Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. On this day in 1916, the first birth control clinic in America was opened in Brooklyn, New York. Margaret Sanger, a nurse who worked among the poor on the Lower East Side, founded the Brownsville Clinic, which was later renamed after her. Sanger would later found Planned Parenthood, the organization that would lead America into an era of child killing.
An estimated 64.5 million babies have been killed since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion on demand in 1973. Though the Dobbs decision would overturn Roe, abortion had already, as Ryan Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis have effectively argued in their book, poisoned basically every aspect of our culture. At the heart of Sanger's views was a deep and incipient racism that continues to express in the work of the organization that she founded. An avowed advocate of eugenics, Sanger famously launched what was called the Negro Project to reduce or eliminate the black population by encouraging sterilization and birth control.
Though the context of her exact words are debated, Sanger once described the project this way We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. End quote. Whatever her intent with that language, her legacy is straightforward. While African Americans make up about 14% of the U.S. population, as of 2021, 28% of all abortions are from black women, compared to just 6.4% of white women.
Black moms are somewhere between three and five times more likely to have an abortion than white moms. In New York City, thousands more black babies are aborted than are born each and every year. In his book, How to Be an Anti-Racist, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for 45 straight weeks, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi defined racism as anything that, and I quote, produces or sustains racial inequity.
According to Kendi, intention does not really matter, only outcomes do.
Well, ironically, Kendi and other progressives center abortion rights in their cultural agenda for diversity, equality, and inclusion. And yet, according to his own flawed definition of racism, there is no more racist practice than abortion. There is no cultural institution more racist than Planned Parenthood. Over 19 million more African American people would be in the world today if not for legalized abortion and Planned Parenthood. Even more, Planned Parenthood's business model directly targets black and other minority women.
A 2017 Protecting Black Life study found that 22 out of 25 abortion megacenters were located within walking distance of black communities.
Now the ideas of systemic or institutional racism are controversial. Often those concepts are used to subvert debate and condemn political opponents.
However, it should not be theologically controversial to suggest that sin can take both systemic and structural forms. There are examples of this throughout Scripture and human history. For example, prior to the flood, God described the evil as man as, quote, great in the earth in every intention of the thoughts of his heart, only evil continually. That's Genesis 6.5. systems and structures can operate, by either intention or inertia, in ways that harm certain groups.
It does not alleviate individual responsibility for evil. Rather, it's what happens because evil corrupts hearts and minds, people and nations, individuals and systems. And there's simply no greater example of systemic racism in the world today in an organization. than Planned Parenthood. Proponents of eugenics like Sanger wanted wealthy, healthy, and strong people to have more babies, and they wanted poor, sick, disabled, and minority people to have fewer babies or none at all.
Of course, the women who walk into a Planned Parenthood today, they're not thinking about Margaret Sanger or her historically racist views. They're in crisis. They're looking for help. Many are in poverty. Way too many are being pressured to have an abortion.
And many are scared. Black mothers are, after all, nearly three times as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth as white mothers. All of them have been raised in a society in which abortion has been normalized. That's why abortion remains prevalent. They may not know the history of this organization, but it is the history.
Years ago, Planned Parenthood of New York removed Sanger's name from its clinic. They even appealed then to the city to change the name of Margaret Sanger Square.
However, distancing from Sanger does not lessen the evil of her views or her life's work. Nor does it redeem the racist foundations upon which Planned Parenthood has been built. and still operates. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
And for more resources to live like a Christian today, go to breakpoint.org. What is a human being worth? in a culture that devalues life. Getting this question right couldn't be more important. That's why we want to invite you to sign up for Why Life, Courageous Faith in a Culture of Death.
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