Planned Parenthood has brought additional meaning to the progressive concept of cancel culture.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 38% of the U.S. abortions in 2016 (the most recent data available) were for black citizens which constituted less than 13% of the population.
According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, Planned Parenthood controls more than one-third of that abortion market.
Before going any further on this morbidly toxic topic, I wish to confess to deep and conflicting personal confusion regarding the enormously complex, emotionally wrenching and circumstantial decision that abortion of a human life entails.
For example, the term has commonly been applied by some to a gestation period beginning with a "morning after" pill, and by others to the moment a fully developed baby enters the exit ramp of the birth canal – and even immediately afterwards.
The latter condition, in my view, is ethically indistinguishable from infanticide.
Nor do I claim any objective judgement regarding exactly when along that development pathway, the child to be or not to be ceases to be endowed with inalienable human rights.
Nevertheless, witnessing a newly born baby, it is impossible to discount the entire miracle of life. And as a parent, I can’t possibly imagine how my own life and that of their mother would have been diminished without their presence.
Having said this, the progressive movement in general, and Planned Parenthood in particular, reveals a dark and disturbing history that warrants long-avoided attention. In the world of Black Lives Matter, this story takes on significant importance.
As chronicled in a July 31, 2013 Forbes article I wrote, Planned Parenthood was indeed founded by a progressive “heroine” named Margaret Sanger who explained in her organization’s 1919 magazine editorial, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control." Then in her 1922 book, "The Pivot of Civilization," Sanger called for sterilization of genetically-inferior races and the "insane and feeble-minded."
In the 1932 of issue of her publication "Birth Control Review,"Sanger proposed a "Plan for Peace" that advised the nation to "keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race."
Race wasn’t by any means the only enemy to be cancelled.
Sanger further urged America to "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."
The plan would "give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization," and to "take an inventory . . . [of] illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends, classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct."
Tragically, under authority of certainly one of the Supreme Court’s most egregious rulings, such policies ultimately were responsible for the forced sterilization of between 60,000 and 70,000 people in the United States (and possibly more) whom progressives such as Sanger deemed unfit. That 8 to 1 decision in Buck vs. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed that "three generations of imbeciles is enough."
Margaret Sanger’s legacy was not lost on others who followed her philosophy.
A Malthusian 1954 pamphlet, "The Population Bomb" written by William Vogt was bankrolled by wealthy Dixie Cups founder Hugh Moore who served as vice president of Sanger’s International Planned Parenthood Federation, chaired an organization called the Population Reference Bureau, and served as president of Birthright, Inc., later renamed Association for Voluntary Sterilization.
Moore’s Population Reference Bureau mailed out over a million Population Bomb copies featuring a cover image depicting a bomb-like globe with a crowded mass of black Africans ready to explode as soon as a fuse projecting from the North Pole was ignited unless a scissors labeled "population control" was cut in time.
President Eisenhower had patently rejected U.S. funded or mandated international population control, stating at a Dec. 2, 1959 press conference, "I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility . . . That is not our business."
Then-Senator John F. Kennedy, who was running for president at the time, opposed such programs as well… a stand that drew stinging attacks from his Democrat party challengers who accused him of trying to impose his Catholic values.
Planned Parenthood leader Margaret Sanger declared that she would leave the country if Kennedy was elected in 1960. (He was . . . she didn’t.) In 1961 her Planned Parenthood Federation merged with Moore’s World Population Emergency Campaign to form the Planned Parenthood-World Population Society.
Vogt’s Population Bomb predated a 1968 book with the same title written by Paul Ehrlich, a professor of population studies at Stanford University. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb proposed that a "Federal Bureau of Population and Environment should be set up to determine the optimum population size for the United States, and devise measures to establish it."
One suggestion was that the bureau might add "temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size."
The theme was echoed in a 1977 publication "Ecoscience: Population Resources and Environment" co-authored by Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich and John Holdren that called for “organized evasive action: population control, limitation of material consumption, redistribution of wealth, transitions to technologies that are environmentally and socially less disruptive than today’s, and movement toward some kind of world government.”
In case John Holdren’s name sounds familiar, it should.
He was selected out of countless possibilities to become President Barack Obama’s science czar.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. Larry has written more than 700 articles for Newsmax and Forbes and is the author of several books. Included are: "How Everything Happened, Including Us" (2020), "Cyberwarfare: Targeting America, Our Infrastructure and Our Future" (2020), "The Weaponization of AI and the Internet: How Global Networks of Infotech Overlords are Expanding Their Control Over Our Lives" (2019), "Reinventing Ourselves: How Technology is Rapidly and Radically Transforming Humanity" (2019), "Thinking Whole: Rejecting Half-Witted Left & Right Brain Limitations" (2018), "Reflections on Oceans and Puddles: One Hundred Reasons to be Enthusiastic, Grateful and Hopeful" (2017), "Cosmic Musings: Contemplating Life Beyond Self" (2016), "Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom" (2015) and "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax" (2011). He is currently working on a new book with Buzz Aldrin, "Beyond Footprints and Flagpoles." Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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