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February 28, 2011

Sharpton and Obama Ignore Planned Parenthood's Racist Underbelly

By M. Catharine Evans
Reverend Al Sharpton called a press conference this past week to denounce an anti-abortion billboard overlooking New York City's Soho district. The sign depicting a young black girl read "The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the Womb." Sharpton's spokesman characterized the message as "classic racial profiling." 

The pro-life non-profits responsible for the billboard positioned it in close proximity to three Planned Parenthood facilities who reported performing 17,000 abortions between them for the year 2010.

Sharpton's charge of racial profiling prompted Lifealways to remove the sign before the Friday press conference. The fact that for every 1000 African-American births there are 1,489 aborted black babies in New York City did not convince the Reverend that something is going on in his community besides racism.

There's an old African proverb that states "if you want to know the end, look at the beginning." The adage is good advice for African-Americans like Sharpton who still defend Planned Parenthood. The billion dollar international organization has never been a friend to people of color, so it's devastating that civil rights activists as well as the first black president would not do their homework. When confronted with pro-life activist Lila Rose's undercover videos of PP personnel condoning underage sex trafficking, Obama stated that "in the past they did good work."

Yes, offering indigent women routine Pap smears and breast exams seems laudable until overwhelming evidence reveals the organization's true historical purpose. Planned Parenthood Federation of America planted the seeds of African-American exploitation in the 1930's, and their venture has since yielded some pretty deadly fruit:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... more African-American babies have been killed by abortion since 1973 than the total number of African-American deaths from cancer, AIDS, violent crimes, accidents, and heart disease combined. Over one-fourth of the total potential black population has been aborted, and African Americans, though they account for 12.3 percent of the population, receive 36 percent of all abortions and are three times as likely as their white contemporaries to have an abortion (US Center for Disease Control, Abortion Surveillance Report)

It's not a fluke that most Planned Parenthood clinics operate in urban minority communities. Margaret Sanger set her first birth control clinics in run-down, inner city neighborhoods dispensing information, collecting data and shoring up her future argument for selective breeding and population control.

In honor of black history month, Reverend Sharpton and President Obama need to understand what true racial profiling looks like:

The birth control movement led to one of Sanger's most audacious projects in 1939. A memorandum "Suggestions for Negro Project" made its way to her desk from Dr. Clarence Gamble. He was the director of the Birth Control Federation of the South. Gamble suggested that they sell eugenics to get rid of blacks by a kind of traveling minstrel show with black preachers and black nurses touting the benefits of family planning. In December 1939 Sanger responded stating, "We do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it occurs to the more rebellious members."(Gordon, Linda. Woman's Body, Woman's Right. New York: Grossman Pub., 1976, pp. 332-333)

The funding for the Negro Project came from wealthy backers like Albert and Mary Lasker in 1940. Their marketing campaign worked. By 1947 black leaders throughout the country stood behind the movement and gave their blessing to Planned Parenthood.

In her autobiography published in 1938, Sanger wrote of her extensive travels to Russia, China, India, England, Scotland and Germany. As a member of the Socialist Party she spoke at labor union meetings, neo-Malthusian conferences, and exchanged ideas with communist leaders. She contends throughout the memoir that she spoke to any organization who requested information on birth control:

Always to me an aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

When confronted with its racist past, Planned Parenthood insists that Sanger acted alone. As for the high abortion rates among blacks, they attribute the alarming numbers to social factors like "poverty, access to information and education, access to birth control and intimate-partner violence." Interesting that today's Planned Parenthood reps cite reasons almost identical to Sanger's explanation for high birth rates almost 100 years ago.  The PR stays the same, whether babies are dead or alive.

Al Sharpton and other black leaders succeeded in forcing a pro-life group to remove a controversial sign. Too bad they didn't see it as a true learning experience and study up.

Read more M.Catharine Evans at www.potterwilliamsreport.com
on "Sharpton and Obama Ignore Planned Parenthood's Racist Underbelly"