Planned Parenthood 'steeped in white supremacy', letter says

FPI / July 7, 2020

The leftist mob has attacked statues of Christopher Columbus, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Spanish priest Junipero Serra among others. Yet a bust of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a virulent racist and advocate of eugenics, still sits in the National Portrait Gallery.

Now, hundreds of current and former Planned Parenthood employees have come forward to charge the nation's largest abortion provider is "steeped in white supremacy."

A letter signed by more than 350 “current and former staffers” of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, as well as about 800 donors, supporters and volunteers, declared that Sanger was “a racist, white woman” and that the organization suffers from “institutional racism,” Valerie Richardson noted in a July 5 report for The Washington Times.

“We know that Planned Parenthood has a history and a present steeped in white supremacy and we, the staff, are motivated to do the difficult work needed to improve,” said the June 18 open letter from Save PPGNY.

Pro-life advocates have long pointed out that Sanger’s focus on Harlem and the South are manifested in Planned Parenthood’s work today.

Clinics are located disproportionately in minority neighborhoods. Black women received 36 percent of abortions in 2014 even though they make up 13 percent of the U.S. female population.

“Anyone familiar with Planned Parenthood’s history, founded by Margaret Sanger who recommended selective breeding of ‘the finest flowers’ to prevent ‘human weeds’ and pushed a ‘Negro Project,’ knows that the racist roots of the nation’s No. 1 abortion vendor taints their entire organization,” said Kristi Hamrick, spokeswoman for Students for Life of America.

Hamrick said the “complaints of employees of Planned Parenthood that such policies continue are unsurprising but still tragic.”

Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of the pro-life Radiance Foundation, said the letter shows “Planned Parenthood’s own employees acknowledge what history has long documented.”

“Margaret Sanger was a racist eugenicist and no amount of leftist revisionism will change that,” Bomberger told The Washington Times. “Sadly, those same employees refuse to see that the same systemic racism that birthed Planned Parenthood, led the abortion giant to become the leading killer of black lives today.”

Bomberger, who is black, is no fan of Black Lives Matter because of the movement’s support for “reproductive justice,” including unfettered access to abortion. Planned Parenthood Federation of America has expressed strong support for Black Lives Matter, including calls to defund police.

“The pro-abortion #BlackLivesMatter movement forces the question: which black lives matter?” Radiance said in a post.

Critics are "watching to see whether Planned Parenthood, after decades of deflecting criticism from the pro-life movement, can withstand the scrutiny of the 'cancel culture' and Black Lives Matter," Richardson wrote.

Hayden Ludwig, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center who has written extensively on Sanger, said:

“Planned Parenthood staffers criticizing Margaret Sanger as racist is certainly unprecedented and completely justified. This letter might be a sign that the Left is close to jettisoning the socialist, eugenics-supporting, white supremacist Sanger. That can’t come soon enough.”

Debate has raged for years about Sanger’s support for eugenics, an early 20th-century social engineering movement that sought to improve humanity through sterilization and selective genetic breeding.

Sanger launched the Negro Project in 1939 aimed at “helping Negroes to control their birthrate” while advocating for a federal “population bureau” to police reproduction. She worked with prominent Black leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and Mary McLeod Bethune but also spoke in 1926 to a Ku Klux Klan women’s auxiliary.

Planned Parenthood issued an eight-page “fact sheet” in 2016 defending Sanger and refuting racism allegations as well as acknowledging that she “had some beliefs, practices, and associations that we acknowledge and denounce, and that we work to rectify today.”

The Save PPGNY letter declared that “Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist, white woman. That is a part of history that cannot be changed.”

In their letter, the PPGNY staffers described a workplace culture of “racism and anti-Blackness.” They said they had complained for years about “systemic racism, pay inequity, and a lack of upward mobility for Black staff,” but nothing was addressed.

“White and non-Black employees are still given more pay and more advancement opportunities than their Black colleagues,” said a Save PPGNY post on equity. “Blanket statements are used to overshadow our grievances, while only exacerbating the problem.”

“Black staff are further disheartened when our white and non-Black colleagues use their privilege to amplify our concerns, and find they, too, are challenged and manipulated into silence,” it added.

Free Press International