The headline in a recent weekend edition of The New York Times was stark, “I’m the Head of Planned Parenthood: We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder.” The author of the piece, Alexis McGill Johnson, went on to proclaim that her organization, the prime progenitor of abortion in the United States and perhaps worldwide, would have to “reckon” with their founder, Margaret Sanger, and her association with “white supremacist groups and eugenics.”
The acknowledgement of Sanger’s notorious views on Planned Parenthood’s use of birth control to eliminate those she regarded as nothing but “human weeds” — by such methods as forced sterilization, birth permits and segregated camps for the unfit — is important. But Johnson’s confession is short on specifics, and to say it is overdue is like acknowledging the Hindenburg had a fire on board. Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood has spent more than a century building a citadel of prejudice with profound, even irreversible, effects on African Americans and the poor.
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