In 2009 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gushingly accepted the Margaret Sanger Award named for the abortion mill’s founding icon: “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously...I am really in awe of her.” This could be problematic for the Democrat aspirant amid the horror of recent videos revealing Planned Parenthood (Twitter hashtag: #PlannedButcherhood) medical doctors haggling like Moroccan rug merchants over the price of nearly-born baby livers and hearts. Will someone ask Clinton if she plans to return the $10,000 in campaign donations she has received so far from top executives of the largest abortion provider in the U.S.? The candidate and the president have said crickets about the videos, while the White House spokes-shill hinted that the videographers, the nonprofit Center for Medical Progress, are the ones that should be investigated.
In their chilling callousness and utilitarian view of humans as mere “tissue,” the videoed doctors are carrying on the grand tradition of Hillary’s heroine Margaret Sanger, who had so little regard for human life that she urged birth control and state-compelled sterilization as practical ways to deliberately eliminate “human weeds.” As an Illinois senator, Obama expressed similar heartlessness, voting in several different years against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which would have given babies born alive after unsuccessful abortions the same medical care as any other infant. He voted no, despite evidence that these babies were being left in utility closets to die.
A prolific author, Sanger laid out her eugenics plan to improve the race in books, newsletters, and essays. From her 1922 book, Woman and the New Race: “Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, (italics mine) of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”
She further clarified the true purpose behind her birth control clinics in an article in the New York Times, April 5, 1923. “Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements (italics mine) in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks – those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”
So who were the flowers and who were the weeds? Sanger expounded on the botanical hierarchy in one of her earlier columns (1912-13) for the socialist magazine, New York Call, asserting that Aboriginal Australians were "just a step higher than the chimpanzee" with "little sexual control," as compared to the "normal man and woman." Elsewhere she lamented that traditional sexual ethics "... have in the past revealed their woeful inability to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has today drifted."
For the current Planned Parenthood doctors as well as for their founding mother Sanger, who was a nurse, humans are essentially a collection of cells to be manipulated into a more convenient form. The doctors would transform the little pre-humans into cash; Sanger devoted her life to attempting to perfect the human race through the magic of birth control and sterilization.
Darwin’s survival of the fittest theories had spawned an excited thought wave that swept among intellectuals gripped by the revolutionary idea that at last they could actually create the utopian society they craved by making sure undesirable “breeders” as they called them, bred no more. The resultant eugenics movement was based on promoting the mating of those with superior genes, and discouraging the mating of those without: in other words, racism. Hitler translated the same concepts into the death camps of the Holocaust, while Sanger stuck to opening birth control clinics and advocating sterilization for inferiors who comprised a large group from the epileptic to the immoral to the insane.
Sanger’s emphasis on “the better racial elements” brand her a racist posing as a do-gooder. Along with fellow contraception crusaders she actually began something called the Negro Project to bring birth control clinics to poor blacks. She worked to get black clerics and community leaders involved, writing to her crony Clarence Gamble that “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.” That it would even occur to her that blacks would think her goal was to exterminate their race via birth control indicates that very suspicion must have been common. She knew the only way to get them into her clinics was an intense public relations campaign enlisting local ministers who could neutralize the fears of any who “rebelled” against the idea of limiting their families.
Black Panther radical and Communist college professor Angela Davis has used this quote to support her claim that Sanger wanted to eliminate the black race, and many black organizations have agreed. But New York University’s Margaret Sanger Papers Project claims that Sanger was simply afraid that blacks would confuse her birth control clinics with the racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south, even though the Sanger clinics didn’t actually offer sterilization. At the time, they also didn’t perform abortions, which were illegal. In judging if Sanger’s intentions towards blacks were altruistic, it’s interesting that the Ku Klux Klan woman’s auxiliary invited her to speak and received her message with great enthusiasm. Tragically, no hidden camera was present.
Today, Planned Parenthood and Sanger’s modus operandi, the belief that some people are more worthy of life than others, is resurrected in the unelected panel called the Independent Payment Advisory Board that makes life-and-death decisions according to Obamacare. As with Sanger, who worried that overpopulation by the “weeds” was entirely too expensive, it’s all about the money.
Since funds are limited, rationing of healthcare in the form of life-giving surgeries and medicines will become the new normal. Obama admitted as much when he suggested to a woman who asked if her elderly Mom would be approved for a life-extending operation, that she should “just take a pill.” And many of his advisors have openly admitted rationing of medical services is inevitable under Obamacare, including Steve Rattner, who stated frankly in a NYT opinion piece, “We need death panels.”
The influential and often combative (ask Megyn Kelly) former presidential healthcare advisor Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel goes further. Emanuel proposes rationing based on a combination of factors including patient age, expected “quality adjusted life years,” and the patient’s “value” to society. In his calculus, the least valuable are the young, in whom expensive education has not yet been invested, and the elderly, who have literally outlived their usefulness. These human “weeds” as Sanger would call them, are clearly a huge drain on society’s scarce resources. Of course, the government would be the ultimate determiner of just who is valuable enough to keep alive. One thing we can be sure of is that we are not all created equal.
Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) has introduced a bill to strip Planned Parenthood of its $500 billion plus in annual taxpayer funding. Let’s support it.
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