*In an interview with Fox News last week, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson alleged that Planned Parenthood deliberately places most of its clinics in black neighborhoods to “control the population” and that its founder, Margaret Sanger, “was not particularly enamored with black people.”
NPR fact-checked Carson’s comments about the non-profit organization, which provides reproductive health as well as maternal and child health services. It’s been a GOP target – particularly since a series of recent sting videos suggested the organization illegally profits from selling aborted fetal tissue.
Carson, a neurosurgeon, has also been a vocal opponent of the group. On Fox News Wednesday, he was asked about Democrats’ criticism that Republicans who want to defund Planned Parenthood are waging a “war on women.” He responded:
“Maybe I am not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood, but, you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people. …And one of the reasons you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a way to control that population. I think people should go back and read about Margaret Sanger who founded this place — a woman Hillary Clinton by the way says that she admires. Look and see what many people in Nazi Germany thought about her.”
NPR dissected Carson’s comments to separate fact from fiction. Read the full article here. Below are excerpts from NPR’s research:
DID MARGARET SANGER BELIEVE IN EUGENICS?
Yes, but not in the way Carson implied.
Eugenics was a discipline, championed by prominent scientists but now widely debunked, that promoted “good” breeding and aimed to prevent “poor” breeding. The idea was that the human race could be bettered through encouraging people with traits like intelligence, hard work, cleanliness (thought to be genetic) to reproduce. Eugenics was taken to its horrifying extreme during the Holocaust, through forced sterilizations and breeding experiments.
In the United States, eugenics intersected with the birth control movement in the 1920s, and Sanger reportedly spoke at eugenics conferences. She also talked about birth control being used to facilitate “the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives.”
Historians seem to disagree on just how involved in the eugenics movement she was. Some contend her involvement was for political reasons — to win support for birth control.
WAS SANGER “NOT PARTICULARLY ENAMORED WITH BLACK PEOPLE”?
Sanger’s birth control movement did have support in black neighborhoods, beginning in the ’20s when there were leagues in Harlem started by African-Americans. Sanger also worked closely with NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois on a “Negro Project,” which she viewed as a way to get safe contraception to African-Americans.
In 1946, Sanger wrote about the importance of giving “Negro” parents a choice in how many children they would have.
“The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America,” she wrote. “Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness; from health, not from despair.”
Her attitude toward African-Americans can certainly be viewed as paternalistic, but there is no evidence she subscribed to the more racist ideas of the time or that she coerced black women into using birth control. In fact, for her time, as the Washington Post noted, “she would likely be considered to have advanced views on race relations.”
ARE MOST OF PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S CLINICS IN BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS?
In 2014, the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research center, surveyed all known abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood clinics, in the U.S. (nearly 2,000) and found that 60 percent are in majority-white neighborhoods.
Planned Parenthood has not released numbers on the neighborhoods of its specific clinics, but responding to a request for demographic information, the organization said that in 2013, 14 percent of its patients nationwide were black. That’s nearly equal to the proportion of the African-American population in the U.S.
Below, Carson’s original comment about Planned Parenthood:
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