Planned Parenthood Has Abortion How Many Babies and How Many Were Black

A Planned Parenthood location in New York City. The organization is a presidential-entrada target. Andrew Burton/Getty Images hide caption

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Andrew Burton/Getty Images

A Planned Parenthood location in New York Urban center. The organization is a presidential-campaign target.

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Ben Carson declared in an interview with Play a trick on News Wednesday that Planned Parenthood puts most of its clinics in black neighborhoods to "control the population" and that its founder, Margaret Sanger, "was not particularly enamored with black people."

Planned Parenthood has been a target on the campaign trail after a series of sting videos was released alleging the organization illegally profits from selling aborted fetal tissue. Carson, a famed neurosurgeon turned Republican presidential candidate, has been a song opponent of the group. He was as well in the news this calendar week after reports surfaced that he once used aborted fetal tissue for research.

Here's a closer look at Carson's comments:

What Carson said

On Flim-flam News Wednesday, Carson 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, simply, y'all know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not specially enamored with black people.

"And one of the reasons you detect near of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a style to control that population. I recall people should go back and read about Margaret Sanger who founded this place — a woman Hillary Clinton by the way says that she admires. Expect and come across what many people in Nazi Germany thought well-nigh her."

It'due south not the first time Planned Parenthood has faced criticism about its founder and the placement of its clinics — erstwhile presidential candidate Herman Cain made a similar statement in 2011.

What Planned Parenthood said

In response, Planned Parenthood said Carson was non only "incorrect on the facts, he'due south flat-out insulting." Alencia Johnson, assistant director of constituency communications, told NPR:

"Does he think that blackness women are somehow less capable of making the deeply personal decision about whether to end a pregnancy than other women? ... It'due south a shame that a doc, who should understand the barriers black women face accessing high-quality preventive and reproductive health care services, would brownnose and then clearly to anti-ballgame extremists on the right."

Did Margaret Sanger believe in eugenics?

Yep, just not in the way Carson implied.

Eugenics was a discipline, championed by prominent scientists only now widely debunked, that promoted "proficient" breeding and aimed to forestall "poor" breeding. The idea was that the human being race could be bettered through encouraging people with traits like intelligence, hard piece of work, cleanliness (thought to be genetic) to reproduce. Eugenics was taken to its horrifying extreme during the Holocaust, through forced sterilizations and convenance 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 nigh birth control being used to facilitate "the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the nascence of defectives."

Historians seem to disagree on merely how involved in the eugenics movement she was. Some fence her involvement was for political reasons — to win back up for nascency control.

In reading her papers, it is clear Sanger had bought into the movement. She one time wrote that "consequences of convenance from stock defective human vitality always will requite us social problems and perpetuate institutions of clemency and crime."

"That Sanger was enamored and supported some eugenicists' ideas is certainly true," said Susan Reverby, a wellness care historian and professor at Wellesley Higher. Merely, Reverby added, Sanger's main statement was not eugenics — information technology was that "Sanger thought people should have the children they wanted."

It was a radical thought for the fourth dimension.

Sanger wrote about this mission herself in 1921: "The about universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is ane of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves today possess the divine spark of regeneration."

Was Sanger "not particularly enamored with black people"?

Sanger'due south nascence command move did take back up in black neighborhoods, start in the '20s when at that place 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 equally a mode to get rubber contraception to African-Americans.

In 1946, Sanger wrote most the importance of giving "Negro" parents a selection in how many children they would accept.

"The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count equally a valuable contribution to the future of America," she wrote. "Negro parents, similar all parents, must create the adjacent 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 show she subscribed to the more racist ideas of the fourth dimension or that she coerced blackness women into using nativity control. In fact, for her time, equally the Washington Post noted, "she would likely be considered to accept advanced views on race relations."

Are most of Planned Parenthood'due south 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.Due south. (nearly ii,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 asking for demographic information, the organization said that in 2013, 14 percent of its patients nationwide were black. That'southward nearly equal to the proportion of the African-American population in the U.Due south.

Notwithstanding, Carson is tapping into a more subtle sentiment — the targeting of African-Americans in wellness care systems. There have been documented cases of that happening, including the now-infamous Tuskegee study. Starting in the 1930s, the Tuskegee Institute enrolled black sharecroppers in experiments and immune them to suffer from syphilis untreated, though they were told they were getting treatment.

And, Wellesley's Reverby said, that was sometimes the case for birth control clinics historically, too. They may have been available in communities where more than general health care was not, raising some ethical questions.

"One of the issues is ... what happens when you tin discover birth control clinics but you can't find chief care? It's just a question of what the state'southward willing to provide for," Reverby said. "Was at that place overuse of birth control and sterilization in poor communities in some states? Absolutely. It's a complicated story."

Did Sanger have a connection to Nazi Germany?

Non that NPR found. Sanger herself wrote in 1939 that she had joined the Anti-Nazi Committee "and gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler's rise to power in Germany."

She also said books of hers had been destroyed and that she had intellectual friends who were sent to concentration camps or put to death. Sanger did not have a connection to the Nazis, merely a loose clan comes through her involvement in the eugenics movement.

American and German eugenicists closely collaborated, and the Nazis reportedly borrowed much of their 1933 so-called sterilization law from American models. That law immune the government to forcibly sterilize people with alleged genetic disorders.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/14/432080520/fact-check-was-planned-parenthood-started-to-control-the-black-population

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