We never thought it would happen:
Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan Margaret Sanger Health Center will be renamed, and city officials are working to rename the nearby Margaret Sanger Square. The organization said the new name would be announced soon.
Sanger, who was a nurse, established the first birth control clinic in the U.S., which would eventually become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
PPGNY said the decision came out of “a public commitment to reckon with its founder’s harmful connections to the eugenics movement.” …
The fact sheet noted that Planned Parenthood “denounces” Sanger’s involvement in the eugenics movement and her endorsement of the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision that allowed states to sterilize citizens who were deemed “unfit” without their consent. J. Edward Moreno, “Planned Parenthood to remove Margaret Sanger’s name from center over ‘racist legacy’” at The Hill
Like, she really did believe the awful things she said about poor people; it wasn’t as if she had hit her big toe while hammering something.
Plus, from back in 2011:
You say she was an equal opportunity vile eugenicist and vicious social Darwinist, but at least, not a racist? Get this from page 133:
“Sanger surrounded herself with some of the eugenics movement’s most outspoken racists and white supremacists. Chief among them was Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. Stoddard’s book, devoted to the notion of a superior Nordic race, became eugenic gospel. It warned, ‘”Finally perish!” That is the exact alternative that confronts the white race…If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will eliminate the white man by elimination or absorption…We now know that men are not and never will be equal.” “
We are known by the friends we keep, no? If one welcomes a pernicious racist as a valued colleague into one’s movement, the defense that she was not “personally” racist rings as hollow as a Jack O’ Lantern pumpkin. Wesley J. Smith, “Margaret Sanger Was Too a Racist” at National Review
In 2016, Time Magazine tried to explain it all away as a big misunderstanding, but lots of people knew the facts.
At Evolution News and Science Today, David Klinghoffer comments:
If Planned Parenthood really sought to “reckon with [their] legacy,” and “address the problem,” they would have to change their whole business model not merely remove Sanger’s name from a building. As Ben Carson points out, “[Sanger] was not particularly enamored with black people. And one of the reasons that you find most of their [Planned Parenthood] clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a way to control that population.”
The abortion provider would also need to “reckon” with the place of evolutionary ideology in Sanger’s thinking. In an article at The Stream, John West has traced “The Line Running from Charles Darwin through Margaret Sanger to Planned Parenthood“:
In Sanger’s view, humanitarianism threatened to swamp America with a tidal wave of the “feeble-minded.” As I explain in my book Darwin Day in America, feeblemindedness was an expansive category that included many people who today wouldn’t be considered mentally handicapped, including members of races (like blacks) considered by Darwinian biologists of the time to be “lower” on the evolutionary scale.
Sanger as a historical figure is impossible to understand without recalling the legacy of evolutionary thinking and scientific racism, detailed in the harrowing documentary Human Zoos. David Klinghoffer, “Memory Purge: Eugenicist Margaret Sanger Gets Canceled by Planned Parenthood” at Evolution News and Science Today:
The thing is, they could have addressed it all decades ago. One can only wonder why they didn’t. Perhaps they thought they could get away with ridiculing the growing numbers of people who knew.