The Hypocrisy of Statue Removal - The Founder of Planned Parenthood Still Honored

The removal of statues commemorating Civil War-era confederate figures from public squares and buildings is the demand of the day.  Yet a statue remains in Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution commemorating the one person responsible for the deaths of more African Americans that any other in history: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

More than 19 million black babies have been aborted.  Abortion is the number one killer of black lives in the United States.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, abortion kills more black people than HIV, homicide, diabetes, accident, cancer, and heart disease … combined. Planned Parenthood is responsible for many of those abortions.

In August 2015, a group of black pastors asked for the removal of Sanger’s bust from the museum.  Their request was rejected and the bust of Planned Parenthood’s founder remains on display today. Asked about the continued presence of the bust at the museum, Linda St. Thomas, director of public affairs for the Smithsonian, said, “The Sanger statue has been there for many years.”

The founder of planned Parenthood by today’s standards would be considered the worst form of racist.  She was a supporter of eugenics. Eugenics supporters pushed middle and upper-class  whites to have large families. In some circles eugenicists went as far as declaring birth control selfish and a form of "racial suicide." The same people believed that blacks and other minorities should not reproduce.

Sanger wrote: "I consider that the world, and almost our civilization for the next 25 years, is going to depend on a simple, cheap, safe, contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles and among the most ignorant people." While Margaret Sanger was being lauded for her role in the creation of the Pill in the 1960s, many in the African American community were aware of her association with eugenics. Suspicious of her intentions to begin with, some were appalled by her ongoing support of the population control movement. At the time white-dominated organizations seemed to push the pill in black communities.

Yet “Black Lives Matter is silent on Sanger.  Removal of tributes to her or condemnations of her do not fit their real agenda, destruction of the foundation of our democracy.