Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies. Become a fan of Blackfemlens on Facebook.
Lately, the sound of galloping hooves and rustling white sheets has risen in a deafening squall from the Capitol. Like their Klan ancestors, elite white males in Congress’ political lynch mob are once again savaging communities of color. The House’s vote to gut Planned Parenthood is a criminal act against poor and working class women and their families. In many rural and urban neighborhoods there are few affordable alternatives to the health care provided by Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights service providers. These clinics are the frontline of preventive care in poor working class white communities and communities of color, providing pregnancy and STD testing, contraception, pap smears, abortions, and counseling for families with little to no health coverage.
Ever since its midterm elections’ sweep, the far right has ramped up its unrelenting drive to theocracy, using reproductive rights as its battleground. Drawing on the sabotage of ACORN, Speaker John Boehner and a host of other GOP and so-called Blue Dog Democrat fascists are bound and determined to take down Planned Parenthood. Extending Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding for abortions to private providers is central to their agenda. Too spineless to criminalize women who seek abortions outright, Religious Right politicians instead choose to pillage health care provisions that keep women from falling deeper into poverty, illness, and economic dependence. Hiding behind Orwellian claims of being pro-life, far right politicians exercise draconian control over the bodies of poor women and their families in the name of God, guns, and bloody fetuses. Why not just jail ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?
It should be no revelation that when poor women are denied access to decent affordable reproductive care—including access to safe abortions—families and communities suffer. While federal and state governments dismantle education and health care funding, the American military regime goes untouched. Because black and Latino communities are on the frontlines of imperialist military recruitment and educational inequity, few people of color would argue that government handouts to the military industrial complex should trump education funding. However, reproductive justice just doesn’t have the same political cache or urgency amongst progressives of color. Consequently, conservative reactionary forces within the African American community have successfully allied with the Religious Right in a revived anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting black women. This propaganda has cropped up recently in black and Latino Southern California neighborhoods. By implying that aborting black babies makes them an “endangered species,” these billboards evoke plantation era regimes of social control.
In essence, bad “genocidal” black women don’t know their place, don’t know that they were put here to be God’s sacrificial vessels and don’t seem to grasp that only evil promiscuous misguided Jezebels get knocked up. They also haven’t gotten Sarah Palin’s “telegram” that women who are forced to have unwanted children will earn more, achieve higher education levels, and have a markedly better quality of life than women who aren’t. These ignorant bad black women destroy black communities with their arrogant self-absorption and unchecked sexual license. After all, black women who exercise control over their own bodies and destinies commit race betrayal and gender sacrilege.
How do we know these gospel truths? Powerful white male legislators, black preachers, and Christian soldiers like MLK’s anti-abortion activist niece Alveda King tell us so. They tell us that abortion is the greatest civil rights threat of our era. Like their Islamic fundamentalist comrades in the Middle East, these pro-death marauders know all too well that female sexuality is a dangerous commodity which only the jackboot of big government can control. Complicit with black hyper-religiosity and black nationalist delusions, silent progressives of color give them this license.
Read more stories from Sikivu Hutchinson:
OPINION: Heretics, Humanism, and “the Hood”
OPINION: American terror and the dehumanization of gay youth
OPINION: The Prosperity Gospel according to Eddie Long
Photo courtesy of Political Junkies
You’re an idiot.
Some quotes from the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger:
Margaret Sanger, the alcoholic and Demerol addict, who spawned the International Planned Parenthood Federation, was a proponent of forced eugenics, segregation, abortion, birth control and sexual immorality. Here are some of her quotes.
“The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population�”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need … We must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“Eugenics is � the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“The unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ [is] the greatest present menace to civilization� the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying� a dead weight of human waste� an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“The procreation of [the diseased, the feeble-minded and paupers] should be stopped.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order…”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children…”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“[Mandatory] sterilization for [the insane and feeble-minded] is the answer.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
“Give dysgenic groups [people with ‘bad genes’] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.”
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood, proposed the American Baby Code that states, “No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child� without a permit for parenthood”.
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood, proposed the Population Congress with the aim, “…to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.”
“As we celebrate the 100th birthday of Margaret Sanger, our outrageous and our courageous leader, we will probably find a number of areas in which we may find more about Margaret Sanger than we thought we wanted to know…”
Faye Wattleton, Past-president of Planned Parenthood
So, you’re arguments are these:
“Well, the founder said some pretty crazy things, so obviously the entire Planned Parenthood organization is dangerous, bad and immoral”.
and
“I’m gonna resort to name calling, because I don’t really have an argument against and I don’t want to admit my own ignorance. I’d rather stick my head in the sand, than think”
Nice straw man arguments. Now, go away and let the adults discuss.
Still, in 2011, after all these years, woman still get treated as second class citizens when it comes to sex and reproductive rights. It’s time to stop trying to control people JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T LIKE WHAT THEY DO.
Planned Parenthood provides MANY MANY services, especially to low income families that have NOTHING TO DO WITH ABORTION. Nor, in ANY of my, or my friends dealings with them have they EVER pushed for, directed to, or implied that abortion was anything but a last option. To deny low income families prevention and care, just because YOU HAVE A MORAL ISSUE, is worse then wrong, it’s downright criminal. Just because you think something is right or wrong, does not make it so. It is YOUR OPINION. And I’ll thank you very much to leave YOUR OPINION OUT OF MY LIFE!
Sikivu Hutchinson – Awesome! Great blog, keep up the fight!
What BS. Does this “editorial” pass for rational thought among the moonbats? Apparently so. The same political party, the Democrats, that once lynched blacks with its terrorist arm the KKK is now the same party that champions the wholescale killing of black babies in the womb. Yet who do these Democrats malign as racist? Yes, the Republicans whom seek to halt the ongoing genocide of black Americans.As Mr. Rathburn above points out, the founder of Planned Parenthood wanted to exterminate blacks and this moonbat opinion supports that goal. Do you read Men Kampf, too?
Ma’am,
I recommend that you check out blackgenocide.com. You may be a senior fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies but you need to broaden your education. Beside reading about the eugenicist designs of Margaret Sanger for whom PPFA’s ‘Maggie’ award is named, you should also check out Finland’s ‘STAKES’ study on post abortive women, which is confirmed by follow-up studies in a half-dozen other countries.
If you care about women, you should understand what the long-term physical consequences are for post abortive women: inability to conceive, premature birth, placenta previa, blocked fallopian tubes and chronic pelvic inflammatory disease among others. As with sisters who have involuntary abortions, (miscarriage), there is also a good probability of increased breast cancer. You could check out personal stories at “Silent No More Awareness Campaign” to learn of true experiences, instead of what the powerful would prefer you to believe.
If you don’t take up this challenge to find alternative information about abortion, then you are a traitor to women of color.