Republican 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson recently asserted on a Des Moines, Iowa conservative radio show that the purpose behind Margaret Sanger’s founding of the abortion mill Planned Parenthood was to “eliminate black people.”
Carson was asked by a WHO Radio host to comment on an Obama speech from last year in which the president defended Planned Parenthood and even said “Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you.” Carson replied:
You wonder if he actually knows the history of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger, who was trying to eliminate black people. That was the whole purpose of it.
Technically, that’s an exaggeration. Eliminating blacks wasn’t Sanger’s whole purpose. Her organization built their clinics in lower-class, minority neighborhoods, to try to reduce minority birth rates, but it wasn’t just black minorities she wanted to reduce. Her first clinic, at 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn, New York, was in an ethnic neighborhood chosen because “it had a large population of working class Jews” (her words), and she advertised it with handbills written in Yiddish and Italian, as well as English.
She was an eugenicist, and she wanted to guide the genetic progress of the human species into “a race of thoroughbreds.” (The phrase wasn’t original; she borrowed it from another progressive, and used it in her newsletter.) To that end, she wanted reduce the reproductive rates of what she thought of as inferior and mongrel strains of humanity.
Jonah Goldberg wrote:
“One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: ‘Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.’ When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.”