Pat Robertson says that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger “set the stage for Adolph Hitler,” and accuses the “evil” organization of “genocide.” The televangelist made his comments yesterday on his “700 Club” TV show, added Sanger “didn’t copy him, he copied her.â€
Hitler and the Nazis are responsible for the murders — genocide — of 17 million people.
Robertson goes on to call the group — which one out of every five women in America turn to for not only abortion services but all their healthcare — “fraudulent” and complains that they get “$500 million of your tax dollars” annually. Robertson, who claims to be “pro-life,” leaves out the fact that Planned Parenthood’s medical services save lives of millions of women through breast cancer screenings and many other services they otherwise could not afford.
In a wholly perverted description of history, Robertson explains the genesis of the women’s health organization, first known as the American Birth Control League, and later, Planned Parenthood:
“What they said was, they said ‘what we’ve got to do in order to get the black people in America to have abortions, we have to have some noted black leader who will come out for Planned Parenthood and we’ll give him the Margaret Sanger award and therefore he will be our poster boy showing the black people they should have abortions. It was strictly genocide.â€
Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch offers more historical background:
While Sanger was tied to the eugenics movement, the claim that she intended to exterminate black people and use black leaders to hide such a plan is based on a quote taken badly out of context.
As PolitiFact reports, the eugenics movement was widely popular at the time of Sanger’s work, but there is “no evidence that Sanger advocated – privately or publicly – for anything even resembling the ‘genocide’ of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferiorâ€:
“I have never run into any serious academic reference of Sanger or others wanting to ‘kill black babies,’” Indiana University professor Ruth Engs, a eugenics movement expert, told PolitiFact Georgia in an e-mail.
The Washington Post also “found nothing to confirm these allegations†that Sanger targeted the black community for genocide and noted that even Martin Luther King, Jr. had praised her work.The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org debunked the claim when Herman Cain made the same argument as Robertson.