Justice Clarence Thomas: Abortion is tool of modern-day eugenics

By Carole Novielli

Part One of Two.

In deciding the recent case Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky Inc., United States Supreme Court Justice sent a warning to the Court, suggesting that states have a “compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics,” even going as far as to implicate Planned Parenthood’s founder and leaders. In the decision, the Court allowed one provision of an Indiana law requiring the humane burial of aborted children to stand, while denying another provision to bar abortions on the basis of sex, race or disability.

Justice Thomas penned a multi-page response to address the Court’s decision, which began (emphasis added):

I write separately to address the other aspect of Indiana law at issue here—the “Sex Selective and Disability Abortion Ban.”… Each of the immutable characteristics protected by this law can be known relatively early in a pregnancy, and the [Indiana] law prevents them from becoming the sole criterion for deciding whether the child will live or die. Put differently, this law and other laws like it promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

He then pulled no punches, making it plain that Planned Parenthood — the defendant in the case — was founded in eugenics:

The use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical. The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth control movement. That movement developed alongside the American eugenics movement. And significantly, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause.

Sanger was a known member of the American Eugenics Society. In addition to speaking at a Ku Klux Klan meeting by invitation, about which she wrote in her autobiography, the Planned Parenthood founder also advocated forced sterilization to rid the planet of those she deemed “unfit.” Despite this involvement, as Live Action News previously documented, Sanger’s namesake is listed on two current Planned Parenthood awards as well as Planned Parenthood facilities and Legacy Societies, with no condemnations from the abortion-friendly media.

Justice Thomas went into great detail, recording for posterity and for the public the truth about Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger. While we will not list all of the comments in detail here, some are more notable:

• Sanger viewed birth control as a way to reduce the “ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
• Sanger argued that “Birth Control . . . is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method” of “human generation.”
• In her view, birth control had been “accepted… as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.”
• Sanger accepted that eugenics was the best way toward a “solution of racial, political and social problems.”
• Sanger believed that the imbalance between birth rates of the “fit” and “unfit” was “the greatest present menace to civilization.”
• Sanger believed in “stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health.”
• In Sanger’s view, frequent reproduction among “the majority of wage workers” would lead to “the contributing of morons, feeble-minded, insane and various criminal types to the already tremendous social burden constituted by these unfit.”
• [I]n 1939, Sanger initiated the “Negro Project,” an effort to promote birth control in poor, Southern Black communities.
• In a report titled “Birth Control and the Negro,” Sanger and her coauthors identified Blacks as “the great problem of the South.”
• She recruited Black clergy to reassure the Black community on the benefits of controlling their birth rates and to keep them from the idea that Sanger “want[ed] to exterminate the Negro population.”

Justice Thomas correctly points out that Sanger herself did not advocate abortion but regarded “the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year [as] a disgrace to civilization.” He made it clear that “[…]Sanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ‘the elimination of the unfit’ apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.”

“Whereas Sanger believed that birth control could prevent “unfit” people from reproducing, abortion can prevent them from being born in the first place,” he said, noting that abortion is a mere extension of Sanger’s eugenic mindset.

For further reading, Live Action News has detailed Planned Parenthood’s eugenic history in articles below:

• Planned Parenthood’s ties to eugenics go far beyond Margaret Sanger
• Former Planned Parenthood president: Forced birth control would be ‘desirable’
• The beginning: How Planned Parenthood became an abortion corporation
• The population control advocate behind Planned Parenthood’s transition to abortion
• Planned Parenthood not serious about disavowing racist history
• Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger spoke to the Ku Klux Klan and supported eugenics. So why does the organization still honor her?
• Is Planned Parenthood scrubbing its eugenicist founder’s name from its awards?

“This case highlights the fact that abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation,” Thomas wrote.

In part two – we will review the Justice’s view of PP’s former doctor and president, Alan F Guttmacher.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a longer – edited- version of one also published by Live Action News.