The Virginia Tech community, along with the rest of the nation, spent yesterday reflecting on the extraordinary achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr.
His words and acts continue to influence policies, debates and discussions in classrooms and congress alike. Civil rights activists seek to identify where King might have stood on an issue in the same way lawyers try to interpret what the founding fathers might have said about the Constitution. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day comes at a time when thousands of individuals are organizing in the streets in protest or support of the Roe v. Wade decision that took place on this day 35 years ago which made abortion a Constitutionally-protected right.
While it has long been debated which camp King may have sided with in the current abortion debate, civil-rights activists should question what his response to Planned Parenthood's mission would have been had he fully known its agenda. Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in America, was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916.
Sanger, an advocate of eugenics, sought to improve human hereditary traits by eliminating undesirable traits using abortion. In her words, we should rid the world of reckless breeding by making abortions accessible to those who are poor, blind, deaf, mute, epileptic, feeble-minded, mentally ill, diseased, imprisoned or alcoholic.
By providing abortions to these groups, Sanger believed she was helping rid the world of an unnecessary strain on humanity. She explained, "we are failing to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying . . . a dead weight of human waste . . . an ever-increasing spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all" (advocates for diversity must be squirming in their seats at those words). For this reason, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in an effort to better humanity through selective breeding. To those who believe an organization's origins have a bearing on its current respectability, it is also interesting to note that Sanger didn't just stop at poor and diseased people in her crusade.
Sanger created the "Negro Project" which, in her words, helped educate the black community about better family-planning practices. Some argue, as she did, that this program was created to help the community overcome the economic stress created by unwanted children.
In order to help broaden this movement she enlisted the help of black pastors. In a private letter to Clarence Gamble she wrote, "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."
Despite her supposed good intentions toward the black community, just a year before she established the Negro Project, she defended her appearance at a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
She writes in her autobiography, "to me, any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, N.J." She was so successful that many other similar groups sent her invitations to speak.
To this day, Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in America, identifies its core clients as, "young women, low-income women, and women of color." They have sought to place abortion clinics in the heart of inner cities in order to better reach these poor and minority women. Sanger would have been proud that her mission has been working - one third of all abortions are performed on black women and four times as many abortions are performed on women from low-income households as those from middle to upper class households.
Even the staunch defender of abortion rights should question how this billion-dollar organization, which was founded with the goal of aborting our most vulnerable groups of society, would be viewed today by Martin Luther King, Jr. and similar civil rights activists. Would King have liked to know that an organization targeting women of color and women from low-income households has successfully made them more likely to remove themselves from the gene pool?
In a well-crafted public relations campaign, Planned Parenthood has continued to reach out to our nation's minorities, youth and poor through the Internet, television and word of mouth. For those who don't find the organization's history distressing, this is a positive step for women's reproductive freedom.
For the rest of us who find this foundation's history of weeding out "unworthy" people from becoming mothers, for targeting minorities and poor people and for diminishing the value that each individual has to add to society, it is important to speak out when Planned Parenthood wishes to generously place a clinic in your neighborhood or perhaps the next time your women's studies teacher touts the merits of such a "progressive" organization.