Category: Racism

NOW pres: It’s ok, Margaret Sanger didn’t just hate Blacks

Laurie Bertram Roberts, Mississippi State Pres. of the National Organization of Women, comments on Margaret Sanger’s racism:

“First of all, Margaret Sanger did not work on abortion. She worked on birth control. Context is everything. I will never deny that Margaret Sanger was connected to the eugenics movement, what they (abortion opponents) never bothered to say is that eugenicists also wanted to limit the birth rate of poor white people and disabled people. It wasn’t just Black people; it was a whole lot of people they deem to be unfit.”

Quoted in “Thank God for Stupid Enemies” Speaker for the Dead WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16, 2014

From Anna Wolf “Using the KKK to Fight Abortion Rights” Jackson Free Press April 16, 2014

Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood. She was also an avowed racist (she spoke at at least one KKK meeting)  who did indeed advocate sterilizations of the  handicapped and poor.

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Columnist: “poor, black, Indian” children are “marked for failure”

An American columnist said abortion is needed for the “at risk” population, “poor, black and Indian” whose children are “marked for failure.”

The quote appeared in Tony Bouza “A Mother’s Day Wish: Make Abortion Available to All Women,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 8, 1989 

 Melinda Tankard Reist Giving Sorrow Words: Women’s Stories of Grief after Abortion (Springfield, IL: Acorn Books, 2007) 193

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Minorities don’t get support to keep their babies, former clinic worker says

From a former abortion clinic worker, Rayna Rapp, who is still pro-choice:

“Many minority women, even if they are not poor, cannot count on support for their pregnancies, and pregnancy related decision-making, from their healthcare providers. Frankie Smithers, an African-American schoolteacher, told me that when she got her positive pregnancy test results back at City Hospital, she was delighted, but the nurse automatically directed her to make an appointment for an abortion. It took considerable complaint to persuade the woman to schedule a prenatal care visit instead.”

Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999) 164

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Planned Parenthood: Children of the Poor are Too Costly

A fund-raising letter of Planned Parenthood committee of Pittsburgh:

“Have you ever stopped to consider how much the “unwanted” children of poor and ignorant parents are costing you in the community in increased relief load, state medical and mental care, juvenile delinquency, and criminality?… There is a critical need for the expansion of this work [birth control] in American slums and other areas.”

Johanna Choen Choice & Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

This is an old letter from before abortion was legal, but it shows the disregard Planned Parenthood had for minorities and the poor.

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Clinic worker on the “underlying” population “for which we have no use”

From a volunteer at an abortion clinic:

“I always felt that Malthus was right. The population bomb was going to explode, that we are developing an underlying population for which we have no use, a part of society that doesn’t fit in.”

Faye D Ginsburg Contested Lives: the Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley and Los Angeles California: University of California Press, 1989) 68

Thomas Malthus was an 18th century British essayist who believed that overpopulation was a danger to society and that  people, especially those of “lower” classes, should have fewer children.

What people comprise the  “underlying population” that there is “no use” for?” It is an elitist and possibly racist way of thinking.

Did her concern about curbing the population (particularly by eliminating certain people) influence the way she dealt with people coming in for abortions?

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Pro-choice author talks about the “forced imposition” of abortion on minorities

Pro-choice author Rosalind Pollack Petchesky writes about how poor minority women are sometimes pressured to have abortions:

“Especially in locales with large concentrations of poor blacks, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Chicanos, and Native Americans, a more serious problem regarding abortion may stem, not from its denial, but from its forced imposition.… They [minority women who became pregnant] report that poor women of color may find that a positive pregnancy test automatically results in an aggressive attempt to persuade them to undergo abortion. Instead of being offered a choice, they are presumed to be too poor or too young or to have too many children already to bear a child. This is in part a function of the population control mentality, but it also reflects economic interests. In profit-making abortion establishments, Medicaid reimbursement and unregulated fee schedules operate as an incentive to some doctors to process as many abortion cases as possible.”

Rosalind Pollack Petchesky Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality & Reproductive Freedom (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990) 161

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s racist comment about Roe versus Wade

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in an interview that she was surprised at a 1980 court ruling that prevented the restoration of Medicaid funding for abortions, because, in her opinion, when Roe V Wade was decided:

“Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth, and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

E, Bazelton “The Place of Women on the Court.” New York Times Magazine” July 7, 2009 Quoted in Doctor Alveda King and Dr.La Verne Tolbert Life at All Costs: an Anthology of Voices from 21st-Century Black Pro-Life Leaders (Xlibris Corporation, 2012)

It’s interesting to speculate who these people are who, according to Ginsburg, “we don’t want to have too many of.” It doesn’t take a big leap of logic to assume that most of “these people” are in fact minorities.

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“Too many minorities already” says Social Worker

A woman who became pregnant after rape but wanted to give birth to her baby was told the following by her social worker and a doctor who were trying top convince her to abort:

“They said I was “just another minority bringing a child into the world. There are too many already.”

David C Reardon Aborted Women: Silent No More (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway books, 1987) 277

 

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Protecting minorities from sterilization…or not: Planned Parenthood

“The not-so-concealed theme of some major figures in NARAL [National Abortion Rights Action League] and NOW [National Organization for Women] was that abortion should be legal because the most prolific breeders were welfare mothers from the dangerous classes … the leader of NARAL in New York lobbied against the provisions to protect poor minority women from involuntary sterilization, and so did Planned Parenthood.”

Alexander Cockburn, quoted in Proletarian Revolution, Fall 1989, page 28

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Abortion clinic charged with racism

A feminist author describes the charges of racism against an abortion clinic she observed at:

“Like many feminist organizations founded by white women, the center faces charges of institutional racism leveled by women of color working in the organization. Black (and sometimes white) workers said that racism had always been a problem, that when black women entered into a white power structure from the bottom (as they did the center, as health workers or low-level administrative workers), clashes between black and white staff members were inevitable. In other words, white women tended to re-create covert power dynamics similar to those they profess to despise, treating black women in a manner comparable to the sexist treatment of women by men.”

Wendy Simonds. Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996) 170

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