By Dr. Harold A. Black

blackh@knoxfocus.com

I have always been confused by the abortion debate. The democrats who are abortion’s most ardent supporters are reducing their future voters while republicans are trying to stop them. It seems to me that this is opposite of what should be. As to abortion itself, I have wondered for some time why isn’t the unborn baby accorded citizenship and constitutional rights when it becomes viable. Perhaps one day that will be the basis of a court case. In the meantime I have asked why Planned Parenthood is not characterized as being predatory.

The left routinely excoriates high rate lenders as predatory, alleging that they prey on low income and minority communities. They point out that the clientele of the lenders of subprime loans, payday lenders and pawn shops are disproportionately low income and minority. There are “advocates” who argue that no loan is preferable to loans at high rates. Obviously, these “advocates” have good credit, live in upscale neighborhoods and can borrow at low rates. “Advocates” say that “the financial institutions that do exist in minority areas are predatory—for example, pawn shops, payday lenders, and check cashing services that charge high fees and rates of interest—so that minority group members are accustomed to exploitation and frequently unaware that better services are available elsewhere.” Predatory lenders are said to aggressively market in minority communities and the location of the lenders is enough to confirm in some minds predatory behavior.

What is ironic is that using the same criteria, Planned Parenthood should be classified as predatory, preying on low income and minority communities. Seventy eight percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are in minority neighborhoods even though blacks make up less than 14 percent of the US population. It seems reasonable to ask if Planned Parenthood is targeting black communities and poor women.

Targeting black women was the objective of Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger who said that “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated”. She gave speeches to women’s auxiliaries of the Ku Klux Klan and talked about purifying the human race by establishing a birth control clinic in Harlem in 1930. She said “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, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”  Thus, Sanger may have been the first to employ black spokesmen who would urge other blacks to act in a manner contrary to their best interests.

When these views came to light Planned Parenthood canceled their founder distancing themselves from Sanger, although her mission of aborting black babies remains unchanged. She would be delighted to know that blacks abort at a rate four times that of whites and black abortions were a third of total abortions last year in the US. In New York City, the headquarters of Planned Parenthood, more black babies were aborted last year than were born alive. Sanger would be pleased to know that absent abortion the black population would be 40 percent larger than it is today – most of them democrat voters. It should come as no surprise that Planned Parenthood is the number one killer of blacks in America.

So is Planned Parenthood predatory? You decide.