Pro-life eugenics victim makes NAACP History Makers list

Elaine Riddick is fully committed to exposing eugenics for one simple reason she is a victim of racist forced sterilization policies.

As a 14-year-old girl, Riddick became pregnant after she was raped.

Without her knowledge or consent, the State of North Carolina eugenically sterilized her the day she gave birth to her son.

Elaine Riddick

“They cut me open like I was a hog,” Riddick said as she testified before a reparations board in the state at the age of 57.

Because of Riddick’s tenacity and willingness to tell her story, North Carolina opened their eugenics records and have agreed to compensate the victims in their state.

Perhaps this is what led to Elaine Riddick receiving a mention on the NAACP’s History Makers list for 2015.

During Black History Month, the NAACP asked supporters to send them the names of people they know who have recently taken their civil rights activism to the next level. Whether on the national scale, or in their own backyards, The NAACP said they wanted to recognize all of the, “courageous brothers and sisters taking a stand against injustice, discrimination, and inequality. Hundreds of names were submitted, and we are so proud to share them all.”

But, I wonder if the NAACP also knows that Elaine Riddick staunchly opposes Planned Parenthood, an organization the NAACP has contributed to in the past.

In fact, one of the men who funded the North Carolina eugenics program was a man by the name of Clarence Gamble, who coincidentally also funded Margaret Sanger, the founder Planned Parenthood.

According to the North Carolina Winston-Salem Journal, “Clarence Gamble who helped found the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947 did so to promote eugenic sterilization. Journal research shows a long history of abuses in the N.C. sterilization program – abuses that Gamble consistently glossed over..”

Gamble wanted sterilizations to increase rather than decrease, and increase they did.

Lest you think that was several years ago and Planned Parenthood was not connected to eugenics.

Think again.

In North Carolina, the Planned Parenthood in Charlotte was founded with help from another man connected to eugenics.

Planned Parenthood Health Systems of Charlotte began in 1969 after Wallace Kuralt and banker Art Jones approached Sarah Bryant to start the Planned Parenthood health center, “We were like a Third World country in that area at the time,” she once stated.

An ardent proponent of population control, in 1969 Jones predicted that, “Unless something is done, the human race is threatened with extinction within 200 years.”

His ultimate solution was: abortion calling it a “very necessary medical tool for population restraint.”

Jones was responsible for North Carolina’s passage of a liberal abortion law in 1967 and blamed the “overpopulation” problem on a growing number of social ills: poverty, ghettos, crime, and mental illness.

Sound familiar? Jones’ statement could have come straight from Margaret Sanger’s racist mouth as well as those of her eugenics backers.

Much of the idea for Jone’s abortion bill came from another proponent of eugenics by the name of Wallace Kuralt.

Kuralt proposed that the abortion law’s focus be on the “health of the mother.” Kuralt and a welfare department attorney, Myles Hanes, wrote out a first draft of the abortion reform bill and presented it to Senator Herman Moore who mentioned it to Jones.

Kuralt was also rooted in eugenics and not surprisingly in 1983 Planned Parenthood of Greater Charlotte gave him the Margaret Sanger Award – according to a Charlotte Observer Obituary from 1994.

Read more about him here.

But it doesn’t end there.

Planned Parenthood’s very slogan was based in eugenics ( read here).

In addition, Planned Parenthood received free rent from the Eugenics Society and even advertised in their publications. (Read here).

In an extraordinary Op-Ed, Elaine Riddick eviscerated Planned Parenthood over their eugenics agenda when by writing:

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.

Despite all the evidence linking Planned Parenthood to the racist eugenics movement one would think that the NAACP would join Riddick on condemning them. But, sadly, that is not the case.

Regardless of the NAACP’s decision to put their head in the sand and overlook Planned Parenthood’s abysmal connection to racist eugenic policies, it is great that Elaine Riddick was honored as she deserves it !