Henry Ford once said, “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present. The only history that’s worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.” Apparently, former Secretary of State and now Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, believes exactly the same thing as Henry Ford did nearly 100 years ago. Back in 2009, then-Secretary Clinton received the “highest honor” from Planned Parenthood of America, the Margaret Sanger Award.
In her acceptance speech, Mrs. Clinton said the following:
Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. Another of my great friends, Ellen Chesler, is here, who wrote a magnificent biography of Margaret Sanger called Woman of Valor. And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.
And there are a lot of lessons that we can learn from her life and from the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so bravely. One in particular, though, has always stood out for me almost a hundred years later. It’s the lesson that women’s empowerment is always, always about more than bettering the lives of individual women. It is part of a movement. It’s about economic and political progress for all women and girls. It’s about making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves to fulfill her potential, a potential as a mother, as a worker, as a human being.
“I admire Margaret Sanger enormously … her vision.” Wait. Did she say she admired Margaret Sanger’s vision? I wonder which part of her vision she admired specifically. Because what most people know of her vision is quite scary.
One of her visions was to create a new religion. The religion would be based on eugenics. Sanger thought that eugenics was the most adequate avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems. She said, “We do not want 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… Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”
Sanger thought that she had solved the problem that vexed most eugenicists from Charles Darwin and Francis Galton on down. In her eyes, natural selection was no longer able to remove the unfit because civilization had softened much of the severity of nature by its misguided compassion and medical advances. She also said the problem was compounded by the high fecundity of the “feeble minded”.
Although this is probably obvious given that they have named an award for her, but Planned Parenthood has never disavowed her or apologized for her comments. In fact they continue her mission today. They build many of their facilities in poorer, African-American neighborhoods to help in primarily targeting African-Americans. In fact, according to the CDC in the year 2000, (the last year for which they have reported these statistics), over 50% (503 per 1000) of pregnancies in the African American community end in abortion. The CDC also reports that 35% of all abortions are performed on African-Americans. Given that they only comprise a little over 10% of the American population that is a startling statistic. It doesn’t take much to connect the dots on this. If you want to know more of the specifics on this, check out blackgenocide.com. That is why I was never sure whether the signs of our first African American president standing in front of t of the Planned Parenthood sign promising FOCA were photo-shopped. How this completely flies under the radar in our racially oversensitive culture can only be diabolically explained. Either way, it’s sad that a leader in the African American community can be promoting this and certainly Sanger’s vision is not one we should admire.
Given that Mrs. Clinton’s “great friend” wrote a magnificent biography, none of this can be news to Mrs. Clinton. It is easy to confront attitudes and accusations when they are true and you are completely unapologetic for them. Certainly, this is nothing that we should be “in awe” of. I think what she meant to say is that it is truly “awe-full” what she did.
What about how Sanger was “making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves to fulfill her potential, a potential as a mother, as a worker, as a human being.”? Of course I assume that is not including the nearly 635,000 women who will die in the womb this year because of abortion in our country. What about the fact that in places like China, abortion is used to selectively kill women in the womb? Hard to make the argument based on this alone that it is “making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves”. To say later, as she does, that it has changed the lives of tens of millions of women is an understatement to say the very least. I think that she means that it has changed them for the better, but anyone who actually lives (or dies) with the reality of abortion would totally disagree. Have the 65% of post-abortive women who suffer symptoms of trauma had all the opportunities they deserve? What about the women who battle suicidal thoughts and tendencies because of abortion?
Let me be absolutely clear on this. These are horrible things that happen to women because they have bought the lies about abortion. But abortion itself is morally wrong primarily because it takes the life of an innocent person. That being said, the fact of the matter is that anyone who says they are pro-women cannot at the same time be pro-abortion.
There is another section of her speech that I think bears commenting upon. Secretary Clinton said that
It has changed attitudes and perceptions about women and our roles in society. It ushered in demographic and social changes that have brought us closer to gender equality than at any time.
I can’t believe that I am actually saying this, but I agree with her about the attitudes and perceptions about women. This is the god of equality rearing its head again. And of course this means first like any false god, it must have its sacrificial victims in the millions of unborn children who have been killed in the name of equality. Rather than actually meeting the needs of women, Mrs. Clinton and those of her ilk want to make it possible for them to act like men through chemical alteration of their fertility and abortion. What if we really treated a woman’s fertility as something sacred and helped them to participate more fully in society?
This is why we need to study history accurately. We can learn from the wisdom of our predecessors. If we did then we would find that Alice Paul, who was the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, said that, “abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.” What abortion does is give society an easy way out of meeting the real needs of women. In making women as close to men, they do not need to do anything that meets the needs unique to women. Society no longer has to take pregnancy seriously. The early feminists such as Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton recognized this and fought against abortion by seeking legal protection from abortion for women and children.
For all the uproar that Humanae Vitae caused both inside the Church and out, Pope Paul VI’s prophetic warning about men easily forgetting the reverence due to woman and reducing her to a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires appears to have been dead spot on. What he couldn’t have seen though is how powerful women like Mrs. Clinton would also forget the reverence due to women. “Gender equality” created in this fashion does not mean equality in dignity. Gender equality as a goal only serves to lessen the dignity of women. That is what women and men should be fighting for.