Only in Hollywood, where fiction is king and leftism is the prevailing ideology, would Planned Parenthood be portrayed as a leader for racial equality and freedom. On Tuesday, Lena Dunham premiered a new Planned Parenthood promotional video entitled 100 Years via her Lenny Letter. In the video, which is animated, Hollywood elites, who are not shown, voice their support for the nation’s largest abortion provider and its founder, Margaret Sanger, who was a well-known racist eugenicist.
“This film reminds us of the tremendous progress that’s been made for women’s health and rights just days before the new president is inaugurated — and at a moment when extreme politicians are trying to defund and shut down Planned Parenthood,” Dunham, who co-directed the film, said in her newsletter.
The video celebrates Planned Parenthood’s century of business. In addition Lena Dunham, collaborators in the project include Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Schumer, Meryl Streep, America Ferrera, Constance Wu, and Mindy Kaling.
“This is the story of the incredible women who sacrificed everything to bring us safe and affordable reproductive health care,” the video’s opening title card reads.
It begins by claiming that Sanger was inspired to create Planned Parenthood while she was a nurse, when she encountered a woman who had died from complications connected to a “horribly botched abortion.”
In narration attributed to Sanger, the video continues, “When I got home, I decided I wouldn’t rest until I was able to give women the knowledge to control birth.”
The narration then continues about how Sanger gained national attention by opting for jail time over fines for running a birth control clinic. The video claims letters were sent to Sanger from women all over the country seeking advice on how to avoid pregnancy.
By 1942, Sanger established Planned Parenthood, which the video states “remained committed to serving low-income immigrant women with a sliding scale payment policy.”
This is where the video really begins to whitewash the truth about Planned Parenthood, as it does not avoid Sanger’s connections to eugenics, but attempts to sugarcoat it. It claims that Sanger worked with civil rights leaders, immigrants, and black communities as well as eugenicists.
The video defends this by saying that “eugenics was an immensely popular social movement” at the time with “the kind of widespread legitimacy Margaret craved for her own birth control campaign.”
But despite this claim, there are no rose-colored glasses on Earth that can ignore the extent of Sanger’s relationship with eugenics. She aligned herself with eugenicists whose fixations with racial supremacy led them to attempt to impose segregation, sterilization, birth control, and abortion on “inferior races.” In The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Plan for Black Americans, Tanya Green writes that Sanger built Planned Parenthood “on the ideas and resources of the eugenics movement.” Unbelievably, it was eugenicists who financed many of the early projects, including birth control clinics and “revolutionary” literature. Sanger’s own writings reflect this particular ideology:
Organized charity itself is the symptom of malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.
Instead of discussing this, however, the video glosses over Sanger’s eugenicist ties by claiming it was a means to an end, and attempts to rewrite history with these words: “”Let’s make something clear, racism and ableism do not have a place at Planned Parenthood and sure as hell don’t represent the organization’s commitment to equality. While there’s no question Margaret left behind a conflicting legacy, there’s no question she’s a champion of progress.”
Unfortunately, as is often the case with revisionist history, there is simply too much evidence to the contrary to believe what is being peddled.
Sanger went out of her way to keep her true intentions of exterminating the black population quiet, but was honest in a 1939 letter, in which she wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
In 1939, Sanger created the “Negro Project,” which was intended to restrict, even exterminate, the black population. Green writes, “Under the pretense of ‘better health’ and ‘family planning’, Sanger cleverly implemented her plan…Some within the black elite saw birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites.”
And as noted by the Daily Wire, if Sanger were around today, she would be thrilled by the “progress” her organization has made in its efforts to target minority groups:
Sanger’s racist roots have left a legacy she’d be proud of: an estimated 79 percent of all Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are located near black or Hispanic neighborhoods. Further, the organization has been rocked by a gendercide scandal as it is currently in a legal battle with the state of Indiana fighting to overturn legislation that bars abortionists from performing an abortion based upon disability, such as Down Syndrome, or gender.
The video goes on to discuss the pro-abortion victory in Roe v. Wade and the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federally funded health insurance to be used for abortions, claiming that it is responsible for the death of a woman named Rosie Jimenez, who had an illegal abortion performed because she could not afford a legal abortion without federal funding.
Ironically, the video attempted to paint abortion providers as street tough in the face of opposition, noting that there have been 11 murders, numerous attempted murders and “a lot of general rudeness” against abortion providers since Roe v. Wade, but failed to mention the nearly 59 million murders of innocent babies since 1973.
The video ends, “In our first 100 years, Planned Parenthood helped establish what reproductive rights are and why they’re so critically important. In the next 100, we will keep fighting until we make sure they’re available to everyone.” It calls upon viewers to support the future of Planned Parenthood.
It’s certainly odd that Dunham and her fellow feminist comrades would overlook Sanger’s racist roots because of all the “good” she’s done when they have been so outspoken against president-elect Donald Trump, whom they’ve accused of racism. What are the odds any of them would give Trump a pass on his alleged racism for any of the good he does?
Fortunately, Americans are too smart to be duped. Many have taken to Dunham’s Twitter to call her out on the truth about Planned Parenthood.
