Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Quote of the Day: Defending Margaret Sanger on Eugenics
“Framing access to reproductive health care and bodily autonomy as eugenics exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of the racialized gender oppression on which antiabortionists stand. The truth is, the anti-abortion movement was born out of racist and xenophobic concerns about the falling white birth rate—echoes of which you will hear in today’s white supremacist rhetoric.”
— Alexis McGill Johnson, President & CEO, Planned Parenthood Federation of America
This quotation came from the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago. Someone had written a piece criticizing Planned Parenthood. Not surprisingly, the president of the organization decided to respond by attacking the pro-life community with an outrageous accusation. Not only are her comments about the pro-life movement untrue, but she completely mischaracterizes the common understanding of eugenics.
To help clarify the record, here are some descriptions of Margaret Sanger’s eugenics work:
Sanger shaped the eugenics movement in America and beyond in the 1930s and 1940s. Her views and those of her peers in the movement contributed to compulsory sterilization laws in 30 U.S. states that resulted in more than 60,000 sterilizations of vulnerable people, including people she considered ‘feeble-minded,’ ‘idiots’ and ‘morons.’
Or, from her writings:
The main objects of the Population Congress would be to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring[;] to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
Clearly, Ms. Johnson is “misinformed” about the pro-life movement.
This from the Guttmacher Institute which supports abortion at around 2014.
Huh, and here I thought Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, had something to do with the pro-life movement being born. The pro-life movement is, after all, heavily populated with Catholics — you know, members of the universal church with adherents and saints of every color and ethnicity and proclaiming the dignity of all human life.
First the Church gets accused of decreeing contraception illicit in order to assure the production of more Catholics, and then she’s accused of wanting only whites to produce more Catholics (and, one assumes, being okay with POC aborting their children). One of us is confused about what it means to be pro-life, and it isn’t me.
Margaret Sanger was despicable and the idiotic comment from the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood is shocking (not really – given the new inflammable talking points of the former Democratic – now called the Socialist Party). I honestly feel sorry for young women today being so misled.
And misled in disreputable ways. There’s no trying to re-cast Sanger’s words and actions, nor trying to explain away the sale of tiny body parts.
Louis Farrakhan is not and has never been a reverend. He’s Muslim.