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A Planned Parenthood location in New York Urban center. The organisation is a presidential-campaign target. Andrew Burton/Getty Images hide caption

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Andrew Burton/Getty Images

A Planned Parenthood location in New York Urban center. The arrangement is a presidential-campaign target.

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Ben Carson alleged in an interview with Trick News Wednesday that Planned Parenthood puts nearly of its clinics in black neighborhoods to "control the population" and that its founder, Margaret Sanger, "was not especially enamored with black people."

Planned Parenthood has been a target on the campaign trail after a serial of sting videos was released alleging the organisation illegally profits from selling aborted fetal tissue. Carson, a famed neurosurgeon turned Republican presidential candidate, has been a song opponent of the group. He was also in the news this week after reports surfaced that he once used aborted fetal tissue for research.

Hither's a closer look at Carson's comments:

What Carson said

On Fox News Midweek, Carson was asked about Democrats' criticism that Republicans who want to defund Planned Parenthood are waging a "war on women." He responded:

"Maybe I am not objective when information technology comes to Planned Parenthood, only, you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not specially enamored with blackness people.

"And ane of the reasons you lot find nearly of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that y'all can find a fashion to control that population. I think people should go dorsum and read nigh Margaret Sanger who founded this place — a adult female Hillary Clinton by the manner says that she admires. Look and meet what many people in Nazi Germany thought about her."

It's non the commencement time Planned Parenthood has faced criticism about its founder and the placement of its clinics — former presidential candidate Herman Cain made a like statement in 2011.

What Planned Parenthood said

In response, Planned Parenthood said Carson was not but "incorrect on the facts, he'southward flat-out insulting." Alencia Johnson, assistant managing director of constituency communications, told NPR:

"Does he recall that black women are somehow less capable of making the deeply personal conclusion about whether to end a pregnancy than other women? ... It'southward a shame that a doctor, who should sympathize the barriers black women face up accessing high-quality preventive and reproductive health intendance services, would pander so clearly to anti-abortion extremists on the right."

Did Margaret Sanger believe in eugenics?

Aye, but non in the way Carson implied.

Eugenics was a discipline, championed past prominent scientists but now widely debunked, that promoted "good" breeding and aimed to forestall "poor" convenance. The idea was that the human race could be bettered through encouraging people with traits similar intelligence, hard work, cleanliness (thought to be genetic) to reproduce. Eugenics was taken to its horrifying extreme during the Holocaust, through forced sterilizations and breeding experiments.

In the United States, eugenics intersected with the birth command movement in the 1920s, and Sanger reportedly spoke at eugenics conferences. She also talked about nascency control being used to facilitate "the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives."

Historians seem to disagree on just how involved in the eugenics movement she was. Some fence her involvement was for political reasons — to win back up for birth control.

In reading her papers, it is clear Sanger had bought into the motility. She in one case wrote that "consequences of breeding from stock lacking homo vitality always will give us social problems and perpetuate institutions of charity and offense."

"That Sanger was enamored and supported some eugenicists' ideas is certainly truthful," said Susan Reverby, a wellness intendance historian and professor at Wellesley College. But, Reverby added, Sanger'south main argument was non eugenics — it was that "Sanger thought people should have the children they wanted."

It was a radical idea for the time.

Sanger wrote about this mission herself in 1921: "The almost universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is i of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves today possess the divine spark of regeneration."

Was Sanger "not particularly enamored with black people"?

Sanger's nascency control motion did accept support in blackness neighborhoods, beginning in the '20s when in that location were leagues in Harlem started by African-Americans. Sanger also worked closely with NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois on a "Negro Project," which she viewed equally a way to become safe contraception to African-Americans.

In 1946, Sanger wrote about the importance of giving "Negro" parents a choice in how many children they would have.

"The Negro race has reached a identify in its history when every possible try should exist fabricated to have every Negro child count every bit a valuable contribution to the future of America," she wrote. "Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, non from weakness; from health, not from despair."

Her attitude toward African-Americans tin certainly exist viewed every bit paternalistic, but there is no evidence she subscribed to the more than racist ideas of the time or that she coerced blackness women into using nascence control. In fact, for her time, as the Washington Mail service noted, "she would probable be considered to have advanced views on race relations."

Are nearly of Planned Parenthood's clinics in black neighborhoods?

In 2014, the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research center, surveyed all known abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood clinics, in the U.S. (nearly 2,000) and institute that sixty percent are in majority-white neighborhoods.

Planned Parenthood has not released numbers on the neighborhoods of its specific clinics, but responding to a asking for demographic information, the arrangement said that in 2013, 14 pct of its patients nationwide were black. That's well-nigh equal to the proportion of the African-American population in the U.Southward.

However, Carson is tapping into a more than subtle sentiment — the targeting of African-Americans in wellness care systems. There have been documented cases of that happening, including the now-infamous Tuskegee report. Starting in the 1930s, the Tuskegee Institute enrolled black sharecroppers in experiments and allowed them to endure from syphilis untreated, though they were told they were getting treatment.

And, Wellesley's Reverby said, that was sometimes the case for birth control clinics historically, too. They may have been bachelor in communities where more general health care was not, raising some ethical questions.

"Ane of the issues is ... what happens when you can find birth control clinics but you tin't discover primary care? It'south just a question of what the state's willing to provide for," Reverby said. "Was there overuse of birth command and sterilization in poor communities in some states? Absolutely. It'south a complicated story."

Did Sanger have a connection to Nazi Frg?

Not that NPR found. Sanger herself wrote in 1939 that she had joined the Anti-Nazi Committee "and gave money, my name and any influence I had with writers and others, to combat Hitler'due south rise to power in Germany."

She as well said books of hers had been destroyed and that she had intellectual friends who were sent to concentration camps or put to decease. Sanger did not take a connection to the Nazis, but a loose clan comes through her interest in the eugenics movement.

American and German eugenicists closely collaborated, and the Nazis reportedly borrowed much of their 1933 so-chosen sterilization law from American models. That law allowed the authorities to forcibly sterilize people with alleged genetic disorders.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/14/432080520/fact-check-was-planned-parenthood-started-to-control-the-black-population

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