Long-shot Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain repeats the canard that Planned Parenthood is a plot to kill black children, calling it "Planned Genocide" (via TPM):
“Here's why I support de-funding Planned Parenthood, because you don't hear a lot of people talking about this, when Margaret Sanger – check my history – started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world,” Cain told CNSNews.com on Tuesday when speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
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Cain said he does not believe there is a great distance between Planned Parenthood's past and present mission.
“It's carrying out its original mission,” Cain said. “I've talked to young girls who go in there and they don't talk about how you plan parenthood. They don't talk about adoption as an option. They don't say bring your parents in so you we can talk to you before you make this decision.”
The way in which pro-life Republicans have latched onto accusing people of genocide is remarkable, particularly when you consider how viscerally Republicans react to race-related criticisms. Among Republicans, suggesting that anti-Latino animus is behind restrictive immigration laws is beyond the pale -- but if you identify Planned Parenthood as the spiritual successor to the Nazis, you might as well be ordering a cup of coffee.
It's worth mentioning, again, that the idea that most Planned Parenthood clinics are located in black neighborhoods is false, and abortion services only account for 3 percent of their budget. Sanger was a eugenicist, and while the term is practically synonymous with racism now, at the time it was one of those intellectual trends that had an embarrassing number of adherents from all over the political spectrum. W.E.B DuBois was a eugenicist, though he obviously wasn't trying to purge black people from the planet.
Michelle Goldberg's book about the history of the global politics of abortion, The Means of Reproduction, is excellent precisely because it doesn't gloss over the disturbing intellectual origins of the views of some abortion-rights supporters, from Sanger's eugenics to the Alexander Haig's Malthusian fears of overpopulation. The sad irony, as Goldberg points out, is that legal abortion had more supporters on the right when the overpopulation was the dominant issue, and not a normative commitment to the rights of women.
The conclusion Goldberg comes to is stronger because she does not whitewash the history of abortion-rights advocates: Where the rights of women aren't the primary concern, catastrophe follows. In Third World countries where abortion is outlawed, mothers die trying to avoid giving birth to children they can't take care of. In countries like India, where abortion is widely available but girls are undervalued, women are forced by their husbands to abort female fetuses to avoid the crushing financial costs of dowries. In parts of Europe where right-wing natalism has taken hold, efforts to force women into traditional roles by outlawing abortion and constraining their economic options has only pushed birthrates further down. The common thread here in all of this is coercion -- denying women the choice over what to do with their own bodies.
There are two obvious contradictions in the worldview Cain puts forth above, one shared by many abortion opponents. One is that racism is a strong enough force in America that the government literally funds a racist genocide but not strong enough that discrimination exists in ways that justify a remedy.
The second one is this issue of coercion. Ostensibly, Cain is concerned with coercion, although in practice, his policies would prove coercive because they would remove the few options lower-income women have to plan their own pregnancies. To hide this, anti-abortion-rights advocates have invented something worse in the idea that Planned Parenthood forces black women to have abortions. This is, in its own way, an admission that the case against allowing women to choose when they have children is weaker than the bluster implies.
