An Amicus Brief filed with the Oklahoma Supreme Court by Liberty Counsel on behalf of Hispanic and African-American groups representing millions of minority Americans offers the blunt truth about the racist roots of abortion advocacy.
The title of the brief tells the story: “Abortion Advocacy Rests on the Eugenics Movement, Which Is Rooted in Social Darwinism and the Elimination of ‘Undesirable Populations.'”
The occasion for the brief by the Florida-based public interest law firm that specializes in First Amendment religious freedom litigation is a challenge in state court by a pro-abortion group of a measure adopted earlier this year by the Oklahoma State Legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt.
According to a statement issued by Liberty Counsel in announcing its filing, the new law made Oklahoma the first state in the nation to move to protect the unborn following the Supreme Court’s landmark Dobbs decision.
The Oklahoma law does so “by prohibiting abortions from fertilization and allowing private citizens to sue those who help women terminate their pregnancies. The law, which passed the House 73-16 and the Senate 35-10, took effect immediately and bans all abortions except when necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency; or if the pregnancy is the result of rape, sexual assault, or incest that has been reported to law enforcement.”
Even in a deeply red state like Oklahoma, the pro-abortion movement is lavishly funded, routinely covered sympathetically by the news media, and continually boosted by the academic community.
Related: Democrats Hang Their Hat on Abortion Going Into Midterms Homestretch
Consequently, Stitt’s signature had barely dried before the new law was challenged in court by the group Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice and others. Liberty Counsel represents the Frederick Douglass Foundation and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. The case cite is: Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice, et. al v. John O’Connor, in his official capacity as Oklahoma Attorney General, et al.
The Liberty Counsel brief captures the horrendous fact at the heart of the pro-abortion movement’s history in America:
Modern abortion advocacy arose out of the birth control movement, which was “developed alongside the American eugenics movement.” Box Planned Parenthood of Indiana & Kentucky, Inc., 139 S. Ct. 1780,1783 (2019) (Thomas, J., concurring). Coined in the 1880s by a British scientist who was a cousin of Charles Darwin, “eugenics” is “the science of improving stock through all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have.” Id. at 1784 (Thomas, l, concurring) (internal quotation marks omitted). Put simply, the sinister goal of the eugenics movement was to eliminate “unfit” and “undesirable” people-those with mental and physical disabilities as well as certain races.
The brief notes the widespread support given to the Eugenics movement by Progressives on the Left, among others:
By the 1920s, the eugenics movement was immensely popular among progressives, professionals, academics, and the medical community. Many leading figures of the day, including Theodore Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, “were fervent eugenicists, putting their money, their power, their time, and their research behind the effort.”
Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood’s founder, was one of the most outspoken members of the American eugenics movement, arguing that eugenics was “the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.” She accordingly praised sterilization as the “remedy” to the problem of “an increasing rate of morons.”
Dozens of states passed forced sterilization laws inspired by the eugenics movement and designed to, in Sanger’s words, encourage “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks-those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”
Given these historical realities, it’s no surprise that Planned Parenthood officials in recent days have sought to separate themselves from their founder’s genocidal views, but the reality that eugenics remains embedded in the abortion group’s very physical structure to this very day as seen in data cited by the Liberty Counsel brief:
According to the Centers for Disease Control’s most recent data, Black women accounted for 33.6 percent of all reported abortions in 2018, even though they make up 13 percent of women in the United States. Black women also had the highest abortion rate (21.2 abortions per 1,000 women) and ratio (335 abortions per 1,000 live births).
Further, abortion-induced deaths of the unborn in the Black community are 69 times higher than HIV deaths, 31 times higher than homicides, 3.6 times higher than cancer-related deaths, and 3.5 times higher than deaths caused by heart disease.”
You want to talk about structural racism in the United States? A map of Planned Parenthood’s clinic locations looks like Exhibit A:
The racial disparity in abortions is largely intentional: A study based on 2010 Census data shows that nearly eight out of ten Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are within walking distance of predominantly Black or Hispanic neighborhoods.
More specifically, Planned Parenthood intentionally located 86 percent of its abortion facilities in or near minority neighborhoods in the 25 U.S. counties with the most abortions.
These 25 counties contain 19 percent of the U.S. population, including 28 percent of the Black population and 37 percent of the Hispanic/Latino population. In 12 of these counties, Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos are more than 50 percent of the population.
Given such data, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that what Sanger wrote privately in a 1939 letter to a friend remains true today of Planned Parenthood:
“The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members” (Emphasis added).
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