In the aftermath of the truly horrific massacre at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, we have heard from the right-wing peanut gallery in social media, praising Robert Dear and saying that any woman at the clinic “got what she deserved.” But we have also heard from some on the left, like this reader of Liberation News: “I know it is not talked about by progressive media. But, Planned Parenthood is promoting a genocide on people of color. The facts speak for themselves. You are doing a disservice by not calling them on it.”
Is this true? Is Planned Parenthood guilty of promoting genocide on people of color? Where did this story come from?
For a number of years, anti-abortion activists have been engaged in a scurrilous campaign to defame Planned Parenthood by describing its founder, Margaret Sanger, as a racist intent on eliminating people of color. One flier, mailed in 2007 to 10,000 homes in Waco, Texas stated, “Lynching is for amateurs,” and compared “Klan Parenthood” clinics to Nazi death camps.
Who was Margaret Sanger?
It is well known among anti-racists in the reproductive rights movement that Sanger welcomed an alliance with proponents of eugenics, the racist philosophy that only genetically “superior” people should be able to reproduce. But Sanger did not herself support coerced birth control or forced sterilization of women of color.
Sanger, a nurse, was moved to political action when she experienced first hand the suffering of working-class women who attempted to end their unwanted pregnancies. She fought for women to have access to safe, legal birth control methods.
Initially a socialist, Sanger moved to the right after breaking with the working-class movement. Instead of focusing on women’s right to prevent or plan their pregnancies, as a part of the overall liberation of women within the context of the working-class struggle, she began to articulate arguments for birth control based on the idea that large families cause poverty. From this stance, she began to form an alliance with the eugenics movement.
One might imagine that the demand of access to birth control and abortion would unite all women: after all, the ability to become pregnant would appear to be a nearly universal characteristic of being born female.
However, racism and class status affect how women experience their reproductive abilities.
In the early days of the birth control movement, upper-class women wanted to limit family size in order to pursue higher education and professional careers. For working-class women, unwanted pregnancies could prevent them from caring for the children they already had, and force them into the back alley for illegal abortions, leading in many cases to permanent injury or death.
Before abortion was legalized by the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, Black and Latina women accounted for 80 percent of the illegal abortions performed in New York.
One way in which birth control has been used in a genocidal way directed against Black women and other women of color is through forced sterilization and dumping of low quality birth control pills in oppressed communities.
The struggle against forced sterilization continues; however, Planned Parenthood and other comprehensive providers of women’s health care services have not been implicated in instances of forced sterilization.
Certainly, to compare Planned Parenthood—an organization that today is often the only provider of comprehensive women’s health services in inner city neighborhoods—to the KKK, is outrageous.
Reproductive rights
Under capitalism, working-class women, especially women of color, are denied their reproductive rights as a result of poverty and racism. For Black women in the United States, infant mortality rates are 13.5 deaths per 1,000 births, while the overall U.S. infant mortality rate is 6.7. Under the socialist system in Cuba, the rate is 5.8.
All women need reproductive rights. This means not only the right to terminate or prevent unwanted pregnancies, but also the right to choose to have children and raise those children under decent conditions.
Reproductive rights include access to prenatal care, adequate nutrition, housing, healthcare for the entire family and a living wage job or income.
We need to fight for these rights each and every day. The capitalist system profits from the racist and sexist super-exploitation of women of color. Only socialism can permanently create the conditions that will ensure reproductive rights for all women.
