La Shawn Barber at the March for Life

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Marching for life and against the "Negro Project"

By La Shawn Barber

Jan 23, 2006

On January 8, 2006, I attended the Justice Sunday III conference at Greater Exodus Baptist Church, a predominantly black church in Philadelphia. Reverend Herbert Lusk preached passionately against abortion and called it murder. Today, I will attend the Blogs4Life Conference, then head to the National Mall for the March for Life rally. I hope to see a large number of the kind of people who nodded in agreement with Rev. Lusk’s sermon.

Black women are three times as likely to have abortions as their white counterparts. Blacks and Hispanics are about 25 percent of the population, yet they account for 57 percent of all abortions. Aside from the fact that abortion is murder, there are two very important reasons why black people should be represented in great numbers at the March for Life rally:

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was the ultimate white supremacist

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America makes a futile effort to deny that its founder Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. Eugenics is a pseudo-science that claims some races are genetically superior and more fit to survive than others. As a eugenicist, Sanger’s goals were to discourage the “unfit” and “inferior” from reproducing. In her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, she called for segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted” and sterilization of “genetically inferior races.”

Can you guess which race in particular she considered genetically inferior?

Sanger even suggested that the federal government pay “obviously unfit parents” not to have children and advocated limiting and discouraging “overfertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

In 1916, Sanger founded the Birth Control League, the forerunner of Planned Parenthood. She appointed a man named Lothrop Stoddard, a Nazi sympathizer, fellow eugenicist and author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy to the Board of Directors. At some point, after Adolph Hitler’s atrocities against the Jews became known, Sanger changed the league’s name to Planned Parenthood, because “birth control” was too closely associated with eugenics.

More controversial is Sanger’s “Negro Project,” devised in 1939. The eugenicist set out to implicate black ministers and doctors in her efforts to spread her message of contraception, sterilization, and abortion in the black community. “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. 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 out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” she wrote.

People in poorer areas, particularly the South, were producing “alarmingly more than their share” of babies. Sanger was able to enlist black men such as W.E.B. Dubois and Dr. Adam Clayton Powell (a minister) to her cause. Even Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a part to play. In 1966, he received an award from Planned Parenthood, writing, “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts.”

Margaret Sanger’s project worked better than she could have hoped. Not only do black women have abortions at higher rates, a solid 90 percent of black voters shamelessly cast ballots for the Democratic Party, an unabashed supporter of Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood targets minority women

Sanger would be very proud of what her modest Birth Control League has become.

The Cybercast News Service compared the location of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics with population figures from the 2000 Census:

“In nearly two-thirds (62.5 percent) of the comparisons, the communities with a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic had a higher percentage of blacks than the state did as a whole.

In Delaware, Florida, Massachusetts and Ohio, the communities containing all of the Planned Parenthood abortion clinics had much higher black populations than their respective states, while Idaho, Kentucky, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming -- all of which have low black populations -- have none of the organization’s abortion facilities.

Two states with high black populations -- Louisiana (32.5 percent) and Mississippi (36.3 percent) -- also have no Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, due in large part to the strength of pro-life forces in that part of the nation and state laws that restrict access to abortion, according to Jim Sedlak, executive director of STOPP International.”

Even after her death, Sanger’s Negro Project lives on. Black ministers and so-called civil rights organizations that support Planned Parenthood ensure that minority women remain targets. Carlton W. Veazey is a minister, supporter of Planned Parenthood, and president and CEO of an organization once called the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, now disguised as the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC).

Veazey founded a program called the Black Church Initiative, purportedly in response to the high pregnancy rate among black teens. According to RCRC’s web site, the initiative “encourages and assists African American clergy and laity in addressing teen childbearing, sexuality education, unintended pregnancies, and other reproductive health issues within the context of African American culture and religion.”

For the first time in its 95-year history, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which once fought to protect black lives, took an official position in favor of abortion in 2004.

While black liberals and so-called men of God continue to align themselves with Margaret Sanger’s “offspring,” I intend to campaign for the protection of all unborn babies, no matter what race or genetic inheritance.

La Shawn Barber is a freelance writer and Townhall.com book reviewer who blogs at www.lashawnbarber.com.