A short time ago, and again recently, the Planned Parenthood Association (aka, Planned Parenthood Federation) has been in the news as a “whipping boy” for Republican budgetary cuts at the national and even state levels. Among the other criticisms thrown at President Obama (‘naiveté’ concerning the intricacies of the Middle East Crisis–meaning appearing not to agree with the Israeli government position–plus the myriad of other barbs), this one too is more about ideology than fact.
The Planned Parenthood Associaton is accused of utilizing federal budget funds for abortions (remember the recently debunked and embarrassing United States senator who said up to 90 percent of those funds support abortion activities?).
In more liberal circles, Planned Parenthood has been defended as a proponent of women’s rights to protect their own health, and although PP does promote and pay for a number of abortions, those activities are called small compared to PP’s dissemination of birth prevention and other health-related information to and for American women.
Rightly or wrongly though, what does this dust-up have to do with African Americans here in California and nationally? Do we really care about Planned Parenthood’s problems when we have our own many crosses to bear?
The standard answer of course is no, at first and even second blush, we don’t. But we should.
The No. 1 group adhering to the call for more abortions in the U.S.A. is African Americans. With Blacks constituting less than 13 percent of the American populaton, Black abortions account for more than, 30 percent of all abortions done annually in this country, including in excess of 1,900 Black abortions performed daily. The latest estimate is that since 1973, more than 13 million African American fetuses have been aborted.
In spite of the common stereotype of increasingly larger Black communities of offspring of unwed welfare mothers, as the latest census has shown, African Americans are declining as an identifiable population in this country. This is the case even though the sheer numbers of Black Americans have increased a bit.
Much of that expansion has come from immigration to the U.S.A. among Caribbean and continental African populations, and the natural increase by birth has become agonizingly slower. Within the last 40 years, in fact, the rate of African American births in the U.S.A. has gone down precipitously, and not many have paid enough attention to that statistic.
Planned Parenthood was created and established to reduce the birth rate of Black and poor Americans, and it has become uncommonly successful in doing just that. Not only is Planned Parenthood the number one abortion agency in this country, it is overwhelmingly the single most sustained agent of abortion among the Black American population. Over a sustained period of time, it has been very good at utilizing Black celebrities and famous advocates to knowingly or unknowingly promote its anti-Black agenda. It gave Dr. King a major award in 1966, and the renowned African American Faye Wattleton was Planned Parenthood’s proud president for more than five years.
As historical background, dating back to at least the 1930’s, the increasing births of Black Americans both remaining in and migrating from the South into New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, Detroit, and Los Angeles, among other areas, was deemed to be a serious American problem as cited in Margaret Sanger’s organizational magazine, “The Birth Control Review.” As part of the Eugenics Movement that has been around, alive and aroused for more than a century in this country, it was labelled the “Negro problem,” and such population control meant proscribing Black births and increasing White births to the fullest extent possible (shades of Brazil).
Latinos currently need to pay close attention to this history.
Sanger, along with interested neo-Nazi members of her organization, initiated the “Negro Project” to reduce the Black population, and this effort later morphed, with Sanger’s leadership, into the American mainstream organization, Planned Parenthood. Birth control clinics created or catalyzed by Planned Parenthood began popping up in rapid succession in rural southern areas, and by the 1960’s in most urban communities, where large groups of Blacks lived. Sanger’s group paid many Black ministers to give sermons and to provide regular counsel on the need to curb Black promiscuity and especially Black pregnancies. It also paid several noted Black researchers to publish studies advocating Black birth control, and it saturated Black communities with flyers and pamphlets on that issue. Planned Parenthood has been and continues to be highly successful at convincing significant members of the Black American population to commit what some call self-genocide, i.e., using the elimination of Black pregnancies as the first and second options when considering having children.
By the 1980’s and continuing into the 21st century, three out of five abortions performed in America were on Black mothers, primarily as a result of the work of Planned Parenthood. It has been relentless in pursuing that agenda.
Out of a high of 938 known abortion/medical health clinics, PP now has, according to a 2010 survey, 785 clinics and more than 86 affiliate facilities in operation. California hosts at least 29 PP clinics and facilities, with two in Los Angeles, one in Ricmond/Oakland, others in Pasadena, Lawndale, San Bernardino, Sacramento and Fresno.
Without a doubt, Planned Parenthood has assisted many women with health issues and it should be commended for that legacy. This article is no attack on that work. However, Planned Parenthood has also been both witness to and architect of a long-term campaign to reduce, if not eliminate entirely, the Black population of the U.S.A. based on its eugenics ideology. Margaret Sanger even famously wrote a letter stating that anti-Black objective in 1939, just before her giving birth to the Planned Parenthood Federation.
The Black community needs to look at this non-profit/ for-profit entity with a very careful and rueful eye. It has indeed been and is dangerous to our well being and should be known by that fact. All of our enemies are not dressed like wolves.
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). It is the step-parent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.
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