From: warren@pws.ma30.bull.com (Warren Lavallee)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,alt.abortion.inequity
Subject: Re: Planned Parenthood on RU 486 "Morning After" Breakthrough
Date: 13 Oct 92 11:57:27 GMT
Followup-To: talk.abortion

Nigel.Allen@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Nigel Allen) writes:
>Here is a press release from the Planned Parenthood.Federation of America:

>   Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the world's oldest and
>largest voluntary reproductive health care organization, is dedicated
>to the principle that every individual has a fundamental right to
>choose when or whether to have a child.
...
>					regardless of race, age,
>gender, sexual orientation, disability, or economic circumstances.
>Through its international program, Family Planning International
>Assistance, Planned Parenthood helps meet the family planning needs
>of women and men in the developing world.

Some of you may know that Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned 
Parenthood) was interested in Malthusian Eugenics.  She believe that
"social regeneration" would only be possible as the "sinister forces
of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility" were repulsed.[1]
She had come to regard organized charity to ethnic minorities and
the poor as a "symptom of a malignant social disease" because it
encouraged the prolificacy of "defectives, deliquents, and dependents."[2]
She yearned for the end of the Christian "reign of benevolence" that
the Eugenic Socialists promised, when the "choking human undergrowth"
of "morons and imbeciles" would be "segregated" and "sterilized."[3]
Her goal was "to create a race of thoroughbreds" by encouraging
"more children from the fit, and less from the unfit."[4]  And the only 
way to achieve that goal she realized, was through Malthusian Eugenics.

Birth Control Review- Margaret's magazine and the immediate predecessor to the
Planned Parenthood Review- regularly published racist articles on Malthusian
Eugenicists.[5]  In 1933, the Review published "Eugenic Sterilization:
An Urgent Need" by Ernst Rudin, who was Hitler's director of genetic
sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene.[6]
And later that same year, it published and article by Leon Whitney entitled,
"Selective Sterilization," which adamantly praised and defended the 
Third Reich's racial programs.[7]

The bottom line is that Planned Parenthood was self-consciously organized,
in part, to promote and enforce White Supremacy.  Like the Ku Klux Klan,
the Nazi Party, and the Mensheviks, it has been from its inception implicitly
and explicitly racist.  And this racist orientation is all too evident in its
various programs and initiatives: birth control clinics, the abortion
crusade, and sterilization initiatives.

During the 1988 Presidential primary season, Republican contender
Pat Robertson caused a nationwide stir when he charged that the long
range goal of Planned Parenthood is the creation of a "master race."
He also asserted that Margaret Sanger was an advocate of Eugenics
and various coercive sterilization programs.[8]

Planned Parenthood's response was immediate.  And vehement.  Fay Wattleton, the stunningly attractive black president of Planned Parenthood Federation of
America said that "All the charges are unfounded, and frankly, ridiculous."[9]
She said that Robertson's contentions were "without basis, and substance,
or even any remnants of facts."[10] Margaret Sanger's "philosophies were
not based on Eugenics," she argued.  "Her philosophy was based on people
being allowed to choose for themselves."[11]  She then dismissed the 
charges of racism as "the same rhetoric we've all heard from televengelists
for ten years."[12]

Interestingly, just four years earlier in an interview with Washington Times
journalist John Lofton, Wattleton admitted that Sanger did indeed advocate
"Eugenics and the advancement of the perfect race."[13]  And though she
tried to distance herself and her organization from those views, she was
forced to confess that Planned Parenthood has never officially repudiated them.

It appears that Robertson was right after all.  The cloud of rhetoric
from Planned Parenthood notwithstanding.

[1] Margaret Sanger, "The Pivot of Civilization" (New York: Bretano's, 1922)
	pg. 23, 176
[2] Ibid, pg. 108
[3] Ibid, pg. 110, 181, 264, 265
[4] Birth Control Review, 3:5, (May 1919), and 5:11, (November, 1921)
[5] See for example Warren Thompson's monthly BCR Series: "Race Suicide in
	the U.S.," extending from August 1920 to March 1921.
[6] Birth Control Review, April, 1933 p. 102
[7] Birth Control Review, 17:4, 1933, p. 85
[8] The Tennessean, February 3, 1988
[9] Ibid.
[10] The Washington Times, February 3, 1988
[11] Ibid.
[12] USA Today, February 3, 1988
[13] The Washington Times, August 10, 1984
--
Root out the cause, not the effects.                           Be | true
Do not distort the truth.                                       --+--
Pay attention.                                                    | Unbeliever
Work: warren@beloved.unidesk.com  Compu$erve: 76450,3463   answer | the call.
Xref: sparky talk.abortion:42816 alt.abortion.inequity:4459