4 More Reasons Planned Parenthood Should Apologize
by Joe Carter, The Gospel Coalition:
Eight years ago, when Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPA) held its annual gala, the motto for the event was “Our past is our prologue.” Part of the past the organization chose to celebrate at the time was its founder, the notorious racist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger.
Sanger wanted to control the reproduction of immigrants, the poor, certain religious groups, and anyone else she thought was from an unacceptable heritage. Sanger referred to such people as reckless breeders who were “unceasingly spawning a class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
In 1939 Sanger started the “Negro Project” and attempted to persuade Christian ministers to help her effort. As she wrote in a letter to a fellow eugenicist, “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 fairness, as her defenders often point out, Sanger wasn’t against all black people. She mainly just didn’t want poor black people to be born.)
But a lot has changed in the past decade, and Sanger has moved from celebrated icon to an indefensible relic of an even more unenlightened age. In an op-ed published April 17 in The New York Times, PPA president and chief executive Alexis McGill Johnson admitted the organization “must reckon with Margaret Sanger’s association with white supremacist groups and eugenics.”
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