Republican Utah Senator Mike Lee has been blasted for saying that “Black babies are at greater risk of being aborted than white babies”.
During a hearing this week about the effects of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, Mr Lee said that “a New York City Health Department report that was released just about four years ago found that between 2012 and 2016, when this study was conducted, Black mothers aborted 136,426 babies while giving birth to only 118,127 babies.”
“That's right. Thousands of more Black babies were aborted than born in New York City during that relevant time period,” he said, before adding: “This shouldn't come as a surprise as you consider that Planned Parenthood's founder Margaret Sanger was a big fan of eugenics. And her plans were not what anyone would want to defend today on that front. She's someone who wanted to, quote-unquote, ‘assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit’. These are not laudable goals.”
Time magazine noted in 2016 that Ms Sanger detailed her plans to reach out to Black leaders in a letter sent in 1939, in which she said: “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.”
The Washington Post called the sentence “inartfully written” and said that “the most damning quote by Sanger has been taken out of context” in a fact-checking piece.
“A number of doctoral dissertations have closely examined the early days of Planned Parenthood and its relationship with the African American community, and found nothing to confirm these allegations,”The Post added.
But Ms Sanger was vocal in her support of eugenics – the discredited idea to improve humanity via selective breeding.
“The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective,” she wrote in an article in 1921.
Mr Lee has since been slammed for his comments by social media users.
“Couldn’t possibly be lack of access to affordable birth control and an education system designed to keep information about effective birth control away from teens, could it?” Twitter user Emerson White wrote.
“Oh my God your speech is insane. I’d like to know what plans you have for all these black babies that you’re so concerned about. I have a feeling whatever you have planned is not good,” another account holder said.
“Look, Senator Lee is despicable and gross for a lot of reasons but anti-CRT, voter-suppression Mike Lee pretending to care about ‘Black babies’ being aborted is so much dog-whistling that my ears hurt all the way over here,” one Twitter user said.
“A fetus is not a baby, and it’s not up to any state to decide what I do with my body. You are full of disgusting projection today,” another added.
“Republican engages in disinformation. In other news, water is wet!” a third wrote.
