EDITORIAL: Planned Parenthood targets blacks

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Planned Parenthood, a self-styled "health care provider" and "informed educator" on women's sexual health, has been promoting abortion since its inception in 1916. This has had a devastating affect on America.

Since the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which overturned most state and federal laws outlawing or restricting abortion, an estimated 48,6 million babies have been aborted, according to the National Right to Life Committee. In particular, blacks are disproportionately impacted by abortion. Is Planned Parenthood deliberately acting to reduce the black population? Is it practicing a form of eugenics?

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive health research, 13 percent of the U.S. population is black, but 37 percent of all abortions are performed on black women. More than 10 million black babies have been aborted since 1973. Black women are 4.8 times as likely as white women to have an abortion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also indicates that one out of every five white pregnancies ends in abortion, whereas one out of every two black pregnancies ends in abortion.

In a July op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, former Bush speechwriter and current Journal columnist William McGurn, rightly called upon the NAACP to be more active in providing alternative organizations for pregnant black women - institutions that will support them rather than speedily eliminate the unborn. He cites the moving words of Alveda King, a niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King, who had two abortions and subsequently changed her perspective: "I remember when I was pregnant and considering a third abortion. I went to Daddy King [her grandfather]. He told me, 'that's a baby, not a blob of tissue.' Unfortunately, 14 million African-Americans are not here today because of legalized abortion. It's as if a plague swept through America's cities and towns and took one of every four of us."

Fortunately, Miss King and others - such as the Rev. Clenard Childress, founder of Black Genocide.org, Day Garner of the National Black Pro-Life Union and Levon Yuille of the National Black Pro-Life Caucus - are bringing attention to Planned Parenthood's deliberate focus on minority neighborhoods. One-third of all abortions performed by Planned Parenthood in 2007 were on blacks, and a majority of Planned Parenthood's clinics are in minority neighborhoods.

A recent video on YouTube showed a Planned Parenthood development director eagerly taking money specifically to be earmarked for the elimination of black children. One caller said he wanted to do this because there are "definitely too many black people in Ohio." And the receptionist simply said, "O.K." Similar incidents in seven other states have sparked a call for a congressional investigation of Planned Parenthood - and we concur.

Congress must also put an end to the $300 million in tax dollars given last year to Planned Parenthood - the nation's leading abortion provider. The phone calls were made by California pro-life advocates in order to test the theory that Planned Parenthood deliberately targets the black population.

Margaret Sanger, who founded what is now Planned Parenthood, wrote a letter in 1939 to Clarence Gamble, with whom she was partnering to promote birth control and abortions in the black community: "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 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."

In a protest outside a Planned Parenthood office in April, the Rev. Jesse Peterson, a conservative black minister from Los Angeles, told the crowd "before you go to bed tonight, more than 1,500 babies will be killed in a black woman's womb."

Planned Parenthood has also been accused of targeting other minority groups, including Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans. Approximately 30 percent of American women are nonwhite. However, acccording to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 60 percent of all abortions performed annually are on African American, Hispanic and Asian women. A Hispanic baby, for example, is three times more likely to be aborted than a white baby. Abortion rates among Asian women are twice that of white women. Planned Parenthood insists it does not target nonwhites. Defenders of Planned Parenthood argue that the disproportionate rate of abortions among nonwhite women is due to the fact that white women have less "unintended pregnancies."

Abortion is a tragedy regardless of the ethnic or racial composition of the victim. But when a specific population is targeted for elimination, it is an abomination. Congress should stiffen its moral spine.