"A Serious Mistake"
But it does seem like just one more reason that it's an outrage this group is subsidized -- generously -- by your tax dollars and mine.
This is not Planned Parenthood's first association with racism. Although feminists have worked hard to promote its founder simply as some kind of feminist heroine, Sanger's goals in promoting birth control were just as much about eugenics -- and what she called the "elimination of the unfit" -- as they were about female liberation.
Note the following language:
The mass of significant Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit and least able to rear children properly.
Misleadingly, Planned Parenthood attempts to distance Sanger from these words, arguing that they were merely from an article by W.E.B. Du Bois in an article next to hers in the 1919 Birth Control Review. What the organization doesn't reveal is that Sanger also quoted this repugnant language in her proposal for "The Negro Project."
In fairness to the Planned Parenthood employee whose behavior is now being characterized as "a serious mistake," it's entirely likely that the organization's founder would have approved of accepting the money and using it for its allegedly intended purpose.
Kudos to the student journalists at UCLA who broke this story.