Tracing the Culture of Death in America
The birth and growth of the Culture of Death in America over the last 100 years can be traced directly from Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger to Roe v. Wade author Harry Blackmun and beyond. Xavier, P., Were Were the Fighting Irish, Kindle Direct Publishing, 2019
According to American Life League, Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of abortion services in the world, generating an estimated 10 billion dollars in annual worldwide revenues. In fiscal 2006, for example, approximately 25% of the well over one million surgical abortions in the United States alone were performed at one of Planned Parenthood’s 855 US clinics, during which its gross income from all services and government grants reportedly exceeded one billion ($1,000,000,000.00) dollars.
In response to the notoriety it was receiving at that time on account of the taxpayer-funded government grants, Planned Parenthood has been trying to run, but has not been able to hide, from its own mission statements long ago established by its now infamous Founder, Margaret Sanger. Here’s a sample:
“More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief aim of birth control.” American Medicine editorial characterizing a 1919 article by Margaret Sanger entitled “Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?” Both items reprinted in the May, 1919 edition of Sanger’s Birth Control Review.
“Organized charity is the symptom of a malignant social disease . . . [I}t encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.” Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922.
“Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying … demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism … a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks … We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922
“The government of the United States deliberately encourages and even makes necessary by its laws the breeding – with a breakneck rapidity – of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble-minded, and criminal classes. Billions of dollars are expended by our state and federal governments and by private charities and philanthropies for the care, the maintenance, and the perpetuation of these classes . . . The dullard, the gawk, the numbskull, the simpleton, the weakling, and the scatterbrain are amongst us in overshadowing numbers – intermarrying, breeding, inordinately prolific, literally threatening to overwhelm the world with their useless and terrifying get.” Margaret Sanger, Editor, International Aspects of Birth Control: The International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. American Birth Control League, New York, 1925.
*******
Fortunately, there are a few feminist voices who have called out Sanger and Planned Parenthood for the damage they have done to authentic feminism and the family. One such voice has been Angela Franks. Here is a sampling from her seminal work on the subject – Franks, A., Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility, MacFarland & Co., 2005:
” Sanger’s ideology is a . . . sensualism that allows for injustice to be performed on women [and it] lives on today in the organizations she founded ” . . .Id at 9.
“. . . Planned Parenthood continues . . . to perpetuate eugenic beliefs about the poor and about the disabled. . . [For it] the ovaries and wombs of impoverished women are the unceasing source of the bulk of human suffering. This scapegoating is fundamentally anti-woman . . .”
“Feminism ought to be the premier liberation movement. Yet with bedfellows like Planned Parenthood, feminism is threatened with incoherence.” Id at 19-20 . . .
“The pressure exerted on women to conform their reproductive desires to those of Planned Parenthood is still present . . . [Its] overarching anti-natalist philosophy was . . . enunciated by an ad campaign that its . . . affiliate ran in 1996 . . . ‘BABIES ARE LOUD, SMELLY, AND EXPENSIVE. UNLESS YOU WANT ONE . . .’ The ad indicates the distorted lens through which reproduction is viewed. . . The point of the ad is to dissuade people, especially the young, from wanting to become mothers and fathers” . . . Id at 63-64 . . .
“By the sixties, Planned Parenthood’s much-hoped-for outreach to businessmen was firmly established. . . The message in a nutshell: population growth is bad for business, but donating to Planned Parenthood is good for the bottom line . . . [because according to its ‘People and Profits’ propaganda] ‘Planned Parenthood represents the most effective form of safeguard for U.S. investments abroad. By averting unrest and social upheaval stemming from overpopulation, poverty and famine, family planning can provide a foundation for peaceful progress. The developing nations will become more affluent, their people will become better customers for American products when competent family planning services are available for all.’” Id at 209-211 . . .
“In promoting consumerist ideology (one that Sanger’s own version of the bourgeois lifestyle presaged), Planned Parenthood . . . has allowed itself to become a tool of men more interested in profits than people….“[and by] accepting this radical misogyny, feminism . . . trivializes the damage done to women and girls through violence perpetrated on their bodies.” Id at 232-236 and 239. . .
“[W]hen the usual misogynist suspects – the self-anointed elite in the mainstream press, big business, Hollywood, the education establishment, the academy, as well as popular culture (the propaganda machine of these elites) – are advocating a plan of action, feminists should investigate the matter, with full critical consciousness, [and] . . .stop making deals with the devil. Planned Parenthood has a eugenic history and philosophy. . . One need only note the apologies it gives for brutally misogynistic regimes and population-control programs to realize the necessity of a clean break. . .”
“To be free, women must live in harmony with the rhythms of their own bodies, not in spite of them . . . Feminism needs to provide the tools for women and girls to rebuild their fragile sense of self, so that they once again feel at home in their bodies. . .All this does indeed mean that feminism must also shed its inhibitions concerning the defense and even the celebration of motherhood.” Id at 246-249.
In addition to this indictment of their ongoing, profit-driven, eugenic-misogynistic philosophy, Planned Parenthood’s public portrayal of itself as the champion of women’s choice is further belied by the evidence that it has adhered to a sinister symbiotic business model of selling sex to impressionable young women, and then urgently advocating abortion if anything should go wrong.
“Our goal,” asserted one Planned Parenthood newsletter as early as 1953, “is to be ready as educators and parents to help young people obtain sex satisfaction before marriage. By sanctioning sex before marriage, we will prevent fear and guilt.”
“Relax about loving,” continued The Great Orgasm Robbery by Sherri Tepper of Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood in 1977. “Sex is fun and joyful, and courting is fun and joyful, and it comes in all types and styles, all of which are okay. Do what gives pleasure, and enjoy what gives pleasure, and ask for what gives pleasure. Don’t rob yourself of joy by focusing on old-fashioned ideas about what’s normal or nice. Just communicate and enjoy!”
These admittedly dated examples are in fact an accurate prelude to what Planned Parenthood has been doing with increasing organization and vigor for over 50 years, right up to and including the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s November 2009 mission statement, Stand & Deliver: Sex, Health & Young People in the 21st Century, wherein its efforts to encourage worldwide unconstrained sexual orientation and experimentation “as a source of pleasure” and “expression of self” in children as young as ten years old were made unmistakably clear.
*******
When he authored Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackman relied heavily on six separate references to law review articles authored by Cyril Means, a trusted attorney for the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (“NARAL”), and a close associate of Planned Parenthood promoters and funders. As painstakingly explained by Fordham University Law Professor Robert M. Byrn in his own outstanding law review article entitled An American Tragedy, Mr. Means distorted eight hundred years of history and tradition to come to the absurd conclusion that civilized society had never seen fit to find that the fetus was a person entitled to protection, when the great weight of authority in fact indicates that nothing could be further from the truth.
Justice Blackmun’s bastardization of both history and law at the behest of Planned Parenthood can be boiled down to this – Roe does not allow States to restrict abortion if the health of the mother is at stake at any time, right up to the end of her term, and defines that health by reference to Roe’s companion case of Doe v. Bolton, wherein Blackmun wrote the words that gave license to abortion on demand throughout the land –
” [T]he medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age – relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he needs to make his best medical judgment. And it is room that operates for the benefit, not the disadvantage, of the pregnant woman. “
This is nothing short of abortion on demand, and the enshrinement of this objective into Florida’s Constitution is exactly what the sponsors of the proposed amendment hope to accomplish. The sponsors are a coalition called “Floridians Protecting Freedom,” in which Planned Parenthood is a major player.