The ghost of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood

Last week, Planned Parenthood of Greater New

York announced that it would remove Margaret Sanger’s name from its Manhattan Health Center. The grounds were her eugenic ideas and alliances, which have been highlighted by anti-abortion advocates and minimized by her admirers. Under the pressures of the moment, apparently, that minimization isn’t sustainable anymore.

This is an interesting shift from just a year ago, when Clarence Thomas faced scorn when he took note of Sanger’s eugenic sympathies. But Thomas was citing her writings to suggest that abortion today reflects a kind of structural racism — an inherited tendency, which persists even without racist intent, for pro-abortion policies to reduce minority births more than white births — whereas the removal of Sanger’s name, was intended to drive home the opposite point: to establish a clear separation between past and present, between racism then and abortion rights today.

But the difficulty is that, according to current thinking on how structural racism lingers and what anti-racism requires, Thomas still seems to have a reasonable case.

That thinking emphasizes, first, the persistent influence of formerly institutionalized racism even in the absence of conscious racists; and second, the importance of assessing policies based on its effects on racial equality. “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy,” wrote theorist Ibram X. Kendi. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity.”

Planned Parenthood had eugenic ideas close to its root, and while Sanger was pro-contraception rather than pro-abortion, her successors championed both abortion rights and global population control policies that were racist by any reasonable definition. Then, when the U.S. legalized abortion, its initial effect was a decline in minority births. White births slightly dipped after legalization, while the nonwhite birthrate dropped by 15%. Fifty years later, the rate is five times higher for Blacks than for whites.

So in this story, a worldview with racist antecedents wins a policy victory that has a disproportionate effect on minority birthrates. And then there is the twist that over the longer run, Roe v. Wade and the sexual revolution probably changed family structure as well, as George Akerlof and Janet Yellen argued in a 1996 paper, by creating a space for men to expect sex without commitment and to behave irresponsibly toward pregnant women: “By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother,” they wrote, “the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.”

Like the abortion rate itself, this trend has been steeper in poor communities. So it, too, has helped to sustain racial inequality, by reserving to the whiter upper classes the socioeconomic advantages that two-parent families enjoy. Keep following this logic, and you might conclude that if Planned Parenthood really took anti-racism seriously, it would repent of its support for abortion and devote to help support African American pregnancies instead. Are you convinced? I expect not.

Maybe you think the nuclear family was itself a form of white or Western oppression, and any anti-racism that requires its revival isn’t worthy of the name. Or maybe you think abortion is an absolute human right, which must be defended even if it appears to have a disparate racial impact.

Or they might even lead to a creeping sense that Thomas has a point: that at the moment America finally granted Blacks full citizenship, it also embarked on a separate social revolution, whose most ruthless feature left a specific stamp on the African American experience, just as the most ruthless features of our history always do.