Is Abortion an African-American Genocide? The Problem with Conservatives Citing Margaret Sanger

Conservatives want to have it both ways. They argue that progressive support of welfare and affirmative action is racist in that it assumes that blacks need these things to succeed. Welfare and affirmative action take away from black agency and get in the way of black progress, they say, and are based in the racist assumption that African Americans are by nature dependent. Conservatives are, they say, all about restoring black agency and removing the chains of dependency—except, of course, when it comes to abortion. When it comes to abortion, African Americans’ agency and ability to make their own choices goes out the window as conservatives paint women of color as dupes participating in their own genocide.

As an example, in 2013 Doug Wilson wrote the following:

The death toll from abortion is approaching 100 times the death toll of the Civil War. And in this, future black generations have been heavily and disproportionately targeted. Does anybody deny that? If you allow Margaret Sanger to speak for herself, this targeting of blacks was a design feature. We know what that white woman thought of her “human weeds.” Where are the black prophets?

I have seen this same argument again, and again, and again. Abortion opponents argue that Margaret Sanger (who died in 1966, by the way) was intent on carrying out a genocide against African Americans and that modern day Planned Parenthood clinics are continuing that effort, as evidenced by the fact that disproportionately high numbers of black women obtain abortions.

But you know what? No one forces women of color to have abortions. In fact, Planned Parenthood personnel are required to make sure that women who come to their facility for abortions are doing so through their own free will. When conservatives argue abortion is a plan dreamed up by Margaret Sanger to carry out genocide against African Americans, and that that is why higher rates of African American women have abortions, they are suggesting that black women should not have the ability to freely make their own reproductive choices.

Who is trying to invalidate African Americans’ agency now?

Let’s imagine for a moment that Margaret Sanger is everything conservatives claim she is. Let’s imagine that she pioneered abortion in an effort to decrease the nation’s African American population with a view toward eventual elimination. Even if that were true, it would have no relevance to the form abortion takes today. No one forces African American women to have abortions. There is no coercion. Indeed, African American women have on average more children than white women, which suggests that Sanger’s (imagined) plan is working out very badly.

To the extent that there is any coercion—i.e. to the extent that women feel that they have no other option than abortion—it is conservative policies that are to blame. Conservatives favor cutting welfare and oppose government subsidies for childcare. Conservatives oppose better maternity leave policies and oppose raising the minimum wage. Conservatives are against providing effective birth control free of charge and against comprehensive sex education. The net result of these policies is that poor women, and especially women of color, will find themselves both unintentionally pregnant and unable to financially afford raising another child. To the extent that coercion exists vis a vis abortion today, this is what it looks like.

But what of Margaret Sanger? If you ask conservatives to demonstrate that Margaret Sanger is racist, they will give you this quote:

We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.

Yes, Sanger wrote that. Here is the full context:

In other words, the whole point was that Sanger didn’t want to “exterminate the Negro population.” Sanger was simply worried that some African Americans might think that was what she was trying to do, and she wanted to reach out to African American ministers and community members to ensure them that that was not the case, in order to ward off any rumors.

It’s true that Sanger was a supporter of eugenics. This was reprehensible, and Planned Parenthood has repudiated these views without qualification. However, conservatives err when they use Sanger’s support of eugenics to argue that she wanted to eliminate nonwhite races. Eugenics, as practiced in the U.S., was primarily about improving the human race by removing “feeble mindedness” and criminality from the gene pool through forced sterilization (for a look at what this entailed, see the 1934 movie Tomorrow’s Children, especially starting at 25:15). While eugenics had racial undertones for many, Sanger rejected efforts to apply eugenics to race. Sanger also disagreed with many eugenicists in arguing that women should be allowed to make their own reproductive choices, and in being opposed to forcible sterilization.

But honestly, Margaret Sanger is a bad target for conservatives in their battle against abortion in general. In 1922, she wrote the following:

It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide. 

Sanger was all about birth control, not abortion. Sanger lived at a time when abortion was both illegal and dangerous. Indeed, she became a birth control pioneer after watching women in her care die of self-inflicted abortions—women who had multiple children already, and could not afford to feed another mouth. Her goal was to place reproductive freedom in women’s hands so that they could make their own choices and avoid the need for desperate self-inflicted abortions.

In 1919, Sanger wrote the following:

And in 1942, Sanger wrote that: