If you tune in to US abortion discourse for long enough, you’re bound to come across the following argument:
‘Planned Parenthood is a racist eugenics group. Margaret Sanger—the founder of Planned Parenthood—was a eugenicist and a racist. She founded Planned Parenthood with one purpose in mind: to eliminate the ‘defective stock’ from the gene pool, by killing disabled and Black babies. Planned Parenthood today is just carrying on her legacy.’
Now, there’s enough pro-life misinformation about Margaret Sanger to fill up the Grand Canyon, a fleet of small canoes, all of Uri Geller’s teaspoons, 75 thimbles, and a Hermione Granger’s handbag. (The Margaret Sanger Papers project has a good article on Sanger’s “Negro Project”, dispelling some of the more common myths about its purpose.)
[Margaret Sanger, looking like she wants to alter the gene-pool.]
But forget the history for now. Cast all nuance aside. Sanger was, after all, uncontroversially into eugenics, and held views that Planned Parenthood has found cancellable enough to publicly disavow.
That in mind, I want to argue for the following truth, which I hold to be self-evident:
Even if Margaret Sanger was a dyed-in-the-wool racist, and founded Planned Parenthood for the sole purpose to killing off Black and disabled children [note: this is not something historians think], just as long as Planned Parenthood today isn’t motivated by those goals, Sanger’s original motives don’t factor into Planned Parenthood’s abortion-related wrongs, if indeed there are any.
In other words: even if Planned Parenthood is an evil organisation for providing abortion services, and its President—Alexis McGill Johnson—is a malicious monster with a twirly moustache, a Klan hood, and a monopoly man monocle, then just so long as Planned Parenthood has sincerely disavowed its founder’s problematic views (and its staff aren’t secretly into eugenics) the wrongness of its current practices aren’t explained—even partly—by anything Margaret Sanger ever said or did.
Why think this? Consider an analogy. In Catholic moral theology, there’s nifty moral principle called the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). According to DDE, you're allowed to take an action which you foresee will have bad consequences (e.g., the death of a foetus) if the action meets the following four tests:
The action has to be intrinsically good, or at least indifferent. It can’t be intrinsically bad.
The good effect—not the bad effect—has to be the thing that’s intended.
The good effect can’t be caused by the evil effect.
The good effect has to be good enough to compensate for/be proportionate to the bad effect.
There’s a ton of controversy about when and how to apply DDE, but here’s an abortion-related dilemma where the doctrine is thought to come in handy:
“A doctor who believed that abortion was wrong, even in order to save the mother’s life, might nevertheless consistently believe that it would be permissible to perform a hysterectomy on a pregnant woman with cancer. In carrying out the hysterectomy, the doctor would aim to save the woman’s life while merely foreseeing the death of the fetus.”
Nearly all pro-lifers (with the exception of Bethel McGrew, friend and fellow Substacker) agree that in this case, it’s permissible for the doctor to inadvertently, but foreseeably, cause the foetus’s death.
Suppose there were a special kind of hospital—nay, a not-for-profit chain of them—dedicated solely to performing hysterectomies on pregnant women, founded in 1916 by Bartlett Hanger, a doctor who delighted in violating the second condition of DDE. Whenever Hanger performed a hysterotomy on a pregnant women, he’d intend not the mother’s health, but the foetus’s death. The hospital chain was founded by him solely in order to kill foetuses.
On the standard pro-life view, the Hanger’s decision to found the hospital chain would be immoral, since it violated DDE. Had Hanger’s intention been to save women, his founding the hospital chain would’ve been fine. But since he founded the chain with murderous intentions, history should judge him harshly.
Hypothetically, what should pro-lifers say about the chain in 2024, once Hanger is long dead? What should pro-lifers say about a chain whose healthcare workers a performing hysterectomies on pregnant women around the country, with the sole intention of saving their lives? Should pro-lifers judge there to be something morally dubious about the chain, in virtue of the intentions of the man who founded it in 1916?
I think you’ll agree they shouldn’t. And if you agree with that, you should think the same about Planned Parenthood, whose workers and leaders no longer share—and have publicly disavowed—Sanger’s eugenicist vision.
Sanger IS relevant (to a small degree). While the "exterminate the negroes" thing is fake, Sanger was pretty clearly a horrible person, and if a movement attracts horrible people, you should take a hard look at the movement.
There are many well-known gene variants that reliably cause immense suffering. Any morally sane person ought to want to alter the gene pool. The only question is: for what purposes?