Cain Wrong on Planned Parenthood ‘black genocide’ lie
“Planned Parenthood is plotting black genocide” — a favorite false canard of the extremist Operation Rescue camp, where they like to romanticize that they are the new John Browns. These types of fundamentalist crazies equate birth control with abortion and then abortion with genocide in their incessant attacks on choice and women’s health.
Cain jumps on the crazy train by floating this charge. It’s a hellbound train where they like to enable people who murder doctors “for god” like Scott Roeder.
We consulted with scholarship, Cain’s camp, anti-abortion groups, Sanger’s biographer, and multiple experts on Cain’s claim.
The supposed evidence that Sanger supported black genocide is a loose collection of her most objectionable statements, her ties to the disgraced eugenics movement, and her work on what was called the Negro Project. That effort, started in 1939, brought birth control services (but not abortion) to black communities in the South.
These facts don’t come close to supporting Cain’s claim.
Eugenics was once a wildly popular theory that the human race can be improved through better breeding and genetics. It drew together backers as diverse as President Theodore Roosevelt and black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois.
At its best, the U.S. movement pushed for better prenatal care. At its worst, it enabled forced sterilization laws and let claims that blacks and immigrants were inferior to masquerade as science.
Sanger welcomed some of the movement’s more notorious leaders onto the board of a predecessor to Planned Parenthood. She also endorsed paying pensions to women of low intelligence who agreed to be sterilized.
But we found no evidence that Sanger advocated - privately or publicly - for anything even resembling the “genocide” of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior.
Every academic PolitiFact Georgia consulted said that Cain’s claim is wrong.