Abortion and the
African-American: Is it Genocide?

(Taken from Reggie White’s Book
“Fighting the Good Fight”)

“I am especially concerned about how abortion is ravaging the black community. I believe that predominantly white abortionists and pro-abortion organizations have, either deliberately or effectively, targeted the black community for genocide.

Let me emphasize that I’m not saying whites are trying to destroy blacks. I love my white brothers and sisters. I believe the great majority of whites would not support these genocidal efforts if they knew about them. But it’s a fact that many wealthy and powerful whites in the abortion industry have aggressively pursued a pro-abortion agenda at the deliberate expense of blacks. And these people have very influential, and mostly white, allies in government and the media.

From the very beginning of the abortion-rights movement, this predominantly white elite has targeted blacks and other minorities. Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger, promoted birth control and abortion among black folk in an attempt to limit the growth of the black population. I believe this motive still drives Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. Ample evidence supports this conclusion.

Does this campaign of population control qualify as genocide? The United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide has held that attempts to wipe out part of a group constitute genocide. I say that by these measures, the black community was and remains the target of genocide.

Illegitimate Birth

Today’s abortion rights movement is the legacy of Margaret Sanger. Sanger founded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942 as the capstone of her years of activism on behalf of birth control and abortion rights. Sanger was born in Corning, New York, in 1883. Her father was an Irish Catholic immigrant who was very skeptical of religion. On one occasion when she was a little girl, Margaret’s father teased her when she was saying her prayers.

As a young adult, Margaret met William Sanger, an up-and-coming New York architect. They were married a few months later. Through her husband, she came to know many of the activists of the day who wanted to loosen sexual morals. Eventually, she started her own publications, including The Birth Control Review. Her writings advocated sex without consequences by celebrating the virtues of birth control, abortion, and a promiscuous lifestyle.

In her writings, Sanger called marriage a “degenerate institution” and sexual modesty “obscene prudery.” One article stated that “rebel women” have “the right to be lazy, the right to be an unmarried mother, the right to destroy...and the right to love.” She was indicted for publishing obscene materials in violation of the federal Comstock Laws. She fled the country for a while, then returned and used her connections to get the authorities to drop the charges.

Margaret Sanger had a broad following among rich whites who favored eugenics. Eugenics was the theory that social progress depends on reducing the birth rate of “inferior” races or ethnic groups. Followers of eugenics thought that people in these groups should be discouraged from having children.

This view was all the rage in the early twentieth century. The rich and famous of the day supported eugenics. People such as Alexander Graham Bell, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court believed in eugenics.

In 1919, Sanger proclaimed in The Birth Control Review, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit-that is the chief issue of birth control.” Across the top of the November 1921 issue of the magazine, Sanger declared, “Birth control: To create a race of thoroughbreds.” Some groups, she thought, were “inferior races” and “human weeds” that needed to be curbed. Sanger said she believed there was “an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”

Sanger argued in a 1932 article, “A plan for Peace,” that society should “apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring,” ironically, she said that these measures would mean “defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”

Sanger sought to put her theory of “race betterment” into practice. She opened her first birth control clinic in 1916 in Brooklyn. It was in one of the “coarser neighborhoods and tenements” where she hoped to attract “immigrant Southern Europeans, Slavs, Latins, and Jews.”

Sanger and other eugenicists were also very concerned about the black population. Many worried about racial intermarriage. In 1921, over half of the papers presented at the Second International Congress of Eugenics discussed the harmful effects of intermarriage. The titles of these papers included “Some Notes on the Negro Problem,” “The Problem of Negro White Intermixture,” and “intermarriage with the Slave Race.”

The Ku Klux Klan was a big advocate of eugenics. Dr. Hiram Wesley Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, cited the work of eugenicists. In 1936, Earnest Sevier Cox, a Klansman, published an article in Eugenical News arguing that all blacks of “breeding age” should be deported to Africa.

Eventually, Sanger and her allies tried to put their theory about blacks into practice. One of Sanger’s biggest undertakings was Planned Parenthood’s so-called Negro Project. In 1939, the American Birth Control League and the Clinical Research Bureau combined to become the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA). Sanger was tapped to be honorary chairman of the board. That same year, the BCFA established a Division of Negro service. The Negro Project was one of Sanger’s pet programs.

In 1938, Sanger laid out her reasons for pursuing the Negro Project. She claimed in the project proposal, “The mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is from the portion of the population lease intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.” That year, Sanger obtained a $20,000 grant from Albert Lasker to begin the project.

In 1939, Sanger wrote a letter outlining her plans for the Negro Project to Dr. Clarence J. Gamble. Gamble was a member of the board of directors of BFCA and heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune. “It seems to me," Sanger said,

“From my experience where I have been in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts.

They do not do this with the white people, and if we can train the Negro doctor at the Clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which I believe, will have far-reaching results among the colored people.”

Sanger knew it was important to persuade black ministers to back her project:

“The minister’s [sic] work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

In a memorandum written that year, Gamble echoed her views: “There is a great danger that we will fail because the Negroes think it a plan for extermination. Hence let’s appear to let the colored run it.” The Negro Project worked hand-in-hand with “southern state public health officials.” As George Grant pointed out in his excellent book, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, these officials were “men not generally known for their racial equanimity.”

The problem was that there were many more “rebellious members” among the black community that Sanger and her backers would have liked. Dorothy Roberts, a supporter of abortion rights, acknowledges in her 1997 book, Killing the Black Body: Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, what Sanger’s writings make clear: “Black people were suspicious of white-controlled birth control programs from the very beginning, and white-controlled programs had no intention of allowing Black people to take the reins.” Roberts notes that many residents of Harlem were wary of the birth control clinic that Sanger and her associates founded there in 1930. “Many potential patients,” Roberts says, “suspected that the clinic was really intended to promote race suicide rather than racial betterment.”

I believe this mistrust still exists. Two surveys in 1972 and 1973 found widespread concerns among blacks that family planning programs were “a potential means of racial genocide, especially if the programs provided sterilization and abortion and were run by whites.” One of the surveys stated that nearly 40 percent of blacks questioned believed that the programs were designed to exterminate blacks.

Leaders of Planned Parenthood since Margaret Sanger’s time in office have expressed pride in her work. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, who succeeded Sanger as president of Planned Parenthood, once said, “We are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.” Another Planned Parenthood president, Faye Wattleton, said she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps” of Margaret Sanger. And Wattleton is a black woman.

A Community Under Siege

The genocidal legacy of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood is clear and shameful. White women today obtain 61 percent of all abortions in America. But they are 81 percent of the female population. Black women, who make up 14 percent of the female population, account for 31 percent of all abortions. Black women are nearly three times as likely as white women to have an abortion. Hispanic women are roughly two times as likely as their white counterparts.

Today, for every three black babies born, two are aborted. Every month more than 41,000 black babies are killed in the womb. Since Roe v Wade, more than 10 million black babies have died in this American holocaust.

Not only are black abortion rates three times those of whites, but Planned Parenthood targets the black community with its abortion clinic and propaganda. Today, according to the Life Education and Resource Network (LEARN), a black antiabortion group, 78 percent of abortion clinics are located in or near predominantly minority neighborhoods. Grant also notes that in the 1980s, more than one-hundred school-based Planned Parenthood clinics opened in the United Stated. None were opened in a suburban, middle-class school. All were in black, minority, or ethnic schools.

Of course, pregnant black women are more likely than their white counterparts to be single and poor. But just because a woman is single and poor doesn’t mean that her pregnancy has to end in an abortion. For one thing, she could put the baby up for adoption. A lot of us believe that the high crime and poverty rates among blacks are a legacy, to some extent, of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. I believe the high abortion rates among blacks are also a legacy of racial injustice and genocide.

Besides, it’s not enough to look only at a woman’s economic circumstances. You also have to look at the temptations surrounding her. The temptation to want sex without consequences is strong in all of us. When society backs up this temptation with a “right” to abortion, and Planned Parenthood conveniently locates its clinics in your neighborhood, these outside factors influence a woman’s “choice.”

Consider this fact: while the black abortion rate is almost three times higher than that of whites, blacks are more likely than whites to believe that abortion is wrong. When asked whether abortion is an act of murder, 48 percent of whites say yes. But 56 percent of blacks answer yes. Blacks are less likely than whites to support the right to have an abortion for any reason whatsoever. Like whites, the vast majority of blacks think that abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances.

Akua Furlow of LEARN has pulled together data showing the devastating effects of abortion of black women. A study of black women by the Howard University Cancer Center from 1989 to 1993 concluded that among those who had received an abortion, there was a significant increase in the risk of beast cancer. In 1994, a survey of 126 black women who has had an abortion found that 81 percent suffered from one or more psychological complaints. Sixty percent had feelings of guilt. Fifty-five percent reported crying and depression. Thirty-five percent said they were unable to forgive themselves.

One black psychiatrist, Dr. Karen Stevenson, shared her experiences in treating patients who had undergone abortions:

“I have encountered tortured women who were struggling with depression. suicidal thoughts, anxiety, and drug and alcohol abuse who have had encounters with this thing called “the women’s right to choose.” I’ve seen women touched by the horror of abortion, yet during my training, this issue was never discussed by my professor as a possible contributor to the person’s present state of emotional turmoil.”

Given that blacks don’t think highly of abortion and are suffering from it, why is the black abortion rate so high? People who might blame this fact on black ignorance or selfishness should first consider a few critical facts. Today, the white leaders of the abortion industry are spending millions of dollars in advertising and propaganda to encourage this behavior. And they’ve been doing it for decades. Targeting blacks has been an integral part of the abortion rights movement from the very beginning.”

NOTES:

1. “The Mass of Negroes”: Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 76-77
2. Sanger’s letter to Clarance J. Gamble: Letter from Margaret Sanger to C. J. Gamble, December 10, 1939. Copy obtained from Akua Furlow of LEARN.
3. Gamble memorandum: Roberts, Killing the Back Body, 78.
4. George Grant on southern health officials: Grant, Grand Illusions, 93.
5. Roberts on white-controlled birth control programs, Harlem clinic, Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 78, 87.
6. 1972 and 1973 surveys: Ibid., 98.
7. Leaders of Planned Parenthood: Grant, Grand Illusions, 59.
8. Abortion rates among the races: Guttmacher Institute, “Facts in Brief-Induced Abortion”; Betsy Wagner, “Who Has Abortions,” U.S. News & World Report, August 19, 1996, 8.
9. Number of black babies aborted: Juluette Bartlett Pack, “A Historical View of Eugenics and Its Role in Abortion in Black America,” Life Education and Resource Network (LEARN) Web site (www.learnusa.org/articles).
10. “78 percent of abortion clinics”: Pack, “A Historical View of Eugenics,” 2.
11. “In the 1980’s: Grant, Grand Illusions, 94.
12. Poll of blacks and whites on abortion: Cable News Network/USA Today, January 1998, Roper Center.
13. Studies cited by Akua Furlow: Akua Furlow, “African-American Women Are Exploited by Abortion,” LEARN Web site.