Topic: WorldNetDaily
One of the ConWeb's favorite pastimes is to spread lies about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger as a way to attack the organization.
In his Jan. 30 WorldNetDaily column, Mychal Massie asserted that Sanger was "rabidly racist," adding:
Sanger wrote: “We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” (“Woman, Morality, and Birth Control,” New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12.)
Then in a 1939 letter, Sanger reaffirmed to another white racist, eugenicist, Dr. Clarence Gamble: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” To be fair, abortionists argue that’s what she said but that’s not what she meant. However, Sanger’s Negro Project, which she established in Harlem because of the great number of blacks living there, proves otherwise.
Rita Dunaway similarly wrote in her Jan. 30 WND column:
The organization that is today Planned Parenthood gave birth to its deadly “Negro Project” in the 1930s, hoping to stunt the growth of black families. No wonder that today, a whopping 79 percent of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are located within a 2-mile radius of a neighborhood that is primarily black or Hispanic.
A lot of things wrong here. Massie's first quote of Sanger is not from "Woman, Morality, and Birth Control" but from the same letter to Gamble he cites in the following paragraph.
Both Massie and Dunaway are falsely smearing Sanger's "Negro Project." As a Washington Post fact check explains, the "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" passage "is frequently taken out of context to suggest Sanger was seeking to exterminate blacks," and that in fact the Negro Project -- which was about birth control, not the attempt to "stunt the growth of black families" Dunaway dishonestly claims it is -- sought to recruit black leaders for the effort to allay suspicions blacks might have had about whites like Sanger being involved.
Further, contrary to Dunaway's claim, the Guttmacher Institute found that 60 percent of them are located in majority white neighborhoods, and that fewer than one in ten are located in neighborhoods where more than half of the residents are black.
And no, Mr. Massie, Sanger was not "rabidly racist"; fact-checkers have pointed out that while Sanger likely held paternalistic attitudes toward blacks that were unfortunately common during her lifetime, there's no evidence she was an avowed racist or that she coerced black women into using birth control.
Remember, WND editor Joseph Farah is weirdly proud that his website publishes misinformation.
