Advice on Tearing Down White Supremacy

Start With Planned Parenthood

By Daniel Payne
The Federalist

It is a rich if tragic irony that the same progressives denouncing [neo-Nazi] Richard Spencer and demanding that municipal statues be torn down for their alleged white supremacist qualities are themselves closely aligned with a white supremacist-tied group. I am speaking, of course, of Planned Parenthood, which is to the abortion-loving Left what Adolf Hitler’s bunker would have become to fascists had Germany not demolished it in the late 1980s: a sort of holy shrine upon which adulation and adoration can be fixated.

The racist, eugenicist roots of Planned Parenthood are well-documented, as is the paranoid racial and eugenic visions of its founder, Margaret Sanger, who spoke of her desire to create “a new race with a racial soul” in the United States, once cheerfully spoke before a women’s Klan meeting, desired to “keep the doors of Immigration closed” to those “whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race,” and yearned to accentuate “the better racial elements in our society” so as to erase from the population “defective stocks—those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

But Planned Parenthood’s partisans tend to downplay those unpleasant historical realities, dismissing them as products of the time rather than a guiding principle of the institution as it stands today. Yes and no.
You will not likely find anyone at Planned Parenthood who will speak as plainly as did Sanger about discouraging the reproduction of “mentally and physically defective” individuals. But the institution nevertheless fights like hell for the right to, say, exterminate babies solely because of their mental and physical defects. Plus ça change, and all that.

It is also in killing black people that Planned Parenthood really shines. Around 941 black babies are aborted in this country every day. Planned Parenthood, netting more than a third of the abortion market in the country, is responsible for 329 of those daily deaths. That averages out to a little more than 120,000 black abortions at Planned Parenthood per year, or around a third of the total abortions the organization performs—this from a demographic that makes up about 13 percent of the United States population. According to the Guttmacher Institute, black women get abortions at five times the rate of white women.

If you were a white supremacist who wanted to sharply reduce the black population to make way for more whites, what would you be doing differently than Planned Parenthood?

Nothing, as it turns out. Spencer, the lily-white organizer of the infamous tiki-torch protest in Charlottesville last week, is a proponent of legalized abortion, precisely because it does very well the thing Spencer is most enthusiastic about, i.e. reducing the number of black people in the United States. “I would say that it is the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics who use abortion as birth control,” Spencer says, favorably, while also speaking poorly of “people who think in terms of human rights,” i.e. pro-lifers.

Spencer says those who oppose abortion are “radically dysgenic, egalitarian, multi-racial human rights thumpers.” And he means it in a bad way.

It is, in the end, not all that surprising that the end goals of a guy like Spencer would line up rather strikingly with those of the pro-choice movement. Both are overtly and self-admittedly concerned with organizing human society along carefully curated and aggressively restrictive lines—-abortive “family planning” for the one, paranoid racial segregation for the other—and both see the value of the human person strictly as a matter of superficial considerations. Pro-choicers judge your moral worth by your biological and physiological development, and Spencer judges your moral worth by the color of your skin.

I do not suppose the average pro-choicer is comfortable being associated with the policy views of a white nationalist. But if your political movement is predicated on the idea that it should be legal to kill babies, I guess you really don’t get to be all that choosy.

Daniel Payne is a senior contributor at the Federalist. He is an assistant editor for The College Fix, the news magazine of the Student Free Press Association. Daniel's work has appeared in outlets such as National Review Online, Reason, Front Porch Republic, and elsewhere. His personal blog can be found at Trial of the Century. He lives in Virginia.