The abortion rights movement,” was inspired by eugenicist Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger, which influenced his own pro-eugenics ideology. Lader was a writer-turned-abortion enthusiast who penned several books on the subject. His 1966 book, “Abortion,” was cited several times in the Roe v. Wade decision.
But Lader was not as direct as Sanger. While Sanger openly used eugenic terms, Lader was more subtle, claiming that society needed to look out for the “protection of the child and its future.” But what Lader really meant was not the future of every child, but the future of the elites, the perfect, and those who were mostly Caucasian.
Lawrence (Larry) Lader, abortion and eugenics promoter
Here’s what Lader said to WNYC Public Radio (emphasis added):
In other words, I feel that what we have to protect and that we want to give the mother a chance to protect, is the right to bring into the world one, two, three, whatever number of children she can love, protect, educate, care for. That we cannot, as a society, our own country, in the world, today can no longer afford to bring into the world ten, fifteen children, most of whom will be starving not just in India, but often in our own home, will become the flotsam and jetsam of society, will become the drug addict.
Lader then stressed that the people who needed abortion the most were “the percentage of Puerto Ricans, Negroes, other minority groups.”
Lader also contradicted himself, calling the preborn child “potential life” on one hand, while also claiming to be “for the protection of the child.” In his book, “Abortion,” Lader sounded eerily similar to Sanger in her promotion of eugenics — the idea that certain people are “more fit” than others, and that these criteria can decide who should or should not live. During that previously mentioned 1966 WNYC discussion, Lader called eugenic protection acts “humanitarian.”
Lader had conspired with Bernard Nathanson to use the women’s movement of the 1960s as the perfect vehicle to push an abortion legalization agenda. In her book, “Subverted,” author Sue Ellen Browder describes Lader as being adamant that the women’s movement was key to decriminalizing abortion. Browder quotes Lader telling Nathanson at a NARAL strategy meeting, “We’ve got to keep the women out front… and some Blacks. Black women especially. Why are they so damn slow to see the importance of this whole movement to themselves?”
By 1967, Lader’s plan had come to fruition, when feminist icon Betty Friedan brought the abortion plank to a vote in her National Organization for Women (NOW) organization, and it was adopted. As a result, one-third of NOW members left the group. “There was actually a night – and it took me many years to find this night… when abortion was inserted into the women’s movement,” Browder told Live Action President Lila Rose in an interview. She continued:
That night, it was wild. There were eight rights that they voted on that night and most of them, six of them, passed unanimously. Rights we would all agree on. Women should have equal pay for equal work, women should not be fired for being pregnant, women should have equal access to educational opportunities, these are all things that everybody agrees on today.
There were only two rights that night that they fought over. One was Equal Rights Amendment. Now, why did they fight over that? Well, one woman who was very articulate said — and she was a civil rights attorney — that human rights are indivisible. And if you can separate women’s rights out from other people’s rights, you’ve destroyed a lot of things. The last right to be fought over that night, and they fought until almost midnight — that was the abortion right. It was wild. People were screaming. Now this is the founders of feminism in the 1960s, this is not a bunch of radical anti-abortions. These are the feminists fighting over abortion. And, some of the things they said in that meeting- because I got the minutes to the meeting, were things that people are seeing today.
One person said, “I’m against murder.”
There were a lot of people opposed. In fact, they were so opposed that at least one-third of those women walked out and later resigned from NOW.… And so, what you had there that night — behind the scenes — it has never been reported except in this book, Subverted, for the first time, is that you had pro-life feminists leaving the National Organization for Women, and pro-abortion feminists staying.
By the late 1960s, Lader had jumped into the abortion fight with both feet, joining Nathanson and Friedan, among others, to found NARAL (or as it was known then, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) and served as chair of the pro-abortion group’s medical committee.
This article is reprinted with permission. The original appeared here at Live Action News.
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( Part one) ‘Father of abortion rights’ called minority children in America ‘unwanted’
(Part Two) ‘Father of abortion rights’ called self a ‘disciple’ of Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist Margaret Sanger
Larry Lader, rightly dubbed the “father of the abortion rights movement,” influenced the women’s movement of the 1960s to push abortion. Lader was a writer by trade and became the biographer for Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, even referring to himself as her “disciple.” The two eventually parted ways over abortion. Watch to learn more:
In his biography, Lader said Sanger’s obsession with eugenics (an ideology the two shared) originated with her introduction to Henry Havelock Ellis in 1914, a psychologist and author of several books on sex, with whom Sanger was rumored to have had an affair. At the time Lader’s biography was published, it received some favorable reviews with Sanger herself arranging book signings. It was also reportedly distributed through Planned Parenthood offices.
Lawrence (Larry) Lader
But, in co-authoring his second book on Sanger, Lader can be credited for remaking her from a eugenic fanatic into, as Planned Parenthood describes her, a heroine. Thanks to Lader, Sanger “the eugenicist” became known instead as Sanger “the birth control pioneer.”
Lader’s books barely mention the word eugenics and certainly fail to connect the evil philosophy to Sanger. But the Planned Parenthood founder admitted to meeting with members of the Ku Klux Klan, openly advocated eugenics, and supported the use of sterilization to rid the planet of the “unfit.”
Forced sterilization as a permanent solution was, in Sanger’s mind, a preferred solution to procreation of the so-called “unfit” over abortion.
Margaret Sanger Story by Lawrence Lader
In his push for legalizing the abortion pill RU486, Lader recounted that Sanger had “skimpy” knowledge about abortion and claimed the topic caused a split between the two. “Ironically, I would eventually split with Margaret over abortion – only in a theoretical sense since, by 1963, she was too ill to carry on our old discussions,” Lader wrote in “Abortion II.”
“Margaret had always opposed abortion…. Naturally, she was right in the context of her time,” he continued.
According to the LA Times, Lader had observed Sanger’s strong opposition to abortion, “seeing the horrors of the women on the Lower East Side, with $5 in their hands, submitting themselves to butchers.” To Sanger, “birth control was a solution to abortion,” Lader realized.
Lader’s abortion activism birthed with Sanger
Nonetheless, Lader’s time with the Planned Parenthood founder seems to have been the catalyst for Lader’s own abortion obsession. “I hesitated to deal with the subject after writing my biography of Margaret Sanger,” Lader wrote in “Abortion II.” “In 1955, I evaded it again…. By 1962, I made the first step, soliciting dozens of editors to write a magazine article on abortion, but being rejected by all. A year later, still concerned that I could be damaged as a writer by this connection, I started work on a book that was published under the blunt title, ‘Abortion,’ in early 1966.”
Abortion written by Lawrence (Larry) Lader 1966
On April 14, 1966, during a discussion about abortion recorded by WNYC in New York, Lader was asked about his feelings on abortion. He said:
I did a biography of Margaret Sanger of the birth control movement ten or twelve years ago and from that point on I’ve been extremely interested in anything that denies to women — and to men also, but basically to women — what I consider their basic right to decide whether they should or should not become a mother.
I think this is summed up very well by a great phrase of Margaret Sanger’s which she stated, ‘No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.’
Margaret Sanger quote
And then I add in my book, I state my own statement, the laws that force a woman to bear a child against her will are the sickly heritage of a feminine degradation and male supremacy. In brief, I believe that the right of a woman to bear or not to bear a child is one of the basic human rights and that this cannot be taken away from her….
Lader reiterated the Planned Parenthood founder’s influence in his book, “RU486.” He wrote (emphasis added), “My first book on Margaret Sanger indicated I had a feminist bent. Three crowded years of talking and working with Sanger had completely convinced me that a woman’s freedom in education, jobs, marriage, her whole life, could only be achieved when she gained control of her childbearing. I came gradually to understand that birth control required abortion as a backup measure when contraception failed or wasn’t used at all.”
Prior to the Roe decision, Lader took part in an illegal underground abortion referral service called the “Clergyman’s Consultation Service on Abortion,” founded by the Reverend Howard Moody. Lader made more than 2,000 referrals for women seeking illegal abortions while participating in this “service.”
Then, in 1967, Lader, along with former abortionist Bernard Nathanson (who later became pro-life) hijacked Betty Friedan’s 1960’s women’s movement and influenced the so-called feminist icon to add a pro-abortion plank to the National Organization for Women (NOW), which she founded. Soon after, in 1969, Lader helped Nathanson to found NARAL, originally called the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and remained active until 1976, when Lader left NARAL for reasons “no one chooses to discuss,” as the LA Times noted.
This article is reprinted with permission. The original appeared here at Live Action News.
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Part of series on Larry Lader.
( Part one) ‘Father of abortion rights’ called minority children in America ‘unwanted’
Going hand in hand with Planned Parenthood’s announcement that abortion would be its number one focus in 2019 come plans to promote abortion as normal in movies and TV. This effort to change the so-called “stigma” that surrounds abortion by “working with content creators on honest and authentic portrayals of abortion in film and television” will include creating more portrayals of “women of color (WOC)” obtaining abortions — something that should raise the eyebrows of anyone who knows about the eugenic history of Planned Parenthood.
The move comes as women of color are experiencing declining abortion rates.
Planned Parenthood’s former “special affiliate,” the Guttmacher Institute, found that “Black women had the highest abortion rate in 2014 (27.1 abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age) and white women had the lowest rate (10 per 1,000). Between 2008 and 2014, women of color experienced the steepest abortion rate declines: Rates fell 32%–39% among Hispanic and black women and those who identified with a race other than black or white, compared with a 14% decline among white women.”
“We’ll be enhancing our efforts to destigmatize abortion in the media and across popular culture — including working with the music, fashion, movie, and television industries, and announcing additional public awareness campaigns in the coming months,” wrote the nation’s largest abortion corporation. To that end, Planned Parenthood has a full time “director of arts and entertainment engagement.” Director Caren Spruch’s job, according to her LinkedIn page, is to advance “sexual and reproductive health and rights through pop culture.”
Caren Spruch planned parenthood director arts and entertainment (Image: LinkedIn )
Planned Parenthood’s eugenic agenda was driven by founder Margaret Sanger who strategically worked to convince the Black community to control its population through her infamous “Negro Project.” Sanger is still viewed as a hero by the abortion industry, despite her admission that she met with members of the Ku Klux Klan, advocated eugenics, and supported the use of sterilization to rid the planet of the “unfit.”
Like Sanger’s Negro Project, a review of a 92-page report from the Tara Health Foundation, a philanthropic effort that funds abortion facilities and efforts, reveals an abortion industry insider strategy to promote abortion among Women of Color — namely, “… specific demographic groups (18-19 year olds, Black [WOC] and Hispanic women, and low-income women) that lag behind the national average in their rates of contraceptive use….”
TARA Health Foundation invest in Women of Color for pushing abortion
The report includes statistics and analysis from “ANSIRH, the Guttmacher Institute, Ibis Reproductive Health, and the Kaiser Family Foundation.” All of these organizations are heavily involved with abortion. TARA’s founder, Ruth Shaber, previously held research positions at Kaiser Permanente and serves on the Medical Advisory Committee for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Guttmacher’s founder was a eugenicist that helped mold Planned Parenthood into an abortion vendor. The organization is the former “special affiliate” and research arm of Planned Parenthood.
TV often shapes our views of the world…. Women of color and women who are mothers are dramatically under-represented… characters tend to get abortions for self-focused reasons… barriers to accessing abortion are either non-existent or easily overcome…. All of these misrepresentations shape what people know and believe about abortion. They could be doing better.
…[O]ur 2015 report found that nearly 90% of television characters getting abortions were white, the finding that almost half of this year’s plot lines in which a character obtained or disclosed an abortion included black women represents the beginning of a corrective course toward more inclusive storytelling — even as Latina characters remain underrepresented. As the majority of American women who have abortions are women of color, it is essential that their stories are told… if we are to capture the current reality of abortion in our country.
ANSIRH celebrated momentum behind Black abortion portrayals:
2018 marked an important moment in fictional abortion stories on television: a shift towards highlighting the nuanced experiences of women of color, more specifically Black women. This year, we identified 18 plotlines where a character has an abortion, discloses a past abortion, or considers getting an abortion. Of those, four of the five characters who obtained an abortion in the course of the plotline were either Black or biracial women.
ANSIRH promotes portrayals of Black woman having abortion at Planned Parenthood (Image: Abortion Onscreen in 2018)
A recent survey by the Guttmacher Institute discovered that — in their words — “being black,” among other reasons, contributed to women having multiple abortions.
Guttmacher Prior Abortion Survey
The report found that Black women had a higher rate of prior abortions: “Slightly more than half of Black abortion patients had a prior abortion (54%), higher than any other racial and ethnic group.”
If the overall Black abortion rate is already disproportionately high, strategies like this will likely force that rate even higher. Is this the outcome wanted by the abortion industry? We can only speculate.
This article is reprinted with permission. The original appeared here at Live Action News.
Alencia Johnson is Director of Public Engagement at Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and Planned Parenthood Action. As many of my readers know, Planned Parenthood has been trying to regain the trust of the Black community due to their own involvement in eugenics and the fact that their own founder, Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist and directors like Lothrop Stoddard were numerous. Planned Parenthood appointed their first female Black president to quell suspicions of Black Genocide and now Alencia Johnson has allegedly been tasked with doing the same.
Alencia Johnson on ComplexCon 2018
Johnson was on ComplexCon 2018‘s Growth Out of Chaospanel, moderated by DeRay Mckesson, where she discussed PP’s history and began by describing her ideas of how people feel politically.
In one word, the PP Director of Public Engagement claimed that people feel “hopeless” and disrespectfully referred to the President of the United States as “Orangey.”
Alencia Johnson Planned Parenthood Action Facebook
“Kind of hopeless. People feel really hopeless. I think for some of us who are working to dismantle the oppression are hopeful. But, the people that we are advocating for who see this on the news, they feel hopeless. Like, how can we change this? We lost the Supreme Court, we have “Orangey” in the White House, we don’t have a lot of Governors who care about us and people are kind of hopeless,” Johnson began on the Complex Con’s Growth Out of Chaos panel.
WOW – so much in that statement…but…let’s move on.
Alencia Johnson went on to address PP’s eugenics and racist history but, instead of pointing the finger at Planned Parenthood’s own involvement, Johnson claimed “evangelical white men in 60’s and 70’s who were trying to – take back another form of liberation” were to blame.
Margaret Sanger, member of the American Eugenics Society (Image: Maafa21)
She then described those who have actually research and exposed Planned Parenthood’s history in racism and eugenics by using the racist slang: “Hoteps.”
Over the past decade or so, the working definition of “Hotep” has morphed into an all-encompassing term describing a person who’s either a clueless parody of Afrocentricity—think “Preach” from Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood—or someone who’s loudly, conspicuously and obnoxiously pro-black but anti-progress…
a person might be Hotep, look for the following:
1. a steadfast belief in illogical conspiracy theories
2. an arrogant adherence to respectability politics
3. sexism and homophobia that vacillate from “thinly veiled” to “If being gay is natural, how come there ain’t any gay elephants?”
4. unbowed and uncompromising support for any black man accused of any wrongdoing, even if said man’s guilt is clear
5. ashy ankles
In other words, Young claims that “Hoteps” are not genuinely Black because they oppose reproductive rights, code for abortion on demand or homosexuality – more here:
But, Ryan Bomberger over at the Radiance Foundation described Alencia Johnson’s statement as, “dangerous (rampant) rhetoric that’s become the norm.”
Bomberger’s creative videos and well researched blog posts have been exposing the racist roots of Planned Parenthood and the targeting of abortion towards the African American Community for many years.
Bomberger added, ‘Hotep’ has become urban slang for black people who aren’t “really” black or are parodies of this re-emergent afrocentricity. Hoteps are also black people who are slaves to Christianity.”
Bomberger called the label, “A very racist label that attacks “whiteness” and black folk who are, apparently, mindless fools and can’t think for themselves.”
Alencia Johnson, as a spokesperson for the largest abortion vendor in the nation, Planned Parenthood goes on to claim she wants marginalized people to “live.”
“All the stuff that people like to say about Planned Parenthood and Black folks. First of all, I want Black people, I want Black folks, I want LGTQ folks, I want marginalized folks, the forgotten about folks- to live. And part of that is having access to health care and determining what happens to your body and Planned Parenthood is a resource for that.” Johnson states.
Alencia Johnson on ComplexCon 2018 2
Notice that Johnson completely leaves out the 320K babies that Planned Parenthood “marginalizes” every year through abortion, many who are Black…Or the Black women that have died or shall I say been permanently marginalized by the neglectful treatment they received from Planned Parenthood during their abortions.
Alencia Johnson continued by disputing Planned Parenthood’s eugenics history, but she doesn’t cite any sources despite volumes of evidence that PP was founded in that racist ideolog :
“An so, when people talk about our founding or abortion rights- whatever, I actually just said, ‘Let me study for myself. Get some wisdom for myself, that’s what the Bible taught me. So I said, Let me figure this out for myself.'”
“And, I found that, what is trying to divide people of color from understanding reproductive freedom and owning it were actually, Evangelical white men in like the 60’s and the 70’s who were trying to again, take back another form of liberation.”
Uh…WHAT!@$!!!
Is Alencia Johnson rewriting history?
Saynsumthn has reams of documented evidence that it was Blacks – manywomen– who were protesting abortion as Black Genocide in the 60’s and 70’s and YES – it was in fact, White men, like PP’s own former president Alan F. Guttmacher , a former VP with the Eugenics Society that were pushing abortion as a form of population control.
Planned Parenthood president Alan F Guttmacher former VP of eugenics society
Then, Alencia Johnson, as the Director of Public Engagement at Planned Parenthood added:
“And I said, so, I said, I’m not going to let, not only people who don’t look like me or never had my experience but also the Hoteps who believe in this…It’s true. And, you all…know a lot of them…I’m not going to let you all take away a resource that is literally saving people’s lives.”
Hoteps? Seriously?
Listen for yourself:
Johnson, then goes into reasons why people take birth control.
The fact Ms. Johnson leaves out is that Black people who oppose Planned Parenthood do so because PP is the largest abortion provider in the nation, they were founded in eugenics and their founder, Margaret Sanger was a Klan speaker who started the Negro Project to push her population control agenda on the Black community.
Margaret Sanger Autobiography spoke to Klan Planned Parenthood racism
And, instead of racist labels about Sanger being lobbed from PP or Alencia Johnson, Planned Parenthood, with their own history of eugenics, regularly hails Sanger a hero.
Though Planned Parenthood has selected emergency room physician Dr. Leana Wen to replace its previous political organizer president in hopes of improving its damaged image as an abortion corporation, it is still spouting the same false, well-rehearsed claims. Wen insists that abortion — the deliberate ending of a human life in the womb — is synonymous with standard medical care.
Wen’s claim was published in a press release from Planned Parenthood: “As a doctor, I know that services like cancer screenings, well-woman exams, and the full range of reproductive health care — including birth control and abortion — are standard medical care.” But there are several problems with this, and with Wen’s other claims, both in Planned Parenthood’s press release and a recent interview she gave to NPR’s 1A.
Here are six false claims made by new Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen — along with the facts:
False Claim #1: Planned Parenthood was founded by a “humanitarian” nurse who just wanted to help people with their health care.
Wen told NPR, “We were founded by a nurse who saw what happens when people don’t have access to basic health care….”
The facts: Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was deeply entrenched in eugenics and brought this same evil ideology — and those who believed in it — into her organization. Sanger’s goal was to make certain that specific groups of people did not procreate, not to make sure they had “health care.” Live Action News has repeatedly documented Sanger’s belief in promoting forced sterilization, her aversion to the poor (including immigrants), her Ku Klux Klan interactions, and more.
Wen is either woefully ignorant of this history or is deliberately misleading people about it.
False Claim #2: “Planned Parenthood has never and never will sell fetal body parts. It is completely untrue – those lies have been discredited many times over.”
The facts: Wen is very good at parroting her Planned Parenthood predecessor’s talking points, but when the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released its disturbing (and forensically authenticated — so, the opposite of “discredited”) undercover videos showing high ranking Planned Parenthood staffers haggling over the price of fetal body parts and talking about using “less crunchy” methods for abortions to better preserve the aborted body parts that buyers want, then-CEO Cecile Richards, apologized for the “tone” of the Planned Parenthood staffer seen in the first CMP video. who discussed how to successfully harvest fetal livers while munching salad and sipping wine. Richards was later summoned before a Congressional panel to answer for the baby parts scandal, and this panel referred the organization for criminal charges.
False Claim #3: “The people that attack Planned Parenthood — they’re attacking basic health care.”
Wen elaborated in her NPR interview, claiming:
What we do is provide cancer screening. What we do is provide the full range of reproductive health care, from birth control to abortion. All of this is medical care. And, it is – to me, it’s so frustrating to see one aspect of healthcare singled out, stigmatized and attacked…. When people attack the work of Planned Parenthood, when they try to make healthcare political, they’re preventing people from getting the healthcare they deserve, when healthcare should be a basic, fundamental human right.
The facts: Planned Parenthood provides 2% of the nation’s breast exams (zero mammograms) and 1% of the nation’s Pap tests for cervical cancer — while also committing 35% of the nation’s total abortions… around 320,000 every year. Planned Parenthood frequently highlights cancer screenings as a primary service, but the number of abortions they commit is nearly equal to the number of breast exams they perform. Planned Parenthood actually did more abortions than Pap tests, according to 2016 numbers.
And abortion isn’t “medical care” or “health care.” It’s killing, and that is why it carries a stigma:
False Claim #4: “It’s my job as the physician to provide medically accurate, scientifically accurate information to my patients….”
The facts: Yes, as a physician, that’s Wen’s job. However, as head of Planned Parenthood, it isn’t.
Multiple Planned Parenthood workers have made unscientific statements to patients, and even former CEO Cecile Richards’ publicly claimed that her children’s lives began at birth. Other Planned Parenthood staffers have claimed “life begins” at whatever arbitrary point someone chooses. Planned Parenthood regularly substitutes correct terms for fetus or baby with “the pregnancy” — and instead of showing scientifically proven information on fetal development to women (whom they claim they “trust”), Planned Parenthood shows a dot in abortion videos rather than accurate images of preborn children:
False Claim #5: Looking at Planned Parenthood’s abortion services as a percentage “isn’t helpful.”
The facts: Having to explain the deceptive way one’s organization arrived at a claim that a mere 3% of its services are abortion — when that organization aborts 320,000 children annually — is probably not “helpful” when one has a façade to protect. This claim has been debunked not only by Live Action but by the (not exactly pro-life) Washington Post. Yet Planned Parenthood and supporters still claim abortion is only three percent of what it does. When NPR 1A’s host, Joshua Johnson, asked about this debunked claim multiple times, in multiple ways, Wen avoided answering. Instead, she said:
… I don’t think its helpful for supporters to frame the work that we do as a number…. If we give a number, in a way it actually further stigmatizes abortion care. Because, what does that mean if quote unquote only 3% of services are abortion? Does it mean we’re shying away from abortion? That’s not true…
Committing around 320,000 abortions annually is not “shying away from abortion,” but abortion doesn’t do wonders for public relations, which is why Wen emphasizes other services. While profitable abortions are on a steady decline nationally, the corporation’s abortion market share has increased to an estimated 35%, climbing nearly 11% from 2006 to 2016. During this time, the abortion corporation’s legitimate health services decreased.
False Claim #6: “It’s pretty hard… when we are attacked in every branch of government all the time, and clinics around the country have been forced to close.”
Wen blames Planned Parenthood’s critics for its facility closures — but the truth is, the organization is losing patients — a decrease of 23 percent in recent years. That’s not the fault of critics. After all, taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood has skyrocketed from $336 million in 2006 to $543 million in 2016. I wouldn’t exactly call that being “attacked.”
Abortion is not health care, and Wen is no different from the long list of previous Planned Parenthood figureheads put forth to parrot deceptive talking points. She may be a doctor, but she’s an extremely political one. And no matter what letters Planned Parenthood’s president has next to her name, as long as it continues to kill human beings through abortion, it will never truly be a legitimate health care organization.
This article is reprinted with permission. The original appeared here at Live Action News.
Was there a sinister eugenics agenda behind so-called federally funded “population control” programs like Title X? The program, which could be seen as a form of classism, is touted as a “family planning”program aimed at “helping” poor and low income Americans in limiting their families. But the question is, what motive was behind this push prior to Title X’s 1970 passage, and who were the key players? In this four part series, Live Action News hopes to answer those questions.
When the push to use government dollars to fund population control programs was introduced, there was heavy opposition from groups that saw the move as racist eugenics. The Population Council and Planned Parenthood, two of the main groups behind this move, were both founded with eugenic philosophies. Planned Parenthood even played a prominent role in recruiting an ideal Republican lawmaker — as readers will learn later in the series — whom they convinced to sponsor what has become known as the federal Title X Family Planning Program, which now funnels $60 million to the organization.
Leading up to this time, many within the Black community viewed government programs of population control as genocidal efforts aimed at limiting the births of Blacks and other minorities. This was not without justification, as detailed by Simone M. Caron’s research, “Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960’s: Genocide or Power Politics?,” published by the Journal of Social History:
Certain segments of the black community mistrusted the underlying intention of both private and government efforts with respect to contraception. Some blacks in particular became skeptical of the increasing push for contraceptive dispersal in poor urban neighborhoods, accusing contraceptive proponents of promoting nothing less than “black genocide.”…
The incidence of increasing government involvement in contraception at the same time as the civil rights movement gained strength could be interpreted as a planned conspiracy to decrease the numbers of blacks and other racial minorities.
Leaders of the birth control movement even suggested that crime and health disparities within the Black community could be resolved by reducing the Black population. This kind of thinking aroused additional suspicion as calls for public health centers to disseminate birth control pills to the poor began to emerge.
1942 article urges family planning for Harlem (Image credit New York Times)
In 1967, Black comedian Dick Gregory joined more than 1,100 Black delegates for the First National Conference on Black Power where he, along with others in the group, adopted a black power manifesto that called for the “refusal to accept birth control programs on the basis that they seek to exterminate Negroes,” among other demands, according to a July 24, 1967, New York Times report. Gregory and others viewed “government programs designed for poor Black folks” which emphasized birth control and abortion as, “designed to limit the black population.”
1967 First National Conference on Black Power
1967 First National Conference on Black Power refuse birth control
Journalist Samuel Yette, himself outspoken about the genocidal aspects of birth control, once wrote about noted civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s views inThe Afro American – Apr 2, 1977, saying, “It is still a society in which an injured man must show his ability to pay before getting hospital services,but his daughter or wife can be aborted or fed birth control pills, at public expense….”
Fannie Lou Hamer
In that same article, Yette, one of the first Black journalists to work for Newsweek, wrote, “Instead of seeking ways to feed the hungry, the back stage plan was to get the poor unwittingly to endorse a plan to eliminate from the society those who were hungry.”
Samuel Yette and his book The Choice (Image credit Maafa21)
Yette went on to publish a book, “The Choice,”which exposed high level attempts of Black genocide through birth control, abortion, and additional means. Shortly after the publication, Yette was fired by Newsweek and claimed that his superiors told him that the “Nixon White House” wanted him out of Washington.
“The book dealt with things they did not want people to know about at the time,” Yette told the Tennessee Tribune, which he joined as a columnist, in 1996. “There were those well-placed in our government who were determined to have a final solution for the race issue in this country — not unlike Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ for Jews 50 years earlier in Germany. I wrote this and documented it. It caused the Nixon White House to say to Newsweek in effect, ‘Don’t come back until you are rid of him.’”
Blacks were highly suspicious of anything that had to do with “control,” radical Black Muslim leader Malcolm X suggested. In 1962, Wylda B. Clowes, a Black field consultant for Planned Parenthood, and Mrs. Marian Hernandez, director of the Hannah Stone Center, met with Malcolm X to “discuss with him his group’s philosophy concerning family planning.” Memos from the meeting indicated that overpopulation discussions evoked questions on why major efforts to control population were directed toward “colored nations.” The Black Muslim leader asked if Planned Parenthood had anything to do with “birth control” and offered the suggestion that Planned Parenthood would probably be more successful if they used the term “family planning” instead of “birth control.”
His reason for this was simple. He stated that “people, particularly Negroes, would be more willing to plan than to be controlled….”
Planned Parenthood memo with Malcolm X
While Caron concludes that the Black community eventually accepted contraception, a look at the organizations behind the push for government funded “family planning” programs reveal that their initial concerns may have been spot on. Behind the scenes, population control groups — some with long ties to the eugenics movement, such as the Population Council, Planned Parenthood, the Hugh Moore Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others — were seeding the ground and calling for large sums of government money to be spent on so-called “family planning.”
Author Donald T. Critchlow, in his book, “Intended Consequences, Birth Control, Abortion and the Federal Government in Modern America,” notes that the Population Council took the lead, and had an annual budget of over $3 million by 1964. Ford and Rockefeller Foundation money, along with dollars from other eugenics organizations, were flooding the Population Council coffers by the millions.
The Population Council was founded in 1952 by John D. Rockefeller III, as Live Action News has previously documented. The group’s second president, Frederic Osborn, was a founding member of the American Eugenics Society. Osborn once wrote, “Eugenic goals are most likely attained under a name other than eugenics.” He also signed Margaret Sanger’s “Citizens Committee for Planned Parenthood,” published in her Birth Control Review in April of 1938. Some speculate that Planned Parenthood’s infamous slogan, “Every Child a Wanted Child,” may have originated with Osborn.
Planned Parenthood Motto
These groups pushed the idea of a worldwide population crisis. The media joined in the fear mongering by publishing articles about the impending population crisis. Images of global starvation resulting in forced euthanasia and cannibalism were depicted in books such a Paul Ehrlich’s now discredited “The Population Bomb.”
Population Bomb threatens world peace
On-screen gloom and doom propaganda was also being disseminated.
One film, produced by Walt Disney Productions, has been detailed in a previous Live Action News article, and interestingly, the controversial 1967 film, “Family Planning,”was produced in association with the Population Council, a eugenics founded organization.
Walt Disney Production produces FP film with Population Council
The propaganda film featured Disney’s iconic animated character, Donald Duck, who introduces the alleged gloom of having a large family. Children in smaller sized families are “healthy and happy and go to school to gain an education,” the film states, as if children of large families are unhealthy, unhappy, and uneducated. The film indoctrinates its viewers that a “happy family” is one with a modest number of children while large families basically starve with “no money for modern conveniences. […]”
In the 1969 book about the founder of Planned Parenthood, “Margaret Sanger Pioneer of Birth Control,” authors Lawrence Lader, an advocate of population control with ties to the Population Council, and Milton Meltzer reinforced overpopulation fears.
Quoting the book from p. 160-161:
Today the world has caught up with the crucial necessity for population control. Many political leaders consider it second only to the threat of nuclear war as the key issue of our time. World population is now growing at a record speed of seventy million a year. The terrible prophecy is that at the current rate of increase the world may double in population by the year 2000. Yet less than 5 percent of the world’s six hundred-odd million women in the fertile years are using modern contraceptives. To Dr. Harrison Brown, one of the nation’s leading scientists, it means “catastrophe appears a near certainty.”
Latin America, whose growth is faster than any other continent’s, will almost triple its population in the next three decades. And less food is now produced and eaten there per capita than before World War II. India, kept from the edge of famine by wheat shipments from abroad, will add two hundred million more people by 1980.
With this tidal wave of population goes desperate hunger. One half of the world’s population and two thirds of its children go to bed hungry every night. General William H. Draper, head of a presidential study committee, has said that “the stark fact is that if the population continues to increase faster than food production, hundreds of millions will starve in the next decade.”
Larry Lader’s book helped redefine Margaret Sanger from her eugenics roots
The United States has already added fifty million between 1950 and 1968, and our population may almost double by the year 2000. We may not face famine because of our highly mechanized food production. But the terrible overcrowding in the cities has already brought us the destructive problems of air and water pollution, traffic chaos, shortage of schools and houses, lack of parks and recreation space. The whole quality of American life is being badly damaged.
The authors then summarize the solution:
Almost everyone now realizes that Margaret Sanger’s crusade for population control is the only way to enable living standards to improve substantially. International Planned Parenthood has already shown in many areas that populations can be kept in reasonable balance…. After the government approved legalized abortion in qualified hospitals, along with contraception, the country cut its birth rate more than in half between 1947 and 1961.
The need has become so staggering that IPPF has been joined by new allies. First came the private organizations. The Population Council, headed by John D. Rockefeller III, has spent over thirty-five million dollars since 1952, the Ford Foundation many millions more.
They end the book by making an argument for federal dollars to fund population control:
But the money needed to spread birth control around the world goes far beyond private means. Hugh Moore’s Campaign to Check the Population Explosion and the Population Crisis Committee in Washington soon realized that only vast help from the federal government could meet the crisis. With constant pressure on Congress, they were able to get the government to increase its population programs overseas to fifty million dollars in 1969. Family planning programs in the United States were given ten million dollars. Yet even these sums are only a tiny fraction of what it will take to meet the problem.
And thus, the push for taxpayer-funded population control programs took on a life of its own and consisted of a multitude of characters working behind the scenes, forming coalitions, meeting with political leaders, and spreading eugenics propaganda. By the 1960s the agenda was in full swing, but it would be continually met with opposition from religious leaders and Black leaders who recognized it as a means to control the Black population.
In a previous article in this series on the eugenics and class warfare agenda behind federally funded population programs like Title X and others, I detailed how minority leaders quickly became suspicious of the government’s push for “family planning.” This article will document the beginning of this agenda and how suspicions of these programs targeted at “low-income,” impoverished Americans continued.
In 1919, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger made an astonishing admission.Quoting from Sanger’s “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” published in the February 1919 edition of her Birth Control Review, Sanger says, “Birth Control will clear the way for eugenics and the elimination of the unfit.” She went on:
Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods….
Eugenics without Birth Control seems to us a house builded upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit.
Sanger’s statement could almost be described as prophetic. Fears of the overpopulation of certain people groups were and are common in eugenics circles. By the 1960s, as discussed in part one of this series, fears of overpopulation were again being driven by organizations with ties to eugenics, pushing for federal dollars to reduce the births of the poor.
This was met with resistance in the United States, where there was a growing concern that the push for federally funded population control was motivated by a sinister plot to limit the births of Blacks and other minorities. After all, years of eugenic programs, had already been aimed at sterilizing Black Americans, so why wouldn’t federally funded “family planning” programs also target those populations?
Graffiti says Birth Control is a Plan to Kill Negro (Image credit: Jet Magazine, August 1951)
As Live Action News has previously documented, North Carolina’s eugenics program was funded in part by Clarence Gamble, a member of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s Boards of Directors for both the American Birth Control League (ABCL) as well asPlanned Parenthood. He was a close friend of the Planned Parenthood Federation and was also a financier of Sanger’s birth control crusade. That eugenics board was responsible for the sterilization of Elaine Riddick, as seen in the video clip below from the film, Maafa21
In Margaret Sanger’s “Plan for Peace,” published in the April 1932 edition of her Birth Control Review, the Planned Parenthood founder laid out her eugenic ideas for using government resources to reduce populations of those she deemed “unfit.” It reads in part:
…Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of the individuals.
The main objects of the Population Congress would be:
a. to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population
b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand…
…The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as 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.
Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense-defending the unborn against their own disabilities.
Margaret Sanger’s Plan for Peace (edited)
In 2017, data from the Centers for Disease Control showed that overall, the U.S. birth rate had reached the lowest recorded number of births in 30 years. According to a May 2018 article in Forbes:
… [A]s described… at the Institute for Family Studies, 2017 fertility rates have been published, and show a 40 year low at 1.76 lifetime births per woman, with the most dramatic declines expressed in “missing births” over the past decade, occurring among Hispanic and African-American women, whose fertility rates are now, while still higher, much closer to the already-low rates of white non-Hispanic women. Specifically, the fertility rate for black women dropped from 2.15 to 1.89, and that of Hispanic women dropped from 2.85 to 2.1 in the time period of 2008 – 2016, compared to a decline from 1.95 to 1.72 births per non-Hispanic woman.
Recently, an Urban Institute report which looked at the birth rates for women in their 20s, found that from 2007 to 2012, according to CNBC, “Hispanic women in the age group saw the biggest declines in birth rates—a 26 percent plunge. That was followed by a 14 percent decrease among African-American women and an 11 percent fall for white women.”
Data on users of Title X clinics by race/ethnicity reveal that poor minorities are growing in their usage of the so-called free “family planning” services. In 1991 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), reported the following:
14.9% Hispanic
61.9% White
17.3% Black
.5% Native American
1.2% Asian/Pacific Islander
Title X family planning users by race ethnicity 1991 (Image credit: CDC)
Today, according to figures published in the 2016 Family Planning Annual report, those numbers are on the rise. A report published by the blog American Progress states:
Out of the 4 million family planning clients who Title X serves, more than half are women of color: 30 percent identify as either black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or American Indian or Alaska Native, and another 32 percent of clients identify as Hispanic or Latino.
21 percent of all Title X clients identify as black or African American, and 30 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino, while African American people and Hispanic and Latino people make up 13 percent and 17 percent of the U.S. population, respectively.
The figures show an alarming increase in users among the Black and Hispanic communities, specifically. This means that poor, minority women are likely more highly targeted for population control services through federally funded “family planning” programs than in the past.
In 1951, Dr. Charles V. Willie, Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University in New York, noted that Black Americans opposed any government effort to limit their numbers. Professor Willie studied the Black community’s attitudes on this topic and concluded that they viewed these efforts as Black genocide. “The genocidal charge of Black people is anchored in good data,” the professor told Jet Magazine. “Blacks point out that a leading government spokesperson has declared that an increase in Black people of 1 to 2 percent points of the total population is ‘extra-ordinary.’ Blacks also point out that whites were not concerned about their family form and size during the age of slavery.”
The Black Panther party considered contraception only one part of a larger government scheme of genocide. Drugs, venereal disease, prostitution, coercive sterilization bills, restrictive welfare legislation, inhuman living conditions, “police murders,” rat bites, malnutrition, lead poisoning, frequent fires and accidents in run-down houses, and black over-representation in Vietnam combat forces all contributed to the malicious plan to annihilate the black race.
Author Donald T. Critchlow, in his book, “Intended Consequences, Birth Control, Abortion and the Federal Government in Modern America,”also noted the opposition, writing, “The Black Muslim newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, kept up a steady attack on federal family planning programs as a white plot against the black community.”
By 1962, Urban League and NAACP chapters would join the list of “family planning” critics, according to Caron:
Whitney Young, leader of the Urban League, revoked his group’s support of contraception in 1962. Several local NAACP chapters followed suit. Marvin Davies, head of the Florida NAACP, rejected contraception and argued that black women needed to produce large numbers of babies until the black population comprised 30-35 percent of Americans; only then would blacks be able to affect the power structure.
In September of 1965, according to author David Allyn in his book, “Make Love, not War,” “the NAACP opposed a $91,000 federal grant for the dissemination of birth control information in North Philadelphia. The NAACP charged Planned Parenthood, which had applied for the grant, with attempting to ‘help Negroes commit racial suicide.’ ”
Many of these fears were confirmed when, in 1964, the platform of the American Eugenics Party included the following:
The United States is already over-populated. We must stop all immigration and impose birth controls.
Those genetic types within each race and stock having better traits will be encouraged to produce more offspring and those having the lesser qualities will be restricted in the number of their offspring.
American Eugenics Party platform 1964 (Image credit: DNA Learning Center at Cold Springs Harbor)
But advocacy of “family planning” programs was strong and the push was coming from top leaders, including the President of the United States.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) lent his support to taxpayer funded “family planning” efforts within the U.S. and abroad, claiming in a speech that for every five dollars spent on population control, more than a hundred would be invested in economic growth. For implementation of an “affirmative and effective population policy at home and abroad,” President Johnson was bestowed Planned Parenthood’s highest award (the Margaret Sanger Award).
Lyndon B Johnson receives Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award
Planned Parenthood had its roots in eugenics; founder Margaret Sanger was a member of the American Eugenics Society, who stacked her board with leaders of the eugenics movement and even willingly spoke to members of the Ku Klux Klan. Simply changing the organization’s name from the American Birth Control League (under Sanger’s leadership) to Planned Parenthood did not erase Planned Parenthood’s eugenics ties. You can trace the organization’s deep ties in eugenics well beyond their name change in 1942, and that philosophy has been carried on throughout its history.
Margaret Sanger writes about Klan meeting in Autobiography (Image credit: Maafa21)
Planned Parenthood‘s medical director during this time (1962) was a doctor by the name of Alan Guttmacher, a former VP for the American Eugenics Society and founder of Planned Parenthood’s research arm and “special affiliate,” the Guttmacher Institute, who later went on to become president of Planned Parenthood.
PPFA president Alan F Guttmacher speaks about abortion, 1965
Guttmacher was also a eugenicist, joining others of his day in voicing a concern about rising population growth. Guttmacher did not discount the idea of coercion.
Compulsory Birth Control article
In 1966, Guttmacher compared the world population with the threat of nuclear war, telling the Washington Post that governments may have to act officially to limit families. “It may be taken out of the voluntary category,” Guttmacher said.
Guttmacher abortion coercion possible
Although Guttmacher can be credited as the mastermind behind the push for abortion at Planned Parenthood, he also helped craft the push for taxpayer funded family planning.
As Live Action News previously documented, in 1966, Guttmacher proposed a blueprint to force taxpayers to pay for birth control access for the poor. By this time, Guttmacher had become more crafty in his messaging, promoting the concept as empowering others to make “choices,” when the real motivation was population control. This eugenics agenda was clear in his statement published by the New York Times: “The main goal of our program is not just to limit population, but to give everyone the same opportunity for quality medical care.”
1963 article urges family planning for Blacks (Image credit New York Times)
The “plan” — described by a 1966 New York Times article as a “partnership of public and private agencies” — was to make birth control services “freely available to every American by 1970” in an effort to prevent about 250,000 pregnancies every year. It was presented at Planned Parenthood’s New York headquarters by the organization’s then-president, George N. Lindsay, who called it the “best bargain in health services that money could buy.”
Interestingly, a short time later, in 1967, according to HHS’ Administration for Children and Families website, funds for “family planning” were introduced:
The 1967 Social Security Amendments earmarked 6 percent of maternal and child health funds for family planning, officially sanctioning the Children’s Bureau’s involvement in these services for the first time. By 1968, nearly all States were providing some form of family planning through this program (up from 20 States just 4 years earlier), bringing assistance to more than 420,000 women.
In addition, the Maternity and Infant Care projects under the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) supplemented the EOA [1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA)] effort by funding family planning services through city health departments. From fiscal 1967 to fiscal 1970, federal funds allocated to family planning increased to roughly $600 million (in 2010 dollars), over 10 times their level in 1967.
Author Donald T. Critchlow noted in the aforementioned book that by 1967, the “Children’s Bureau budget was increased to $50 million… but the bureau was hamstrung by restrictions that limited matching grants to state and local agencies. This policy deliberately excluded voluntary agencies such as Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funds administered through state and local agencies.”
However, Critchlow also observed that by the time Lyndon B. Johnson left office in 1968, “a policy revolution in federal family planning had occurred, setting the stage for the further expansion of family planning programs under Richard Nixon.”
