Eminentoes/A White Lie
Flaherty, Michael K.
A White Lie by Michael K. Flaherty T he estimated 500,000 men and women who marched for abortion rights in Washington last April were instructed by their leaders to dress in white, as a symbol of...
...The question cannot honestly be answered without a look at the largest abortion provider in the world, Planned Parenthood, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate that conducts its activities in over a hundred countries...
...Sanger carved out for us...
...e needn't be so modest...
...That was at the National Theater in Washington...
...Even Faye Wattleton, the black woman who was named Ms...
...Sanger believed that this "great biological menace to the future of civilization . . . deserved to be treated like criminals...
...Wattleton stepped down in January after fourteen years as head of Planned tSimon & Schuster, 639 pages, $27.50...
...Parenthood...
...One of the articles, "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," was written by Ernst Rudin, Hitler's director of genetic sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene...
...Marchers and organizers for women's rights, if they truly are concerned about the fate of black women, must be equally honest about the racial reality of abortion—and its eugenicist roots...
...Vocal protests by a The American Spectator August 1992 37 dozen Republican legislators led Gloria Feldt, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Central and Northern Arizona, to make the Orwellian response, "I would say [those who object] are .. . flirting with racism...
...To carry out her plan, she sought the support of prominent black ministers and political-leaders...
...September, "Just as any left that wants to go anywhere in American politics is now obliged to prove its patriotism, the right needs to prove that it's not composed of haters...
...Broadway plays used to come to Washington, Boston, and New Haven before they came to Broadway...
...Try-outs...
...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...
...On September 9, 1977, he sent this telegram to Congress: "AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS . . ." It was only when Jackson tried to enter the Democratic party mainstream that he abandoned this position for the pro-choice rhetoric of the party's white, upper-middle-class power brokers...
...in his history of Planned Parenthood, Grand Illusions (1988), Sanger devoted the entire April 1933 issue of Birth Control Review to eugenics...
...I'm by far the poorest and the most worried about money, so why Benjamin J. Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in Malibu, California...
...As David Frum wrote in these pages last Tuesday Off to New York...
...Today, H 70 percent of the clinics operated by Planned Parenthood in the U.S...
...How long can Sanger's supporters remain in denial...
...Life magazine in 1990 named her one of "the 100 most important Americans of the 20th Century...
...Sanger outlined her beliefs in several books, and in her monthly magazine entitled Birth Control Review...
...My little family, Maw, Paw, big sister, and I, all went to see it when it first came out sometime long ago, like maybe forty years ago...
...Getting the kinks out...
...The people Sanger considered unfit were "all nonaryan people...
...My parents are coming up from Washington and my sister is coming over from Brooklyn...
...Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood in a two-room shack in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1923, remains a hero to the abortion movement and a "liberator" to the prestige press...
...Until they are, the white that they consider the symbolic color of their struggle will reflect a cruel irony...
...From time to time, all Americans are forced to address and reconcile some inescapable and painful truths about their intellectual forbears...
...She estimated that these people—the "dysgenic races"—comprised 70 percent of the American population...
...The implications of the Negro Project are all but ignored in Ellen Chesler's adoring new biography Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America.' None of the Planned Parenthood presidents since Sanger admits to anything less than admiration for her...
...magazine's 1989 "Woman of the Year" for her work as president, said that she was "proud" to be "walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger...
...This is hardly a matter of "choice...
...Anyway, I'm off to New York...
...A White Lie by Michael K. Flaherty T he estimated 500,000 men and women who marched for abortion rights in Washington last April were instructed by their leaders to dress in white, as a symbol of their purity...
...That's right...
...How I remember those endless flights of stairs and the crowds of madly smoking men in the bathrooms at intermission...
...are performed on black women...
...are in black and Hispanic neighborhoods...
...Given that black women use abortion twice as much as white women, why do black faces continue to be conspicuously absent in these public displays of support...
...Last October 12, she was installed in Arizona's Hall of Fame...
...But even discounting their apparel, the crowd was, like the crowd at all abortion rallies, overwhelmingly white—or, as the New York Times put it, "a remarkable display of homogenous distress...
...Wile Sanger's early campaign was aimed primarily at east Eu- opeans, in 1939 she began to target blacks by creating the "Negro Project," to promote birth control and sterilization specifically within the black community...
...As George Grant points out Michael K. Flaherty is a writer in Boston...
...A .trip across the country to see a musical comedy, the revival of Guys and Dolls, to be specific...
...Alan Gutmacher, her immediate successor, said that Planned Parenthood is "merely walking down the path that Ms...
...Although a successor has yet to be named, one of the favorites is Alexander Sanger, Margaret's thoroughbred grandson and president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood of New York City, the largest of 170 affiliates nationwide...
...For every three black babies born, two are aborted...
...From the second balcony at the National Theater...
...Forty-three percent of all abortions in the U.S...
...To see a show...
...Successful implementation of her proposals, according to her, would result in "a race of thoroughbreds...
...She wrote, "The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal...
...As the ranks of Margaret Sanger's critics dwindle, the list of her supporters lengthens...
...The similarity to Nazi ideas was not a coincidence...
...One of the first to assess the threat that abortion poses to blacks was Jesse Jackson, who in 1977 referred to abortion as "genocide against the black race...
...With all her success, my grandmother left some unfinished business, and I intend to finish it," he told the New York Times last year...
...We saw South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam, Fiddler on the Roof, and lots of others that way...
...In Pivot of Civilization, first published in 1922, she described her objectives: "More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief aim of birth control...
...She proposed to "segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying...
...In a poll taken in 1988 by the National Opinion Research Center, 62 percent of blacks said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, a fact ignored by the patronizing whites who cite "poor blacks" as constituents for whose abortion rights they are fighting...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
