A movement’s unseemly side

Suggest what the woman’s own words stated overtly, that the founder of Planned Parenthood was an unequivocal racist, a fact that taints the movement she mothered, and one can be sure of invoking the wrath of the intolerant left. More than 40 years after her death, Margaret Sanger has evolved from heroine to embarrassment to topic of historical revisionism. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might advance to the final stage while still living.

In a story that appeared Sunday in New York Times Magazine, Ginsburg spoke as only people of her persuasion can any longer in this country, that is, with impunity. “Frankly,” Ginsburg said, “I had thought at the time [Roe v. Wade] was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want too many of.” Obligingly, the reference was left to pass without elaboration. Because Ginsburg was discussing taxpayer funding of abortions for the poor, that group presumably falls into the classification of those “we don’t want too many of.”

Such thinking places Ginsburg squarely in the company of Sanger, who despaired over the notion of the poor breeding unbridled. “It is a vicious cycle,” she wrote in a handbook published in 1915. “[I]gnorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding those things. Stop bringing birth to children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence.”

Steeped in eugenics, the ideological delirium of Hitler, Sanger eventually got round to a thing called the Negro Project, the outward aim of which was to introduce family planning to the black community. The idea was to be pedaled in black churches by black ministers. Sanger acknowledged in a memo to the program’s author that others might interpret the initiative differently, which is to say, more to its point. “We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten that idea out if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

The idea took hold, and that hold has been meticulously deepened and maintained. Abortion ratios among blacks are twice that of whites. Groups such as BlackGenocide.org say abortion has claimed the lives of 16 million blacks, reducing their population by more than a third, since 1973.

Cries of racism and eugenics buzz like mosquitoes in the face of the abortion movement, returning just as they seem to have been waved away. Planned Parenthood, NARAL and other so-called pro-choice groups generally respond first by endeavoring to recast Sanger, refuting what her writings and record will not allow to be refuted. The effort is almost comical, like Yogi Berra saying famously, “I never said most of the things I said.”

Ginsburg has said something, and means something by it. Precisely what is a critical question that ought to be asked of her and of the nominee to join her on the court, appeals judge and wise Latina Sonia Sotomayor. America defeated history’s most notorious eugenicist, but has it lost the war?

That question surely has not been asked by many of abortion’s backers, who do not fathom the procedure as a tool for suppressing “growth in populations that we don’t want too many of.” But these backers are not now nor have they been the abortion movement’s leaders, nor are they among advocates possessed with the authority to ensure abortion’s continued legality.

That group is narrow in number and of mind. Ginsburg is part of this. She demonstrates that beyond popular mantras about “choice,” a term abused like no other, is an unseemly aspect of abortion that rests not at the fringe of the movement but in its soul.