Cain maintains Planned Parenthood has racist roots

Washington D.C., Oct 31, 2011 / 15:27 pm

Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain reaffirmed his opposition to Planned Parenthood, an organization that he describes as the perpetrator of a black genocide.

In an Oct. 30 interview on CBS' “Face the Nation,” Cain was asked about a statement he made in January condemning Planned Parenthood’s agenda as a racist one.

“I still stand by that,” Cain replied.

“If people go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came from.”

In 1921, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, the precursor to the modern Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
 
Sanger is the author of numerous eugenics articles declaring the superiority of the white race and the need to eliminate the “unfit” from society.

In a January 2011 interview, Cain told American Family Radio that Planned Parenthood “as an organization is an absolute farce on the American people.”
 
Cain said that Planned Parenthood’s original intention was “not to help young women who get pregnant to plan their parenthood.” Rather, he said, “it was a sham to be able to kill black babies.”

In March, Cain said that he supported defunding Planned Parenthood. He charged that Sanger’s objective in starting the organization “was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.”

“It’s planned genocide,” he said. “It’s carrying out its original mission.”

In his recent CBS interview, Cain defended his position.

He explained that Sanger spoke “about preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born.”

“Seventy-five percent of those facilities were built in the black community,” he said.

“What I’m saying is, Planned Parenthood isn’t sincere about wanting to try to counsel them not to have abortions.”

Veronica Byrd, director of African American media for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, denied that racism played a part in Planned Parenthood’s objectives.

“It is simply unacceptable for those who oppose legal abortion to use inflammatory and divisive language based on race to push an ideological agenda,” Byrd said in a statement.

She argued that Cain is “clearly out of the mainstream in his attack on Planned Parenthood.”

Byrd referenced statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, an organization committed to “reproductive health” that was previously affiliated with Planned Parenthood.

The institute claimed that less than 10 percent of abortion clinics are located in primarily African-American areas.

However, the Guttmacher Institute did acknowledge that black woman undergo abortions at nearly five times the rate of white women.

Cain, who is currently a frontrunner for GOP presidential nomination, contributed one million dollars in 2006 to a pro-life advertising campaign targeting young African American voters in key states.

He has repeatedly reiterated his pro-life stance after being called into question over several seemingly contradictory comments on abortion in recent weeks.

Cain says that those comments were misquoted and misunderstood. He describes himself as “pro-life from conception, period.”