Topic: WorldNetDaily
Lying about Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood is a longtime ConWeb pastime, and at WorldNetDaily in particular.
In a Nov. 5 WorldNetDaily article, Alicia Powe gives right-wing columnist Star Parker to make comments like this:
Black Americans are enticed by abortion giants to undergo abortions to reduce the black population, Parker contended. That was one of the goals admitted by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, she said.
In fact, there's no evidence Sanger ever targeted blacks out of a racist motive.
Powe herself contribuutes to the lies, claiing that "In her book 'Pivot of Civilization,' Sanger implied many impoverished blacks “should never have been born.” In fact, Sanger said no such thing in that book; the word "negro" (the accepted term for blacks at the time Sanger's book was published) appears only twice, neither referencing a claim that any black person "should never have been born."
Powe also asserts that "Seventy-nine percent of Planned Parenthood’s surgical abortion clinics are located within walking distance of black or Hispanic neighborhoods" -- as we've documented, a highly misleading claim.
Then, in a Nov. 12 WND column, William Hamnet Wall cited what he claimed were "15 deadly lies of abortion pushers." In response to the statement that "Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was not a eugenics-loving racist," he huffed in response:
Even the squirming apologists from liberal Time magazine reported: “She did (say so), and very publicly. In a 1921 article, she wrote that, ‘the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.'”
Want more proof?
“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” Sanger wrote in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble on Dec. 10, 1939.
Even Planned Parenthood admits Sanger advocated eugenics (as a lot of prominent people did in Sanger's time), so we're not sure who's saying she wasn't. The quote Wall uses to support his claim that she was a racist, however, is taken out of context; as fact-checkers have pointed out, the quote is in reference to encouraging black doctors and ministers to let black women know that Sanger's birth-control campaign targeting blacks was not a Jim Crow-like action.
But Sanger's dead, and you can't libel the dead. That's what WND is counting on in publishing demonstrable lies.
