The President needs a History Lesson

In the spring of 1983, President Ronald Reagan did something highly unusual for a sitting president. He wrote and published an unsolicited article in The Human Life Review, titled “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation.” In it, he denounced the “raw judicial power” by which the Supreme Court had dispossessed the unborn of their inalienable right to life in the Roe v. Wade decision, and mourned the some 15 million lives that had been snuffed out by abortion by that time.

On April 26, 2013, President Barack Obama did something equally extraordinary. He became the first president to address a Planned Parenthood conference. Planned Parenthood is the foremost provider of abortions in the United States. In his speech, Mr Obama celebrated the “quality healthcare to women” that this organization purportedly provides without once mentioning the service for which they are best known – abortion.

President Obama also lauded the organization for its near century of service since “the first health clinic of what later would become Planned Parenthood opened its doors to women in Brooklyn.” Curiously, he neglected to say much else about the origins of the group, except that “for nearly a century now, one core principle has guided everything all of you do – that women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health. It’s a simple principle.”

Actually, that’s not quite accurate. The real founding principle behind the group from which Planned Parenthood sprang was purely eugenicist, deriving from Charles Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.” Perhaps it is best to let founder Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) speak in her own words at length (so as to avoid their being taken out of context).

In Women and the New Race (1920), she wrote that

“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives. So, in compliance with nature’s working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we can expect of it efficient motherhood. If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman. Then and then only can the mother cease to be an incubator and be a mother indeed. Then only can she transmit to her sons and daughters the qualities which make strong individuals and, collectively, a strong race.”

Read more at Mercator.Net.