought to put downward
pressure on wages, profits, and, subsequently, standards of living.
Contraception was widely understood as a political solution to a supply-
and-demand problem, with birth control understood as one element in a
broad and unified program of economic control. Ellis sums up this view in
his foreword to Sanger’s Woman and the New Race:

Progressives holding views closer to those of the proto-Nazi Lothrop
Stoddard frequently talked about eugenics in zoological terms, but, in the
main, eugenics was subordinated to the larger progressive economic agenda:
the management of productive activity by enlightened experts. The great
economic terrors among progressives of the time were “overproduction” and
“destructive competition,” both of which were thought to put downward
pressure on wages, profits, and, subsequently, standards of living.
Contraception was widely understood as a political solution to a supply-
and-demand problem, with birth control understood as one element in a
broad and unified program of economic control. Ellis sums up this view in
his foreword to Sanger’s Woman and the New Race:

Or, as Sanger insisted: “War, famine, poverty, and oppression of the
workers will continue while woman makes life cheap.”

There is more to this history than exegesis of Progressive-era thinking.
It is significant that Sanger’s birth-control movement, and not Dennett’s,
came to dominate the field. The financially driven structure of local
affiliates working in complete subordination to a tightly controlled
national body of course survives in the modern iteration of Planned
Parenthood, but, more important, so does the humans-as-widgets conception
of sexuality and family life. The eugenic habit of mind very much endures,
though it is less frequently spoken of plainly.

In his Buck v. Bell decision — confirming that involuntary-sterilization
programs pass constitutional muster “for the protection and health of the
state” — the great humanist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared: “Three
generations of imbeciles are enough.” Never having been overturned, Buck
remains, in theory, the law of the land. But that was long ago. And yet:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a reliable supporter of abortion rights, has
described Roe v. Wade as being a decision about population control,
“particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many
of.” Like Ellis and Sanger, Ginsburg worries that, without government
intervention, birth control will be disproportionately practiced by the
well-off and not by the members of those “populations that we don’t want
to have too many of.” In an interview with Elle, Ginsburg said, “It makes
no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.”
That wasn’t 1927 — it was 2014. A co-counsel for the winning side of Roe
v. Wade, Ron Weddington, advised President Bill Clinton that an expanded
national birth-control policy incorporating ready access to pharmaceutical
abortifacients promised immediate benefits: “You can start immediately to
eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country.
It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a reliable supporter of abortion rights, has
described Roe v. Wade as being a decision about population control,
‘particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many
of.’

But it is not true that we only whisper it. In Freakonomics, one of the
most popular economics books of recent years, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen
J. Dubner argued that abortion has measureable eugenic effects through
reduction in crime rates. Of course that debate has an inescapable racial
aspect: “Fertility declines for black women are three times greater than
for whites (12 percent compared with 4 percent). Given that homicide rates
of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths,
racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to
translate into greater homicide reductions,” Levitt and a different co-
author had written in a paper that the book drew from. Whatever the merits
of this argument, it is very much in line with the classical progressive
case for birth control, which was developed as a national breed-
improvement project rather than one of individual women’s choices. Linda
Gordon notes: “A content analysis of the Birth Control Review showed that
by the late 1920s only 4.9 percent of its articles in that decade had any
concern with women’s self-determination.”

The American Birth Control League was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1921,
working out of office space provided by the American Eugenics Society.
Sanger would depart seven years later as part of a factional dispute, with
various elements of her organization eventually reunited in 1939 as the
Birth Control Federation of America. But the words “birth control” at that
time were considered public-relations poison, and so in 1942 the
organization was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Sanger herself often wrote critically about abortion, which, especially
early in her career, she classified alongside infanticide, offering
contraception as the obvious rational alternative to such savagery. Her
arguments will sound at least partly familiar to modern ears: “Do we want
the millions of abortions performed annually to be multiplied? Do we want
the precious, tender qualities of womanhood, so much needed for our racial
development, to perish in these sordid, abnormal experiences?” But that
line of thinking was not destined to endure, and by the 1950s Planned
Parenthood was working for the liberalization of abortion laws. Sanger’s
successor, obstetrician Alan Frank Guttmacher, also served as vice
president of the American Eugenics Society and was a signer of the second
“Humanist Manifesto,” which called for the worldwide recognition of the
right to birth control and abortion and, harkening back to the 1920s
progressives, the extension of “economic assistance, including birth
control techniques, to the developing portions of the globe.” The repeated
identification of birth control with national economic planning rather
than women’s individual autonomy is worth noting.

Continuing Sanger’s strategy of courting elite opinion as a more effective
form of lobbying, Planned Parenthood’s medical director, Mary Calderone,
convened a conference of her fellow physicians in 1955 to begin pressing
for the legalization of abortion for medical purposes. By 1969, the demand
for therapeutic abortions had grown to a demand for the legalization of
abortion in all circumstances, which remains Planned Parenthood’s position
today and, thanks in no small part to its very effective litigation
efforts, is the law of the land.

In Planned Parenthood’s hometown of New York City, a black woman is more
likely to have an abortion than to give birth: 29,007 abortions to 24,108
births in 2013.

Is it working? Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color
against White World Supremacy, might be gratified to note that, in Planned
Parenthood’s hometown of New York City, a black woman is more likely to
have an abortion than to give birth: 29,007 abortions to 24,108 births in
2013. African Americans represent about 12 percent of the population and
about 36 percent of the abortions; Catholics, disproportionately Hispanic
and immigrant, represent 24 percent. In total, one in five U.S.
pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) ends in abortion, and most women who
have abortions already have at least one child. The overwhelming majority
of them (75 percent, as Guttmacher reckons it) are poor. The public record
includes no data about the “feebleminded” or otherwise “unfit,” but the
racial and income figures suggest that Planned Parenthood is today very
much functioning as its Progressive-era founders intended.

If Planned Parenthood’s operating model remains familiar after 100 years,
so does the rhetoric of the abortion movement. Sanger herself relayed the
experience of the Scottish ethnologist John Ferguson McLennan: “When a
traveller reproached the women of one of the South American Indian tribes
for the practice of infanticide, McLennan says he was met by the retort,
‘Men have no business to meddle with women’s affairs.’”

--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party has run out of gas.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for ending the disaster of the
Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its
supporters can dispute that.

Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum
wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.

a322x1n

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Jul 1, 2017, 4:38:22 PM7/1/17

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