Planned Parenthood: Cruelty to Women and an Affront to Women’s Health and Women’s Rights

Saynsumthn has covered Elaine Riddick’s pursuit for justice for her eugenics sterilization for years. So it is an honor to publish this Guest Editorial by Ms. Riddick.

Planned Parenthood: Cruelty to Women and an Affront to Women’s Health and Women’s Rights

By Elaine Riddick, Executive Director, Rebecca Project for Justice March 18, 2014

Planned Parenthood is not a sanctuary for women’s health as women have been made to believe. Many women have no knowledge of the cruel and callous history of Planned Parenthood.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood is an infamous eugenicist and population control advocate who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in 1921. The clinic was called the American Birth Control League and was renamed Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) in 1942, and later she created the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in 1952.

Planned Parenthood’s fundamental strategy for Population Control of Black and low income women was forced sterilizations and abortions. Margaret Sanger persistently dehumanized Blacks, low-income children, the disabled, mentally ill, immigrants, and impoverished women, by classifying them as “human weeds”, “spawning… human beings who never should have been born”.

Euphemisms and sterilization target code words, for example, “feebleminded”, were used to describe Black women like me, Elaine Riddick. I was forcibly sterilized at the age of 14 years under North Carolina’s inhumane forced sterilization policy. A policy that was derived from Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood population control handbook, which spread across the United States by her loyal band of eugenicists and lobbying our elected officials. Those cruel and inhumane forced sterilization polices and abortion-on-demand policies were also exported to create the one-child policy in China; where mothers abandoned or killed their live birthed children to avoid persecution. IPPF programs through the US government also forcibly sterilized millions women and men in India.

(Elaine Riddick in the powerful documentary film Maafa21)

Currently, Planned Parenthood uses an arsenal of abortions on demand lethal contraceptives such as Depo Provera and Norplant called the “DDT of contraceptives”. They are called the DDT of contraceptives, because they cause extremely lethal side-effects and are banned or restricted in the United States, Europe, India and Israel.

However, Planned Parenthood the largest distributor of Depo Provera circumvents restrictions, and typically, Blacks, Latinos, low-income and vulnerable women & girls are targeted and injected without full informed consent of lethal side effects. In the U.S. less than 2% of white women are injected with Depo Provera, and in Europe the use of injectables such as Depo Provera is virtually non- existent.

In 1998, the FDA sent a letter to Pfizer the maker of Depo Provera requesting an immediate halt to advertisements that misled women about risk and side effects of Depo Provera. However, this practice of misleading women about risk continues through Pfizer’s distributor Planned Parenthood, by target marketing to Blacks and Latinos while concealing details about side-effects on their websites.

In 2013, Israel restricted Depo Provera with funding from U.S. reproductive health funder Shira Saperstein of the Moriah Fund. However, in the United States Shira Saperstein still works with Planned Parenthood and abortion advocates to callously promote Depo Provera as a safe contraceptive for low income women in the U.S. and Africa.

They mislead women about lethal harm of increased HIV/AIDS and breast cancer and other debilitating diseases documented by the FDA and NIH.

Norplant was pulled from U.S. markets in 2002 is still implanted in economically deprived women globally and is promoted by the International Federation of Planned Parenthood and the Population Council with malice and forethought. Thousands of poor women have died from diseases caused by Depo Provera and thousands struggle with permanent damage but the US government is silent.

Therefore, my goal as Executive Director of the Rebecca Project for Justice is to seek a practical humane policy solution that institutes informed consent procedures to protect women.

To achieve that goal, we have devised a four point strategy:

1) Policy: Drafting legislation to present at Congressional Hearings with the Global Health and Judiciary Committees this year;
2) Lawsuits: Class action suit lead by Attorney Willie E. Gary of the Gary Law Group;
3) Prosecution: Through a detailed letter to Department of Justice, we are demanding prosecution of doctors and institutions such as Planned Parenthood that conspire to conceal lethal side effects;

and 4) Media: Creating petitions and a public relations campaign with Tanya Wiley of WPC Communications.

Elaine Riddick is the Executive Director of Rebecca Project for Justice you can contact her her by e-mail here: Elaine.Riddick@RebeccaProjectJustice.org.