The ghost of Margaret Sanger

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 Sanger’s eugenic ideas and alliances, which for years have been highlighted by anti-abortion advocates and minimized by her admirers. Under the pressures of the current moment, apparently, that minimization isn’t sustainable anymore.

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

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 every policy based on its effects on racial equality. “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy,” wrote best-selling theorist Ibram X. Kendi. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity.”

Now apply these frameworks to the history of Planned Parenthood. The organization had eugenic ideas close to its root, and while Sanger herself was procontraception rather than proabortion, her successors championed both abortion rights and global population control policies that were racist by any reasonable definition.

Fifty years later, the abortion rate is five times higher for African Americans than for whites.

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 (future Fed chair) Janet Yellen argued in a 1996 paper, by creating a wider space for men to expect sex without commitment and to behave irresponsibly toward pregnant women.

Like the abortion rate itself, this trend — the long rise of fatherlessness — has been steeper in poor and vulnerable communities. 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 itself exclusively to helping support African American pregnancies instead.

Are you convinced? I expect not. Maybe you think the decline of the two-parent family is strictly about deindustrialization. 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. I just want the skeptical reader to consider, through the case of Planned Parenthood’s history and abortion’s social consequences, just how complicated the questions opened up can become.

Followed to their conclusions, they may lead to surprising or inconvenient ideological conclusions. Or they might even lead to a creeping sense that Thomas has a point: that at the very moment that America finally granted African Americans 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.