“How Abortion Became Popular”

From Choices in Matters of Life & Death 
by Judie Brown with Paul Brown 

If scientists agree on when human life begins and if abortion has so many dangers and complications for the mother, how did it become so popular? How did we in the United States get to the point where we are killing more than one million children each year? First, you have to create an attitude, in society, that abortion is an acceptable thing. 

It all started back in 1915 when Margaret Sanger, who ultimately became the founder of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, began extolling the virtues of sterile sexual relationships between poor husbands and wives. She said that her goal was to create a situation whereby poverty-stricken couples would not have one child after another so quickly.

But, while that was the public attitude of Margaret Sanger, her private attitude was anti-black, anti-any minority, and she used terms such as “human weeds” to describe the children of the very people she publicly said she was trying to help.

Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. Eugenics is the science of purifying a race. What Adolf Hitler did in Germany was in fact advocated by Margaret Sanger in America.

Sanger’s philosophy, which was and still is at the foundation of Planned Parenthood’s philosophy, involved limiting births among “undesirables.” One of her favorite sayings was “More children from the fit; less from the unfit.” Her plans to force sterilization and abortion on the “weak-minded” poor would not have been easy to implement in a democratic society, however. The average American would have recoiled at her organization’s desire to eliminate the poor and the weak. 

Even today Planned Parenthood supports forced abortion where it is politically feasible, as in China. It has not changed its philosophy – it has simply popularized public acceptance of birth control and abortion, providing abortions and breaking down traditional morality by attacking parents, the family and the churches.

We are not in danger of overpopulation. Rather, we are in danger from self-centered materialism, from worship of convenience. It is true that there is much human suffering from famine and poverty. But it is not true that we must blame the poor for having too many children. It’s much harder to address the real reasons for poverty and famine, reasons such as exploitation and stone-aged farming. The fact is that we as a human family are not living up to our responsibilities; we are socially in tune with our own comfort, not the self-sacrifice required of each of us if we are to truly resolve poverty by giving of our own prosperity.