From the desk of Julaine Appling, Wisconsin Family Action president:
I can’t think of one single reason that a dime of taxpayer money should be going to Planned Parenthood. Not one. I can’t think of one single reason I should be upset that last week Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin shut down the first of four facilities in our state.Let’s briefly rehearse the history of Planned Parenthood. The organization grew out of the American Birth Control League, founded in 1921, by Margaret Sanger, a woman who believed we needed to purify the gene pool, so to speak, by discouraging people she deemed “unfit” from having babies.
Sanger made no secret of her interest in eugenics. An even cursory review of her writings would show that she was targeting the African-American community, although she was smart enough to not directly state that. Comments such as this one from her Birth Control Review publication, however, make her racist thinking clear. Sanger wrote, “As an advocate of birth control I wish … to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation…. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Where did that approach get the African-American community? Today, some contend that over 78% of Planned Parenthood facilities are in minority neighborhoods, in spite of the fact that African-Americans make up just 12% or so of the total population. Tragically, 35% of the abortions in America are done on African-American women.
Over the years, through smooth-sounding phrases and disingenuous words, Sanger’s campaign for birth control became a nationwide campaign for abortion on demand, the ultimate contraception–which in 1973 became a reality with the truly infamous Roe v. Wade US Supreme Court decision. That ruling put Planned Parenthood in the driver’s seat. Almost overnight they were everywhere, including in our federal and state budgets, most often under the guise of Margaret Sanger’s passion—family planning or birth control.Think about that for a minute. Government uses taxpayer money to encourage its citizens not to have babies. Aren’t babies the future taxpayers and workforce in our country? Aren’t they the next scientists, leaders, teachers, artists, and athletes? Well, apparently they are, but we really want only those babies to be born whom we believe can improve the gene pool. So we use our taxpayer money to fund an organization whose goal is to keep women from having babies—either by contraception or if contraception fails then by murdering their unborn children? It makes no sense. None.
