MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin, November 30, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A campaign to expose the racist and eugenic roots of Planned Parenthood is now spreading its message in southeast Wisconsin – and arousing the ire of the local Planned Parenthood.
Thirteen billboards bearing the message “Black Babies are in Danger” and “Black and Beautiful” have been erected in the Milwaukee area, part of a project of The Radiance Foundation in cooperation with Pro-Life Wisconsin. The billboards will stay up for a month.
The advertisements direct readers to TooManyAborted.com/WI, which displays data showing the disproportionate abortion rate among black women in Wisconsin. While only constituting 6.2 percent of the population, black women in the state account for 24 percent of the abortions there.
“Wisconsin is the eighth lowest state nationally in the number of abortions, but the racial disparity in its numbers far exceeds the national trends,” said Virginia Zignego, communications director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, in a press release Nov 29.
A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, Amanda Harrington, called the campaign’s assertion “lies and distortions” and said the “reprehensible” billboards were “using racism to interfere with a woman’s ability to access health care.” She told the Milwaukee Capital Times that the racial disparity was actually caused by a lack of access to sex education and birth control among the African-American community, and accused the pro-life groups of trying to turn blacks against the one group willing to provide them with affordable contraception.
When the campaign was first launched in February, Ryan Bomberger, the campaign’s creator and an African American, explained that the campaign simply exposes the agenda of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in her “own words.”
A leading early 20th-century eugenicist, Sanger had written that “birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race” in her 1922 book Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. In a December 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, Sanger also explained how to simultaneously win the trust of the black community by hiring “colored ministers … with engaging personalities.”
“We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And the [religious] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” wrote Sanger.
In PLW’s release, Bomberger said that his group is “exposing the myth of the ‘unwanted’ child and the destruction of hope and possibility that abortion brings to the black community.”
“There are better, life-affirming alternatives, especially adoption. In this day and age, with the most advanced technology, information access, and resources ever available in human history, abortion should never be the solution we resort to,” he said.
A map of the billboard locations has been made available by Pro-Life Wisconsin.