Just “undo” is not enough

Planned Parenthood "erases" the name of its founder, Margaret Sanger, due to eugenics. But her views have been known for decades.

The racism of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her support for eugenics has always been inextricably linked to the organization's mission.

The decision to remove her name from the name of the New York clinic - although belated, but still a start, but without a real atonement, it is just a signal.

On Tuesday, the largest birth control organization announced that the name Sanger will be removed from the name of a clinic in Manhattan. The organization also plans to submit to the Public Council a petition to remove the street sign "Margaret Sanger Square" from the intersection where the clinic is located.

However, such cosmetic transformations do not come close to solving the historical problems associated with Sanger and Planned Parenthood.

Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in part to discourage the reproduction of "unwanted people": the mentally and physically disabled, as well as the poor and black.

In fact, one of her most infamous initiatives, the Negro Project, was, as the name suggests, aimed at promoting contraception among blacks in the southern United States.

She believed that blacks “breed carelessly and with disastrous consequences,” and wanted to put an end to this.

And while her advocates argued that the exact words belonged to the black author William Dubois, she expressed the same idea throughout her career.

Perhaps her most controversial quote emerged from the Negro Project.

“We don’t want rumors circulating that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” Sanger wrote in 1939 to Clarence Gamble, also a supporter of eugenics and heir to the Procter & Gamble empire. She explained that her organization must train black preachers to "straighten" all "rebellious" blacks who think so, and black doctors to gain the trust of the target population.

Sanger's apologists argue that this is the opposite, but if she wanted to show that it is wrong to interpret her organization's contraceptive efforts as extermination, there are many other words she could use instead of “rebellious”.

In addition, they insist that Sanger was just a product of her time, because before eugenics became associated with Nazi medical experiments, it was very popular in the pre-war years.

Contraception pioneer Sanger spoke to members of the Ku Klux Klan and believed that it was necessary to obtain permission from the state to create offspring. Obviously, this was more than a passing fascination with eugenics.

Back in 1934, she admired the German sterilization program, and said that she admired the "courage of the government, which takes a firm stand on the sterilization of the unfit." Although she made it clear that race or religion should not be the criterion for determining "unfitness," for the founder of Planned Parenthood, such a view was relatively new.

About ten years earlier, she wrote: "Negroes and southern Europeans are mentally lagging behind American-born."

In addition, in her opinion, in order to be able to replenish the gene pool, one must have not only certain innate qualities. In 1918, she called for the forced sterilization of the "poorest classes" if they did not voluntarily restrict their own reproduction: "All our problems are the result of the excessive reproduction of the working class."

Of course, the role of contraception in strengthening women's rights is worth noting: few of the achievements of recent decades would have been possible if women had remained perpetually pregnant housewives on the doorstep.

However, Sanger has been outspoken about making contraception a weapon of eugenics.

This eugenic movement within Planned Parenthood did not die with Margaret Sanger, although the defeat of the Nazis forced its supporters to drape eugenics in more socially acceptable language. Under the leadership of board members such as an ardent supporter of population control William Gates Sr. (the father of another fellow Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates), the organization began to loosen abortion laws and eventually repeal them.

Planned Parenthood is often accused of locating clinics in low-income and black-dominated areas in an effort to exploit those communities. At the same time, more black children are aborted in New York than are born - an alarming statistic, no matter how strongly anyone believes in a woman's right to decide what happens in her womb.

The forced sterilization advocated by Sanger is no longer a thing of the past. Yes, gone are the days when 60,000 people were subjected to medical sterilization in America on the wave of eugenic mania, but some of those laws remain in force, providing for state funding for the sterilization of female prisoners - most of them black or Hispanic origin.

To their credit, Planned Parenthood seems to understand that the deletion of the Sanger name is a very belated measure and categorically insufficient to address issues related to the history of the organization.

A press release on Tuesday cited the renaming of the clinic as part of a broader reform process and noted that for a year now, a public-led Radical Renewal program has been underway to redefine its racist and eugenic past and “shape a new relationship [Planned Parenthood] in society ”.

Alas, the program description reeks of cosmetic tweaks that many organizations have gone through in recent weeks, wanting to appear "awakened" without significantly changing their questioning methods.

Along with vague (even if they are somewhat reassuring) promises to "get even with the past of Planned Parenthood and its role in the history of reproductive harm to people of color", we see chatter in the spirit of "White fragility", for example: "reject and eradicate organizational cultural norms and values ​​built on white domination ”, or“ put the voice, experience and self-understanding of people of color at the center ”.

The tendency towards shallow reckoning with the past, triggered by the Black Lives Matters movement, has resulted in a mass of hasty renaming, often unrelated to deep analysis of history, which is sucked into Orwell's memory holes.

This is doing a disservice to both the minorities in whose name the façade is being renovated, and to future generations who will have to live with the consequences of this sloppy revisionism.

If Planned Parenthood is serious about reconciling its eugenic past with a sincere desire to help women manage their lives by controlling their fertility, it has the opportunity to show its skeletons in the closet, repent of crimes against black and disadvantaged women, and set an example for other groups who choose to study. on the past, not run away from it. Simply “canceling” Margaret Sanger and declaring “Mission accomplished” is not enough.

The author's Twitter is @ velocirapture23 .

The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.