Herman Cain has been promoting lies, including the most convincing kind of lies, the ones that have some grain, some detail, of truth in them.
Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States
August 2011
INCIDENCE OF ABORTION
• Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2]
• Forty percent of pregnancies among white women, 67% among blacks and 53% among Hispanics are unintended.[1]
In 2008, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million
in 2000. However, between 2005 and 2008, the long-term decline in
abortions stalled. From 1973 through 2008, nearly 50 million legal
abortions occurred.[2]
• Each year, two percent of women aged 15–44 have an abortion. Half have had at least one previous abortion.[2,3]
• At least half of American women will experience an unintended
pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, one in 10 women will have an
abortion by age 20, one in four by age 30 and three in 10 by age 45.[4,5]
However, Cain is not the only prominent figure on the right to repeat these lies.
Only Cain himself can know if he sincerely believes these lies. Whether he believes them, or as he has demonstrated on a number of occasions --- like his foreign policy statement about China intending to become a nuclear power, which they did decades ago back in 1964, or his misinformation about homosexuality as a choice - he is simply Michele Bachmann-like sloppy about facts, the result is to create racially based ill will where there is no valid basis to do so.
We should not be demonizing Planned Parenthood. we should instead be helping to provide women with effective contraception, and the education to use it consistently to find better alternatives to control their reproductive decisions and their reproductive health.
Herman Cain seems to be playing the so-called 'race card' here, and it seems to be the Joker - the trickster, the dishonesty card.
If he gets this kind of thing wrong, and so many other items of information wrong, how can he presume to be qualified to serve as President? How can any of the candidates currently in contention for the GOP nomination?
Cain’s False Attack on Planned Parenthood
Posted on November 1, 2011
Herman
Cain has offered an alternate version of history in claiming that
Planned Parenthood’s founder wanted to prevent “black babies from being
born.” We find no support for that old claim. Cain also states that the
organization built 75 percent of its clinics in black communities, but
there’s no evidence that was true then. And today, only 9 percent of
U.S. abortion clinics are in neighborhoods where half or more of
residents are black, according to the most recent statistics.
The GOP presidential candidate made these comments back in March,
telling an audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation that
“[w]hen Margaret Sanger — check my history — started Planned Parenthood,
the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities
so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.”
He called it “planned genocide.”
In an interview on “Face the Nation” on Oct. 30, Cain did not back down from those allegations. Here’s his exchange with host Bob Schieffer:
Schieffer: … you said that it was not
Planned Parenthood, it was really planned genocide because you said
Planned Parenthood was trying to put all these centers into the black
communities because they wanted to kill black babies –
Herman Cain: Yes.
Scheiffer: — before they were born. Do you still stand by that?
Cain: I still stand by that.
Schieffer: Do you have any proof that that was the objective of Planned Parenthood?
Cain: If people go back and look at the history and
look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came
from. Look up the history. So if you go back and look up the history —
secondly, look at where most of them were built; 75 percent of those
facilities were built in the black community — and Margaret Sanger’s own
words, she didn’t use the word “genocide,” but she did talk about
preventing the increasing number of poor blacks in this country by
preventing black babies from being born.
Cain isn’t the first to believe that birth control advocate Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
wanted to stop the birth of black babies. Just do an Internet search
and see what happens. Sanger made more than her share of controversial
comments. But the quote many point to as evidence that Sanger favored
something akin to “genocide” of African Americans has been turned on its
head.
Sanger, who was arrested several times in her efforts to bring birth
control to women in the United States, set up her first clinic in
Brooklyn in 1916. In the late 1930s, she sought to bring clinics to
black women in the South, in an effort that was called the “Negro Project.”
Sanger wrote in 1939 letters to colleague Clarence James Gamble that
she believed the project needed a black physician and black minister to
gain the trust of the community:
Sanger, 1939: The minister’s work is
also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to
our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. 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.
Sanger says that a minister could debunk the notion, if it arose,
that the clinics aimed to “exterminate the Negro population.” She didn’t
say that she wanted to “exterminate” the black population. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University says
that this quote has “gone viral on the Internet,” normally out of
context, and it “doesn’t reflect the fact that Sanger recognized
elements within the black community might mistakenly associate the Negro
Project with racist sterilization campaigns in the Jim Crow south,
unless clergy and other community leaders spread the word that the
Project had a humanitarian aim.”
It goes on to characterize beliefs such as Cain’s as “extremist.” The
project says: “No serious scholar and none of the dozens of black
leaders who supported Sanger’s work have ever suggested that she tried
to reduce the black population or set up black abortion mills, the
implication in much of the extremist anti-choice material.”
We asked the Cain campaign for support for his claims, and we have
not received a response. His comments already have been debunked by our
fact-checking colleagues at the Washington Post, which today gave Cain four Pinocchios, and Politifact, which gave him the “Pants on Fire” designation in March.
Sanger, as we mentioned, was a controversial figure. While she is
heralded for her work in making birth control available, and legal, she
was also tied to the eugenics movement, which believed the human species
could be improved by controlling who reproduced and who didn’t. One essay from Sanger
shows she believed birth control advocates and eugenists were working
toward a similar goal — “to assist the race toward the elimination of
the unfit.” But she disagreed with some of the eugenists’ methods.
Sanger, “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” Feb. 1919: We
who advocate Birth Control, on the other hand, lay all our emphasis
upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping
all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper
care for those who are born in health. The eugenist also believes that a
woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the
state. …
We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her
reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions
under which her child should be brought into the world. We further
maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations,
to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many
children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother.
She goes on to talk about the financial benefits of birth control,
saying that it “will make a better race,” because a family can better
care for a smaller number of children.
Sanger’s early 20th century clinics later grew into what is now
Planned Parenthood, and the group is aware that its founder had some
views that it doesn’t agree with today. In response to the controversy
over Sanger, Veronica Byrd, director of African American media at
Planned Parenthood, issued a statement saying:
Byrd: Planned Parenthood has a long
history of condemning racism and opposes discrimination in all forms.
Margaret Sanger worked for social and racial justice at a time when
segregation was the law of the land. She was invited by African American
leaders to help provide health care to women in the African American
community and her work was praised by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For
all her positive work, Margaret Sanger made statements some 80 years ago
that were wrong then and are wrong now. Those statements have no
bearing on the high quality health care Planned Parenthood provides
today.
In 1966, Planned Parenthood awarded Martin Luther King Jr. one of its
Margaret Sanger Awards, and he praised her in his acceptance speech,
delivered by his wife, Coretta Scott King, saying:
“At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth
control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was
violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions.”
75 Percent of Clinics in Black Neighborhoods?
Cain also claimed that “75 percent of
[clinics] were built in the black community.” But we found no evidence
that that was true in Sanger’s time, and it’s not true today.
In fact, early birth control clinics didn’t
welcome black women with open arms, Hajo writes: “In the 1920s and
early 1930s, African Americans had far more limited access to birth
control than did white women. Not only did many clinics discriminate
against black women, but the regions with the largest black populations
had fewer clinics.”
Sanger opened a clinic in Harlem in 1930, and, as mentioned, the “Negro Project” began in the late 1930s.
That doesn’t support Cain’s implication
that Sanger’s “objective was to put these centers in primarily black
communities,” or that “75 percent” of clinics were in such
neighborhoods. It should also be noted that these early clinics were
focused on providing birth control, and Sanger herself warned of the
dangers of abortion. “While there are cases where even the law
recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I
assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America
each year are a disgrace to civilization,” she
wrote in her 1920 book “
Woman and the New Race.”
Cain’s claim also isn’t true today. Tait
Sye, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood, told us in an email that “73%
of Planned Parenthood health centers are located in rural or medically
underserved areas.” Not all of those would be predominately black
communities.
Also, the Guttmacher Institute
reported this year
that 9 percent of abortion clinics in the U.S. are in neighborhoods in
which 50 percent or more of the residents are black. That’s according to
the group’s “census of all known abortion providers.”
– Lori Robertson
One of my favorite adages is :
ReplyDeleteThe LIE becomes the TRUTH when people begin to believe it.
When I heard Herman Cain on Face the Nation, I thought … wow … I didn't know that … I will bet that there is more to that story than what Mr. Cain suggests … so your write-up is critical to Spreading the TRUTH.
No serious voter can consider voting for a Presidential candidate who displays such ignorance on foreign affairs. Repeatedly he has shown his lack of knowledge of history and facts … comedians may joke about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his denial of the Holocaust, but Ahmadinejad’s message is politically motivated, Mr. Cain is purely uninformed.
Heck, I will bet that he did not know that Abortions were legal in the United States from the time the earliest settlers arrived. At the time the Constitution was adopted, abortions before "quickening" were openly advertised and commonly performed. In the mid-to-late 1800s states began passing laws that made abortion illegal with Connecticut being the first in 1821. The motivations for anti-abortion laws varied from state to state. One of the reasons included fears that the population would be dominated by the children of newly arriving immigrants, whose birth rates were higher than those of "native" Anglo-Saxon women.
Rather than hearing Mr. Cain’s “history lesson” on abortion, I would be interested in hearing what he knows about African slave traders who would frequently castrated their charges in order to increase their commercial value. Castrating male slaves and branding on the left cheek of female slaves was not uncommon.
Or, maybe Mr. Cain could educate voters on the Georgia slave code of 1755 which was designed to control minute aspects of a slave’s life. For example, slaves were not allowed to dress in a way "above the condition of slaves." Their clothes could only be made from a list of approved coarse fabrics. Blacks were prohibited from learning how to read and write, and were not permitted to assemble with one another. Blacks in violation of these provisions were subject to flogging. Conversely, punishment for the murder of an enslaved person by a white, for example, was reduced to a mere misdemeanor punishable by a fine.
BTW ... I was shocked at how docile Mr. Cain became when Bob Schaeffer challenged him on his campaign commercial that featured his spokesman smoking.
Please, Keep Spreading the TRUTH.