The White Supremacist Roots of the Abortion Industry

In an interview published in Forbes Magazine on July 8, rapper, producer, and presidential aspirant Kanye West spoke out against Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry.

West has made waves in recent years for his support of President Trump and his very public conversion to Christianity. While his support for the President has cooled, his love of Christ still appears to be strong. His 2019 album, Jesus is King, topped the charts and included a gospel choir that West used during his own produced church services. Over the Fourth of July weekend, West announced that he was running for President of the United States, and Forbes interviewed him to get his stance on various issues. One of those issues was abortion.

Abortion, West told Forbes in the interview with Randall Lane, is the “Devil’s work.” “I am in service of our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ, and I put everything I get on the line to serve God,” West said. “I’m pro-life because I’m following the word of the Bible.” He went on to say, “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.” West isn’t wrong.

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We have entered a time when the most innocuous statements about race can land one in hot water or even get one “cancelled.” Statues of great Americans—even those who freed the slaves such as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant—and Catholic saints, including the Blessed Virgin, are being defaced and pulled down. Yet it came as a shock to me that Planned Parenthood has decided to remove the name of their founder, Margaret Sanger, from their flagship abortion center in New York. As a spokesman for Planned Parenthood told The New York Times, “The biggest concern with Margaret Sanger is her public support for the eugenics medical philosophy, which was rooted in racism, ableism and classism.” It is refreshing, albeit strange, to hear Planned Parenthood speak so honestly about their roots.

Indeed, the Planned Parenthood founder was a racist eugenicist, a phrase coined by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, who wanted to put Darwin’s ideas on evolution into practice by the selective breeding, sterilization, etc., not of dogs and horses but of humans. This science of eugenics was quite popular with WASP-type elites in Europe and the United States, but got a justifiably bad reputation when the full horrors of its aims were demonstrated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The shocking images and stories of the Nazi brutality and genocide of Jews, Slavs, and others whom the Nazis considered less than human ended eugenics as a mainstream science.

But Sanger and her fellow American eugenicists were more subtle and less bloodthirsty than their counterparts in Germany, and thus were able to continue their eugenics plans after the war, though under the guise of helping the poorer populations. Instead of setting up death camps, Sanger placed birth control and abortion centers in neighborhoods comprised of what many WASP elites considered “undesirables,” i.e., blacks, Jews, Catholics, and Slavs. Believing most black people to be mentally no better than an 11-year-old child, Sanger set up “The Negro Project” to reduce the black population growth in America. She even went so far as to recruit black ministers to lead their flocks to stop reproducing voluntarily.

Unfortunately for the eugenicists, the “weeds”—as Sanger referred to those she thought of as “unfit”—did not always stop voluntary reproduction. And when voluntarism failed, American eugenicists used the courts to sterilize the undesirables forcibly. Tens of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people whom these elites considered unfit, usually people of color, were forcibly sterilized in the United States. Forced sterilization lasted all the way until the 1980s.

Do not be fooled by the seemingly less barbaric methods of eugenics employed in America; the end goals of the eugenicists in the United States were the same as those of their Nazi comrades in Germany—the elimination of the “unfit” to make way for the “fit.” And, make no mistake, the Nazi eugenicists were comrades with American eugenicists. American eugenicists often travelled to Germany and German eugenicists came to the United States to exchange ideas and discuss their plans. In fact, Sanger even invited Eugen Fischer, the Nazi scientist whose writings on eugenics inspired Hitler’s theories of the master race, to speak to her Birth Control League. Furthermore, in a speech delivered on March 3, 1938, meant to allay fears that forced sterilization might not safeguard the rights of the people, Sanger praised the Nazi sterilization system and the “1,700 special courts and 27 higher courts in Germany [set up] to review the cases certified for sterilization there.” She assured the audience that courts in America would safeguard citizens’ rights just like those in Nazi Germany. Of course, we all now know the truth about those German courts Sanger spoke of so fondly.

To Planned Parenthood’s credit, the organization does not deny the uncomfortable truth of their founder’s eugenics past, stating in a document on their website, entitled Opposition Claims About Margaret Sanger, that “Planned Parenthood acknowledges these major flaws in Sanger’s views [about eugenics]—and we believe they are wrong.” In that same document, however, Planned Parenthood couches Sanger’s work to reduce the black population in the United States as “Outreach to the African American Community,” and argues that leaders of the black community supported her work. Of course they did. She recruited them for the purpose of keeping what she called the “rebellious members” of the black community from realizing what was really going on. To be fair, Sanger wanted to get rid of the “unfit” people in all races, and she did not believe that all members of any one race were “unfit.” But she did view the black community as having far higher numbers of unfit persons than the white community.

Planned Parenthood also distanced Sanger from the Nazis by pointing out that she helped save some Jews and that the Nazis burned her books. I have found no one who suggests that Sanger advocated the murder of healthy adults of any race. She did advocate segregating the “weeds” into what some have called concentration camps, but certainly did not advocate gassing them. As this article clearly states, Sanger and the American eugenicists sought to create a master race through birth control, forced sterilization, and abortion—not death camps. Furthermore, as acknowledged above, unlike Hitler, Sanger did not believe any one race to be a “master race.” She saw “fit” and “unfit” in every race, although she saw more unfit in the same places that the Nazis did—the Jews, blacks, Catholics, and Slavs. As to the Nazis burning her books, even Planned Parenthood admits this is because Sanger advocated aborting not only “unfit” babies, but even unwanted healthy babies. Apparently, killing healthy unborn babies went too far for even the genocidal barbarians in Nazi Germany. But not for Planned Parenthood.

While it is certainly true that most American eugenicists, including Margaret Sanger, were not the virulent racists that the Nazis in Germany were, their aims of creating a perfect “master race” were the same. Furthermore, most American eugenicists, like their British founder Francis Galton, believed that white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were generally mentally superior to other races, especially the black race. Margaret Sanger agreed. This is why forced sterilizations of blacks greatly outpaced forced sterilizations of whites and why, according to the CDC website, even today, the black population—though only 13 percent of the U.S. population—accounts for 36 percent of mothers who abort their babies. Thus, when Kanye West claims that “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work,” he isn’t wrong.

Now that this is out in the open, and Planned Parenthood is admitting to their racist eugenics origins, how can they be permitted to continue the work that Sanger and other racist eugenicists began? Sure, they have removed Sanger’s name from their building in New York, but they are still killing babies by the millions. This is their moment of weakness. This is the chink in their armor. This is the time to stop them. This is the time to drive home the fact that the killing of babies—whether inside or outside the womb—is wrong. This is the time for all Catholics, all Christians, and all sane and rational people to stand together to proclaim, as Kanye West succinctly put it, that Planned Parenthood does “the Devil’s work.” God has opened the door for us to end the greatest evil America has ever allowed. Let’s take advantage of it.

Author

  • R. C. VanLandingham

    R.C. VanLandingham is a novelist. His most recent work is Peter Puckett and the Amulet of Eternity. Find out more rcvanlandingham.com.

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