Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has some choice words for Planned Parenthood founder and eugenics enthusiast Margaret Sanger, and the Washington Post is not impressed.
Carson said in a recent Fox News interview, “[M]aybe I’m not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood. But you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people.”
“And one of the reasons that you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find way to control that population. And I think people should go back and read about Margaret Sanger, who founded this place — a woman who Hillary Clinton by the way says she admires,” he added. “Look and see what many people in Nazi Germany thought about her.”
For the Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, Carson’s comments merit a full four Pinocchios (the lowest grade possible). And for the newspaper’s The Fix blog, the 2016 Republican presidential candidate maybe has a point, but he’s still sort of wrong.
Kessler dismisses Carson’s remarks outright, saying that the doctor is refuted by data regarding which neighborhoods are targeted by Planned Parenthood. The Fix mostly agrees, but says so in language that is not nearly as confident.
The Post’s fact checker and the Fix both acknowledge that Sanger was indeed a superfan of eugenics and that she clearly was not fond of minorities. But that doesn’t mean she was an actual Nazi.
“Sanger’s embrace of eugenics — and her statements in support of sterilization — may be abhorrent today. Her attitudes on race may appear antiquated,” Kessler wrote
Nevertheless, he concluded, Carson’s comments deserve a flunking grade.
“[T]here is little evidence that she targeted blacks for ‘elimination’ or embraced the Nazis, who took eugenics to a horrific extreme,” he wrote. “Some readers may believe the historical record is even more damning for Sanger. But Mixing all of these elements together, with little basis in fact, earns Carson Four Pinocchios.”
The Fix’s Janell Ross, for her part, downplayed Carson’s remarks in much softer – if not confusing – terms.
“Now, here’s the part that might surprise you: They are ideas that contain at least a kernel of truth and in some cases the technical truth, along with links to an ugly-but-real history which Carson used to draw some provocative conclusions,” she wrote.
“Only one of them is baseless. Still, the Washington Post’s own Fact Checker blog found that Carson’s claims, when taken together, could boast an only tenuous connection to the facts and are, on balance, false,” she added [emphasis added].
Ross continued, conceding that abortion is indeed the leading cause of death for black Americans — “if … one considers an abortion to be a death.”
The conclusions to the Fix’s and Kessler’s reviews are nearly the same: Sanger was a eugenicist who clearly disliked minorities. But she was not exactly a Nazi.
Yes, Sanger wrote things like, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief aim of birth control.”
Yes, the newsletter she oversaw from 1917 to 1929, the Birth Control Review, would go on to publish submissions from noted eugenicists, including Professor Dr. Ernst Rudin, curator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics during the reign of Adolf Hitler. Yes, this same review also published an article in April 1933 by noted eugenicist Paul Popenoe wherein he praised Germany for “proceeding towards a policy that will accord with the best thought of eugenicists in all civilized countries.”
Yes, the newsletter for a time bore the banner, “Birth control: to create a race of thoroughbreds.”
But Sanger wasn’t exactly a Nazi.
After all, Kessler noted, she wrote in 1939 that she opposed Hitler’s rise to power! And she certainly didn’t target black people exclusively. Anyway, the Fix’s Ross added, eugenics was in vogue back then. And Sanger probably aligned herself with that camp because she was a political opportunist.
