...... The point is that there are many on this forum who pushed a false narrative about the organization's founder and that organization just set them straight. ....... What is relevant is that many people on this forum have been pushing a lie and they've just been completely exposed. I get you're trying to play hide the ball to give them air cover, but I don't have the desire to do so.
In her letter Alexis McGill Johnson, the CEO of PP claimed that, " In the name of political expedience she (Sanger) chose to engage white supremacists to further her cause. In doing that she devalued and dehumanized people of color."
Sanger never engaged with white supremacists groups. She spoke, by invitation, to one group of women's auxiliary of the KKK . She talked about serial pregnancies and how birth control worked. She wrote at length about her experience and her disagreement with the goals of the KKK women and never spoke to another KKK group. When she speaks of immigrants, and minorities being illiterate, living in abject poverty, overcrowded slums, undernourished, uneducated, and debilitated she was not denigrating, dehumanizing, or devaluing any race or ethnicity she was simply reporting the appalling conditions created by serial pregnancies and the great need for birth control.
Again, Ms Johnson, is simply wrong when she states that Puerto Rican women were victims of birth control pill testing. Puerto Rico was chosen because birth control was legal and they had a system of clinics from which to contact women. Most US states would have prohibited testing of women's birth control. The study was voluntary, any woman could join. Women were told that the pills prevented pregnancy. So many women volunteered that another study group was set up. They were not told about the side effects because almost nothing was known about them, hence the testing.
In the summer of 1955, Gregory Pincus visited Puerto Rico, and discovered it would be the perfect location for the human trials.
www.pbs.org
Sanger did support the eugenics movement but Johnson implies her support was racist and intended to harm Blacks. The discovery of genes and the knowledge that better plants and animals could be bred using genetics fascinated the world and the idea of improving the human race fostered international eugenics organizations. Starting in the 1950s, long after Sanger ha disowned eugenics, the movement degenerated into racism and states used it against poor men and women: Mexican, Black and white. Sanger saw eugenics as dealing with the problem and not with the cause of human unfitness. In 1919 she wrote:
"While I personally believe in the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic, ...... they do not go to the bottom of the matter. ..... do not touch those great masses, who through economic pressure populate the slums and there produce, in their helplessness, other helpless, diseased and incompetent masses, who overwhelm all that eugenics can do ..... Birth Control, on the other hand, .....enables the child to be better born, better cared for in infancy and better educated........ Eugenics without Birth Control .... is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit. ...... Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment."
Planned Parenthood, like its founder, is committed to helping men and women build stronger, healthier, caring families. A navel gazing CEO falsely calling her a racist will hasten the banning of abortion and women's birth control.
www.nytimes.com
