NFL Tight End Benjamin Watson, who currently plays for the Baltimore Ravens (a fierce rival of the Pittsburgh Steelers), echoed the debunked lie that ”Planned Parenthood and its founder Margaret Sanger exterminated Black people” when giving an interview with Turning Point Pregnancy Resource Center, a crisis pregnancy center where anti-choice propaganda is king.
Sporting News on Watson’s comments:
"I do know that blacks kind of represent a large portion of the abortions, and I do know that honestly the whole idea with Planned Parenthood and (group founder Margaret) Sanger in the past was to exterminate blacks, and it’s kind of ironic that it’s working," Watson said.
"We (as minorities) support candidates, and overwhelmingly support the idea of having Planned Parenthood and the like, and yet, that is why she created it. We are buying it hook, line, and sinker, like it’s a great thing. It’s just amazing to me and abortion saddens me, period, but it seems to be something that is really pushed on minorities and provided to minorities especially as something that they should do.
"In the public, it seems to be painted that when minorities get pregnant they need to get abortions, especially when it comes to teen pregnancy. It’s like when black girls are pregnant, it’s like a statistic, but when white girls get pregnant, they get a TV show."
Although Watson believes that abortion is a "women's issue," he believes that men still have a large role to play in the women's ultimate decision to get an abortion.
"[A] lot of the women wouldn't be having abortions if the men would step up and be a part of what they are already biologically a part of. Raising children and having children, even though the women birthed the child, is designed for two people to do it,"Watson stated. "And there is so much undue stress and pressure on the woman if the other one isn't there."
Watson argued that a fault in the process is that many men would rather have abortion be a "women's issue" so that they don't have to "step up and make a decision."
"Any idea that a man doesn't have a role in it is not true, and is simply more about politics and making a man's life easier," Watson stressed. "If you are going to say, 'It's your choice' and she decides on an abortion, then at least be man enough to go with her through the entire process. You should have to sit with her through the entire procedure (and recovery) if you are going to go that route."
It is true that Sanger was a proponent of eugenics, and pro-choice advocates do themselves no favors by attempting to whitewash this fact and paint Sanger as some infallible feminist hero. Sanger was passionate about contraception—perhaps to a fault—and her fervor about promoting her birth control agenda led her to align herself with eugenicists, along with racists and an assortment of people of questionable character.
But it is simply untrue that Margaret Sanger wanted to exterminate the Black race.This is a flat-out lie. Yet it is one that is repeated ad nauseum, both by anti-choice activists and the politicians who support them, most recently Ben Carson.
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Sanger was pro-birth control and anti-abortion. This may surprise you, considering that Planned Parenthood opponents frequently accuse Sanger of erecting abortion clinics in Black neighborhoods, a practice they claim the organization continues to this day.
But this is simply not true.
Sanger opposed abortion. She believed it to be a barbaric practice. In her own words, “[a]lthough abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious.”Her views are, ironically, in keeping with the views of many of the anti-choicers who malign and distort her legacy.
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Yes, she believed that the “reckless breeding” of the “feebleminded” was “the greatest biological menace to the future of civilization.” Yes, she believed that Americans were “paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” Yes, she believed that “morons” should be forcibly sterilized to ensure that they could not breed. She also believed that these “morons” could not be trusted to properly use birth control. Frankly, Sanger was far more ableist than she was racist.
But she was also a product of her time. The terms “moron,”“imbecile,” and “idiot” were all medical classifications back then. And eugenics—the theory that intelligence and other traits are genetically predetermined—was very popular at the turn of the century. The concern that “inferior stock” was reproducing at a faster rate than “superior stock,” was widespread. Inferior stock included anyone not viewed as a descendant of good breeding: Black people, immigrants, mentally and physically disabled people, the poor, criminals, and the “feebleminded.”
In contrast to anti-choicers’ claims, while Sanger was pro-eugenics (a product of her time period), pro-contraception, and pro-birth control, she was vehemently anti-abortion, with the exception to save the life of the mother.
In 2014, the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research center, surveyed all known abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood clinics, in the U.S. (nearly 2,000) and found that 60 percent are in majority-white neighborhoods.
Planned Parenthood has not released numbers on the neighborhoods of its specific clinics, but responding to a request for demographic information, the organization said that in 2013, 14 percent of its patients nationwide were black. That's nearly equal to the proportion of the African-American population in the U.S.
Facts about Planned Parenthood: Media Matters for America | Right Wing Watch |